Today, the highlight of my day was the journal club meeting. This semester, I am working as a research assistant in the Translational Research in Cognitive and Affective Mechanism (TRiCAM) lab under the UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program) with Dr Angus MacDonald as my faculty mentor. So, part of what he has for this lab are lab meetings and journal club meetings for the researchers working under him namely graduate students doing their research internships and senior students doing their honor thesis. Thus, when I went for the meeting, I was fairly intimidated to have found that out.
We started off by having them introducing themselves to me as I missed the first meeting. All of them talk about their background and their studies which were full of technical psychological terms that I barely remember any. When I was to introduced myself as Sylvia, a Sophomore doing UROP program, I felt small yet there was a sense of pride and gratitude for being able to work with these people. What was weird was I felt like noting my feelings at that point. I was enjoying the sensations I felt at that moment.
So, for this semester we are going to read about the Foundations of the Science of Schizophrenia. Thus, we started with Kraepelin. Before this meeting we were emailed a 76-page chapter from Kraepelin's Dementia Praecox, the name Kraepelin used before the term Schizophrenia came about. I thought the reading was fairly interesting but not so much as I did not notice the significance of the rudimentary descriptions to today's diagnosis of Schizophrenia. The prof. brought up interesting points from the text and I was awed at how sharp these people are in critiquing the paper. I guess I will now learn to spot anything I find funny in articles and try questioning them and bringing them up in discussions instead of just reading and accepting them for how they are.
I can't believe I did not notice the prevalence of Catatonic subtype in Kraepelin's writings and that it has decreased over years. The other members also brought up how Kraepelin describes the situation in such elaborate manner in which is similar to the descriptions we have for Schizophrenics today. As he focused mainly on mental deterioration, he brought a lot of his contemporaries' researches into his writings too, namely Alzheimer's findings about the profound changes in the cortical neurones of catatonic patients. I was also impressed by patient's hypersuggestibility of just sticking their tongue out without hesitance when one ordered them to even when they were threatened to be poked with needles. Eeeeeyerrr....
I really like this whole journal club notion. According to the professor, the reasons we study past researchers and their research is to first get a sense of what the disorder looked like to them in the past in order to allow us to see what they were seeing. Second, we get to see whether there are actual changes; in this case, the decrease in catatonia. Third, we get to learn from their theories and people's rediscoveries. It is amazing how a man who wrote this book at the time of Freud was disregarded until 100 years later when his theory suddenly resurrected from the dead. Last but most importantly, we learn humility, a powerful scientific tool that will carry us forward by learning to put on others' hats and learn from them.
It was a great learning experience I had today. I also get a sense of what CSIA (Center for the Study of Impulsivity in Addiction) battery is going to consist of. That's the battery I have proposed to work on for my UROP. But before that, I am to gain as much lab experiences as possible....which means data entry, test administering, and data analysis...XD..Boring...but rewarding.
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