Cobbers on the Brain

I know Concordia is trying really, really hard to meet its “Five Goals of Liberal Learning”. Before I begin talking about these goals, it might be important to state them.

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

And I am not going to lie, the liberal arts education I have received here has certainly met these goals. But has my “capstone experience”?
There are a few things to recognize about the capstone experience before we examine it further. First, it is a class that graduating seniors are required to take. Second, these classes are given the “capstone” listing with the understanding that they emphasize learning in a broader sense than typical classes (i.e. not from textbooks). Indeed, the Concordia College website defines the capstone as follows:
The Capstone Course sequence of the core curriculum focuses on student achievement of the Goals for Liberal Learning, and emphasizes writing intensity and experiential learning.  These courses have students reflect on the Goals for Liberal Learning and thus reinforce the connection between liberal learning and various academic disciplines.  This part of the new curriculum was implemented in the 2010-2011 academic year.  Faculty development will be devoted to managing capstone course development in each academic division.

I worry that Concordia has backed itself into a corner with this definition. How is it that a student can gain a “love of learning” when they are forced to take a class they may not be interested in? Of course, this is the precisely the reason why a large variety of capstone courses are offered: so that a student may find one interesting enough to take. But I was not allowed that choice. The ACS chemistry major (biochemistry concentration) lists neurochemistry as a required course. When I saw that listing, in and of itself, the class was changed from a “liberal learning” course to “just another chemistry course for my major”. It loses all other qualities, simply from my recognition that it was no longer my choice.
Indeed, I love(d) chemistry, and the course was also quite enjoyable from that standpoint. But it was not a “capstone” experience (for me). I wish I could say otherwise, but I would be lying. The writing assignments still felt like assignments, and the tests still felt like tests. And honestly, I cannot complain about the class itself, as I learned much. But to insist that the class behaved in capstone sense (for me) would be fallacious.
Regarding Concordia’s “Five Goals for Liberal Learning”, I had already met them, quite likely during my second year, if memory serves. And thus, as I see it, there is no benefit to the “capstone” experience being labeled as such. If Concordia is truly the strong liberal arts institution I regard it to be, the existence of such an experience is moot. Might I offer a solution that can make both the students and the administration happy?

Students are here to learn, but they do not want to learn everything that is asked of them. Yes, this is hypocritical, but for all intents and purposes this is the truth. Ask any student if they enjoy their homework, and the response will be “no”. And so clearly it follows from this that to “instill a love of learning”, Concordia must ensure that students can pursue their own paths of learning in a subject, however niche or specific that subject may be. And what could the students gain because of this (instead of a grade on a transcript like the capstone course gives)? The students could create whatever they feel fit to create. We already have a Celebration of Student Scholarship each spring. Could it not just be an extra requirement to make seniors showcase their projects then?
What I am proposing, in its most simple sense, is this:

• Set up a 1-or-0 credit class that is called the “capstone”.
• Let a student pick a faculty member to work an independent study (one-on-one) with. They can meet once per week.
• The student must produce something tangible (g. a book, published journal article, work of visual art, composed music, theatre event) to be showcased at the end of the year
• The faculty member gives the student an appropriate grade based on perceived work ethic. (This could even just work as a pass/fail.)

The reason this should work well, is that by senior year, most students have figured out where their passions lie, and if they have not, a single “capstone” class isn’t going to be a “massive epiphany” to them, but conversations with a respected professor might. Even further, this allows each student to leave the institution with something that they can look back at and marvel, saying “I did that”. Administrators would be happy too, seeing a drastic increase in student research and publication (i.e. something they can brag about when trying to convince prospective students to attend).

Did my neurochemistry course mimic anything remotely like this? Sadly, no. Simply put, I learned about neurochemistry. What a “life-changing”, “mind-bending” experience that “prepared me to conquer the problems of the real world” and “instilled a love of learning” in me. Indeed, I almost felt as though sometimes it did the opposite. This semester I had a mathematical breakthrough that will likely change the course of modern mathematical research, and instead of being able to devote my time where it was most efficient, I was writing blogs about neurochemistry that would never be read by more than a handful of people.
Perhaps I have become a cynic, but perhaps there is something inherently flawed about the capstone experience. I am not arguing against neurochemistry as a class, but rather the “capstone” subdiscipline with which it was assigned. I know this blog was supposed to explain how this class met the goals, but my morals got the best of me and I had to tell the truth. And please, don’t take my opinion as the tried-and-true fact; it is likely I could be the exception rather than the rule. If the opinion of the majority is in support of the capstone, then it is likely the best option.
With that said, I believe there is going to be a change in the capstone experience very soon. It is being replaced by PEAK (I don’t know if it is meant to be all capitalized, as I have only heard of it by word-of-mouth). And with any luck, this will let future students avoid some of the cynicism that I have felt my final semester of college.
(Don’t worry about me though, I am truly quite content with life right now. This was just my opinion regarding a very small matter, that in the end will not make much of a difference.)

Alzheimer’s is all around us. It’s pretty hard to ignore considering it not only is the the most common form of dementia but it also affects over 3 million Americans each year – mostly folks over the age 65. However, one of the biggest misconceptions about the disease is that it is normal aging when it is in fact, it is progressive neurological disease. Despite a net loss of neurons occurring, most Alzheimer’s patients do not die directly due to the disease but often of other pathogens like pneumonia. But as many can attest the effects on the quality of life is devastating. And despite many years of research and clinical observations we are still no where close to curing it.
So this leads to the question – what is going on exactly? Like most neurological diseases the exact cause of Alzheimer’s is unknown. But an interesting hallmark of Alzheimer’s is the presence of neurofibrilary tangles. What these essentially are tangles of the misfolded protein tau that clump together within various brain regions. Research has found that these tangles can occur in the entorhinal cortex, hippocampus, and cerebral cortex. These brain regions are specifically associated with spatial memory, emotion, and higher cognitive thinking. So its pretty easy to figure out how the symptomatology comes about.
Another thing of note is that working memory generally decreases with age due to changes in cellular firing and signaling. But one study did find that with rhesus monkeys they could reverse the negative effects on working memory with cyclic AMP, an important messenger in cellular signaling processes.
Sources:
1) http://www.alz.org/alzheimers_disease_what_is_alzheimers.asp
2) https://www.nia.nih.gov/alzheimers/publication/2011-2012-alzheimers-disease-progress-report/understanding-biology-alzheimers

 
Like many other students at Concordia College, I am (was) a student athlete. I wrestled for three years at Concordia, and I wrestled all the way from high school back to kindergarten. Only my senior year did I decide that enough was enough and it was time to hang up the wrestling shoes. And yet I feel guilty despite all the time and energy I spent cultivating my skills. My reasoning for quitting was that it was time to give my brain a break.
 
Nearly a year ago today I was wrestling with a teammate. It was the off season, so we were just messing around. My partner took a low shot, which I blocked with my knee. We had gone through this motion probably a thousand times before, but this time the knee cap to his temple knocked him out. He was fine, but he was unconscious for a few moments.
Instances like my wrestling practice are all too common in American colleges and high schools. Our obsession with sports is often chalked up to their ability to help young people develop character traits like tenacity and team working cohesiveness. But what’s the catch?
 
Our Concordia College neurochemistry class reviewed whats happening to our brain cells following a concussion, and there’s five things happening on a molecular level that you should know about.

1. Ionic Flux-  After that big hit, your brain cells are reeling, and the ions (sodium, potassium, and calcium) are flying all over the place. Lots of positive ions move out of the cells, and they can’t signal anymore. This doesn’t allow the brain to communicate effectively.
2. Energy crisis- Dealing with an injury takes a lot of energy. When the ions start moving around, your brain cells try to move them back against their gradient. This takes up a ton of energy, and the brain cells end up exhausting their energy stores rather quickly. In turn, your brain cells are subjected to metabolic stress, which is not a good thing.
3. Cytoskeletal damage- If your brain cells were a building, and you threw those buildings against a wall really really hard, you’d expect there to be some damage right? This also happens to your brain cells during a concussion. The mechanical support system that holds your cells together (called the cytoskeleton) can break apart from the force of the hit.
4. Axonal damage- Axons relay signals between brain cells, and they look like a long bridge projecting from the cells. Unfortunately these long bridges are also prone to breaking just like the cytoskeleton. Cells with broken axons tend to shrink and/or die.
5. Protease dysfunction- Proteases are the small molecules that recycle proteins. To do this however, the protease needs energy. Remember the energy crisis that’s going on in your brain? Well if we don’t have the energy to keep your cells alive, we probably won’t be breaking down any proteins. This results in the accumulation of proteins within cells. This isn’t a big deal in younger brains normally, but as we age this can cause problems.

Even with all this evidence that hitting each other with our heads is bad for us (duh) we continue to engage in sports that consistently cause concussions. After thinking about this, I think I would still wrestle even if I knew it I would get a concussion. I believe that it’s easy for people to glaze over the life lessons we can take away from sports, but I definitely would not be going to medical school without having wrestled first. Wrestling taught me to stay on task and keep grinding even when things aren’t going well. I likely would have given up on my dream of being a physician without sports, so the brain trauma was worth it for me. But I think it is important to educate younger people about the risks involved in contact sports, so they can decide for themselves.

Sometimes we like to make fun of liberal arts degrees.  I may not understand my tax forms, but at least I know about quantum tunnelling!  Those kinds of comments happen often.  Learning about seemingly random things you never thought you were signing up for is tedious at times, but when you step back and look at what four years has done, you start to appreciate it.
During senior year, students take a capstone course as the culmination of their liberal arts education.  The courses are designed to blend disparate fields of study and bring them together to deepen students’ knowledge about a topic.  Capstone courses also involve cultural awareness and involvement in the local community.  At Concordia, topics of capstone courses include world musics, dangerous literature, and the biochemistry of cancer.  I took neurochemistry for my capstone course.  Don’t worry, it was actually a lot more fun than I expected.  
What do capstone courses have that others don’t?  That became clear in our weekly group discussions.  We would break into small groups and discuss aspects of the disease/ issue/ chemical pathway of the week.  During our week on schizophrenia, a student brought up an idea from an Indian religions class.  A person with schizophrenia living in India might not be avoided as a dangerous anomaly.  Instead they might be treated with respectful distance or even valued as someone with a gift.  Maybe the way we shun people with mental illness in America contributes to poorer outcomes for patients.  In a normal neurochemistry class, no one would have ever raised that question.  
When our different skills came together, our overall understanding grew tremendously.  As we tried to understand a research article on addiction, students from different fields had different perspectives to give.  Neuroscience majors explained the mechanisms of reward and long-term changes in the dopamine neurons of the striatum.  Psychology majors told us about how the reward pathway works on a larger scale with classical conditioning and state dependent memory.  Pre-med students understood that many addictions begin with prescription narcotics, and that the opioid epidemic is driven by more than individual brains, but by systemic, bureaucratic problems.  With many people adding their own experiences to the pile, everyone developed a broader knowledge of the issue.  
The ultimate aim, of course, is coming closer to fixing intractable diseases– of brains and of society.  A sweeping, entrenched epidemic like we see with opioids can not be solved using only neuroscientists.  Medications need to be prescribed by vigilant doctors and accompanied by therapy from perceptive counselors.  We will need meticulous statisticians to help to manage the health of millions of people.  Only social workers are able to help the families of addicts, and sometimes to heal fully you need a musician or a comedian thrown in for good measure.  Before I took my capstone course I knew that teamwork would be necessary, but the course showed me how to make that teamwork happen, and how powerful a synthesis of minds can be.