Cobbers on the Brain

The abuse of marijuana is a highly prevalent in the US society, as there is a major push for legalization for recreational usage. This results in a high potential for abuse to obtain the “high” and euphoric effects from THC. This results in a major stigma for doing research and attempting to utilize endocannabinoids for medical applications. One solution to this would be to completely change the form of administering THC, by changing the face of it from smoking something to another means. This would reduce the seemingly abusive nature of the drug. This would give more control to the pharmaceutical industry to better control dosage and administration of THC and CBD.

The glamorization of smoking marijuana is glamorized in our culture, by stripping away the abusive nature and controlling THC content, this may result in a more acceptable means of legalization of THC for medical applications. As the usage of CBD offers many of the positive effects of THC, however without the euphoria. This would potentially limit people from abusing the medically administered CBD and THC, as the content of THC could be controlled to meet the minimum dosage for treating a patient, thus by decreasing THC, the euphoria and abusive nature of the drug is severely hampered.

Another question that seems to be irrelevant to many Americans is the  double sided outlook on smoking. Many young adults seem to discourage usage of cigarettes, however the concept of smoking marijuana and vaping further socialize our culture. Many Americans utilize the argument that smoking marijuana isn’t bad, and their claims are there’s no research as to it causing harmful effects. However, it has been shown to cause serious issues with the developing adolescent brain. Unfortunately many see the euphoria of the drug, rather than the potential future outcomes of its abuse.

With the current schedule system, marijuana is ranked I, this prevents research of it, this could be due to the wide range of other drugs that are synthetic cannabinoids that feature a more abusive and dangerous implications upon their usage. By potentially reclassifying THC to a schedule II drug, this would allow for more research to better understand the underlying benefits and harms that its usage entails.

In the US, obesity is seen everywhere you look. In this map, shown below, you can see a high prevalence of obesity for adults in the South and the Midwest.

In seven states, 35%, OR MORE, of the adult population is considered obese. That is outrageous! The numbers for childhood obesity are no better. The data for childhood obesity varies from race and gender, but overall, 18.5% of children are obese in America, equating to around 13.7 million kids.

How is obesity happening?
If a person mainly consumes a high-fat diet, full of saturated fats, it causes neuronal inflammation of the hypothalamus. The inflammation causes insulin and leptin signaling resistance, which increases the amount of AgRP and decreases the amount of alpha-MSH being released and absorbed by the MC4R neurons. The opposite signaling leads the body to believe that it needs to save energy and eat more food to store MORE energy.

Why is obesity dangerous?
The chronic inflammation that leads to obesity can also cause an array of terrible diseases, such as, type 2 diabetes, dyslipidemia, cardiovascular diseases, and a wide variety of neuronal diseases. Each one of these diseases can lead to complications and death. Cardiovascular diseases are the top natural killer in the US. Once the heart is not able to pump blood to the body, the body starts to die. A high fat diet also stimulates an activation of IKK/NF-κB, which then leads to an increase of death factors and more expression of pro-apoptotic genes. By eating a high-fat diet, a person is literally killing themselves.

What do we do?
As a nation, we need to learn at a young age to eat healthy and exercise for 30 minutes every day. If we steer away from a high-fat diet, then the neuronal inflammation does not occur and the cascade of unfortunate events can be prevented. This is easier said than done. Our foods are full of saturated fats. We have technology that assists us in being lazier and lazier. I have a relative that is 350 pounds and orders delivery every single day. It is slowly killing her and it is heartbreaking. How do we completely change our society to make it so a 25% obesity rate is NOT the norm?

There are programs that are helping to reduce the obesity epidemic. Salad bars to Schools is a partnership that is promoting the establishment of salad bars in schools to encourage healthy eating in the public school system. These salad bars give children access to vegetables that they may not have, otherwise. Besides salad bars, schools are completely changing their menus to introduce more whole grains and less saturated fats in the food that they’re offering. Schools are switching out the items in their vending machines from sugary drinks and chips to sparkling water and apples. Another great opportunity is Fuel Up to Play. Fuel Up to Play 60 is a program initiated by the NFL to encourage children to get outside and play for 60 minutes to help reduce the childhood obesity issue. Together, with healthy eating and exercise, we can become a healthier, happier society that can live longer lives.

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/index.html

It’s crazy to believe that I only have one semester left of my undergraduate career. Although it has been a few years since my first day at Concordia, I still remember it like the back of my hand. I remember the overload of information that I received during Orientation week: where campus resources were located, how to access campus mail, etc., but one thing I remember vividly was the constant mention of a four letter word: BREW.

I remember President Craft mentioning this word throughout his speech when he addressed the entire freshman class before we set out to volunteer in the Fargo/Moorhead community for Hand’s for Change. He stated something along the lines of, “At Concordia College, you will learn the meaning of Becoming Responsibly Engaged in the World, or BREW.” As a beanie-wearing freshman, I was eager to learn the meaning behind this daunting acronym, but to my surprise, I did not fully understand what it truly meant to BREW until I took Neurochemistry my senior year.

Specifically, Neurochemistry taught me how to BREW by teaching me what a liberal arts education is all about by helping me understand the five goals for liberal learning:

1. Instill a love for learning
2. Develop foundational skills and transferable intellectual capacities
3. Develop an understanding of disciplinary, interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives and their connections
4. Cultivate an examined cultural, ethical, physical and spiritual self-understanding
5. Encourage responsible participation in the world

I learned the beauty and purpose of each of these goals throughout this course, and I can’t wait to share them with you.

Neurochemistry was unlike any other class that I have taken at Concordia. I believe that what made this class so unique was it’s layout. The beginning of the year gave all of us the opportunity to develop a foundation in the basics of cell-signaling and the pathways that we would soon see at work as we dove into reading our weekly articles. Once it was time to start reading the articles, I quickly fell in love with how they were approached.
We were given a week with each article: three entire class days structured something like this:

(1) Monday: Come to class with the article read. When you read the article, try to gain an understanding of the main points, and come to class with questions about some aspects of the paper that you didn’t quite understand. The questions that you have will be the class’ assignment for Wednesday.

(2) Wednesday: Share your findings with the class: add your piece to help everyone understand the entire puzzle.

(3) Friday: Discussion leaders for that week will come prepared to talk about the topic more in depth. They will prompt you with questions regarding the disease/disorder in real life situations, and you will get the opportunity to hear the viewpoints of your classmates.

Fridays were the best days.

This was the only science class that I have taken at Concordia where learning wasn’t about memorizing facts and regurgitating them on a test. This class was about learning the science, and why it mattered.

Friday discussions gave everyone in the class a platform to discuss what was on their minds: their thoughts on the topic, how it made them feel, if they had a personal connection to it, and why they believed it was important to learn about. In no other science class are you given the opportunity to learn from your classmates in this way. This open communication not only strengthened my understanding of the topics that we covered, but it also made me dig deeper and think about topics in a new light.

These discussions allowed me to understand the first two goals of liberal learning:

• Instill a love for learning
  • I fell in love with looking past the science printed on the page. I loved searching for the bigger meaning, the “why it mattered” to help contribute to discussions. As I begin medical school in the fall, I know that I will dig deeper and promote this type of communication with my new classmates, as I believe that it helped our class become more of a community where opinions were valued and ideas were encouraged to be shared. I know that this type of discussion will not stop after medical school, but will continue when I am a physician someday. I know that I will strive to have these deep conversations with my patients to help us build better relationships so that they can get the best possible care.
• Develop foundational skills and transferable intellectual capacities
  • I believe that one of the most transferable skills that I will take from the discussions that we had in this class is the fact that personal opinions can be changed. It is so important to listen to others, and to remind yourself that you are not always right. I learned this time and time again throughout discussions when I would come with an opinion on a topic, only for it to be shattered and rebuilt by learning and listening from someone else’s perspective. Listening is such a powerful thing, and these discussions taught me how to actively listen to the opinions of those around me to gain a better understanding of my own beliefs.

In addition to learning in the classroom each week, this class also gave us the opportunity to make a difference in the community through a Community Action Project (CAP). The CAP not only allowed us to learn about issues in the community that we could help alleviate, but it also gave us the opportunity to discover the beauty of other disciplines outside of the sciences as we merged with social work students to complete the task.

This merging of disciplines gave me an insight into learning goal number 3:

• Develop an understanding of disciplinary, interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives and their connections

I quickly learned as we merged with the social work students, that each of our classes had strengths and weaknesses to bring to the project. This interdisciplinary union helped me gain an understanding of when to be a leader and when to be a follower. We quickly learned that when the social work students had a strength, they would lead and we would follow, and vice versa. Not only is this strategy great for group projects, but it is very applicable to the real world. It’s often said that “teamwork makes the dreamwork,” and this couldn’t be more true. It is important to learn that everyone brings something unique to the table, and that no one has strengths in every area. We therefore learned that tackling a problem in the community was all about joining forces with those with differing strengths, so that the best outcome could be reached.

I gained an understanding of the last two liberal learning outcomes when we actually carried out our CAP.

• Cultivate an examined cultural, ethical, physical and spiritual self-understanding

The purpose of our CAP was to use musical interventions to enhance the quality of life for individuals with Alzheimer’s Disease, and we saw the music that we shared do just that. We partnered with Memory Café of the Red River Valley, and distributed the individualized plan of care that we developed as well as handmade CDs. As soon as one of the CDs began to play at a Memory Café event, an individual with advanced Alzheimer’s Disease immediately perked up and became more engaged in the craft that he was working on. Is there anything more fulfilling than knowing that something you were a part of helped someone? Even though this change may not seem like a huge difference to those of us without Alzheimer’s Disease, the music that that individual heard helped make his day better. I believe that this experience, and any other experience where you can help someone, is the best form of spiritual self-understanding. Isn’t that what life is all about? Leaving the world better than you found it? What could possibly be more fulfilling than that?

• Encourage responsible participation in the world

To put our CAP into perspective: we were able to positively impact the Fargo/Moorhead community. A bunch of college students enrolled in a capstone class changed the lives of individuals in our community because this class gave us the opportunity to. I don’t know about you, but knowing that something as unsuspecting as a school project could influence the community makes me wonder how else I could Become Responsibly Engaged in the World.

So what else do I have to say about this course? It changed the way that I viewed science. It made me want to become engaged in our world. It made me want to build better, stronger relationships with those around me. It pushed me to ask questions like “why” and “so what”. It made me a better person. I couldn’t recommend it enough. It was the perfect capstone experience.

I did not know what to expect when I signed up for this course. I honestly thought it would parallel the neurobiology course some of my classmates had taken last spring. This thought had me worried, as I was very aware of how difficult that class had been. However, I have been pleasantly surprised by neurochemistry. The reason I enjoyed neurochemistry so much is not because of the lighter workload than traditional classrooms or the decreased emphasis on exams (although those were nice benefits), but because it encouraged open discussion and the ability to draw knowledge from many different areas to understand a concept.

The structure of the class created an environment where I wanted to dig deeper and find the answer to the various neurological diseases we read about. We were given a whole week to read a paper, discuss our questions, learn more about topics within the paper, and finally, discuss our thoughts and conclusions with our classmates. This gave us the opportunity to draw connections to what we wanted to learn about. It also altered the learning environment, instead of being taught at by our professor every day, we were given the freedom to read over the material, bring forth our questions, and then find the answer for ourselves and bring it to class. Approaching material in a way that emphasized the process of learning instead of just memorizing the material to get an “A” helped instill the love of learning that is vital to a liberal arts education.

This  love of learning was such an important part of this course. If I’m being honest, these four years of undergrad have been tough. As a chemistry and biology double major, I have spent endless hours going over material, reading, studying, doing homework… it has been a lot of work. And extremely stressful, as we constantly have our minds focused on what is ahead and how our grades will affect our future. I was starting to ask myself why in the world I ever wanted to be a science major. And then neurochemistry reminded me why. The excitement of finally discovering how a pathway works or how different molecules interact with each other reminded me that learning is not just about getting good grades. I found myself drawing connections from the papers we read to concepts I had learned during my years at Concordia. When you can finally apply what you have learned in the many biology and chemistry courses to “real life” topics such as neurological diseases, you begin to feel the value of your knowledge. Before neurochemistry, I felt as though I knew a bunch of random information about receptors and enzymes, but after this course I now realize how important that knowledge is. For this reason, I believe neurochemistry is the epitome of what a capstone course should be: it, for lack of a better term, caps off your college experience. It connects everything I have learned and showed me how my knowledge will be used in the field I wish to spend my life in. Neurochemistry was exactly the class I needed to round out my education and make me feel comfortable moving into the next stage of my life.

The Community Action Project also played a large role in why neurochemistry was such an enjoyable course. This project allowed us to expand our knowledge outside of the classroom. We also worked with students from a totally different discipline at Concordia, something that doesn’t happen often. Looking at an issue facing our society alongside students who approached it from a different viewpoint than us was very helpful to understanding the interdisciplinary connections all throughout our society. We had to evaluate a need and truly decide what was the best approach to helping with that need. This let us tap into each person’s expertise and allowed us to understand the need from so many different perspectives. We were really able to BREW and make a difference within our school and community, something no other class has really allowed us to do.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time in neurochemistry and I am so glad I decided to take it as my CORE capstone experience. It was so nice to be in a classroom environment where the focus was learning and discovering, not testing. I now know my semesters at Concordia have given me a wealth of knowledge that I will be able to apply not only to my future professional career, but to other aspects of my communities. I am very thankful for my liberal arts education and how it provides me with opportunities such as this course.

The Neurochemistry capstone course brought together all of Concordia’s goals for liberal learning and provided me with a unique and meaningful capstone experience. Through weekly readings, discussions, and blog posts along with a Community Action Project bringing together neurochemistry and social work students we were able to learn and apply neurochemistry in a variety of contexts.

1. Instill a love for learning

During this course, we were able to rank topics according to our interests to form groups for a project that, throughout the semester, were going to work and engage the community in. I found the whole project inspiring, especially as it took the knowledge we learned in class and gave it a purpose outside of the course. Along with this, I found myself staying interested throughout this course as each week we tackled a new topic not for the goal of just learning it but engaging this knowledge to discuss the implications of what we had learned to medicine, the well-being of our community, and science.

2. Develop foundational skills and transferable intellectual capacities

I think one extremely important intellectual capacity I gained from this course is how to successfully read and understand scientific literature. Being able to read a difficult paper and pick out the parts that make sense, and do further research to get the parts that don’t make sense is something I will be need all the time in my future. Another foundational skill we practiced in this class is critical thinking. Making connections between parts of the papers, topics from different weeks, and our past knowledge of science was all a part of the learning process. This is a skill that is needed in all careers and areas of study.

3. Develop an understanding of disciplinary, interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives and their connections

Working together with students studying Social Work during our Community Action Project helped us to build an interdisciplinary project. This was worthwhile, especially with my teams project focusing on mental health, as we had to focus on the science of mental health, but also the resources and supports important at our campus and in the community. During weekly discussions, we were also encouraged to answer questions posed by discussion leaders that often involved thinking about a variety of implications and perspectives.

4. Cultivate an examined cultural, ethical, physical and spiritual self-understanding

Throughout this semester, I was personally able to develop further my passion for understanding and impacting the fields of mental health and psychology, especially through our community action project. I have also been able to develop my learning style and determining which learning techniques are helpful for understanding and engaging scientific knowledge.

5. Encourage responsible participation in the world

The projects we worked on throughout the semester encouraged us to engage with our campus community and the greater area of Fargo and Moorhead.

Alyssa Dalen, Concordia class of 2020