Anyone remember what show that line is from? I remember it from some show where there were people who lived underground and their exit to the surface was on some vaguely Gunsmoke-esque ranch.

Of course, that might be a near total distortion of what the show was actually about. These are some very old memories formed when I was very young.

And of course, it’s entirely possible that the phrase originated on Gunsmoke or Bonanza or any of the dozens of other Wild West shows that used to be as common as crime shows are now.

But what the hell.

Today’s been a good day. Had Psych 1100. Learned neat stuff about memory. At the most basic level, memory is just the tendency of synapses to change in structure if exposed to the same stimulus over and over again. That pathway then becomes optimized. If that goes on, you get a stable pattern that repeats in full when the right synapse is triggered.

In other words, it becomes a memory. Freaky to think it’s something so relatively simple.

I also learned that while memory involves all kind of brain regions (which makes sense when you think of all the things we can remember, like words, sounds, thoughts, ideas….. ), the master index file is the hippocampus. That’s the card catalog (damn I am old) without which the rest of memory is basically useless.

We also learned the story of HM, which is very sad but it made me so made I have to pass it on. Sorry.

HM was a young person who, after a head injury, developed severe epilepsy. As in, 20-50 seizures a day. He couldn’t learn much because the seizures kept him from consolidating memories. He couldn’t make a living, because his seizures could strike at any time. He couldn’t even take care of himself. He was, in short, a very sick man.

Enter Doctor Scoville. He was a neurosurgeon with a reputation as being a real cowboy, always taking risks and trying out new things. And he’s invented a procedure where, by removing one of the two hippocampi in the human brain, he had greatly reduced the frequency of seizures in a number of patients.

But golly gee, HM was REALLY REALLY sick. (Some of you already see where this is going. )

Yup. He took out both hippocampi, leaving poor HM unable to form any new memories because the index file was gone. For the life of me, I can’t picture the man’s reasoning. Did he really think that the hippocampus was just some useless organ like the appendix that you could just get rid of when it breaks? Like Nature and/or God had put them there for no reason? The mind boggles.

But this was in the bad old days of the early Fifties, when doctors were God and nobody ever questioned what they were doing and there was no such thing as an ethics review board.

As a result of that butchery, HM’s long term memory was gone. And he could not form new memories at all. For all we know, memories were being formed in the short term memory, and maybe even being stored all over the brain. But without a hippocampus, his mind could not access them.

As a result of the horror bestowed upon HM, Scoville at least had the decency to be wracked with pain and guilt and dedicated the rest of his life to arguing for the most conservative approach to neurosurgery, and reminding his fellow surgeons to not be such hubris soaked egomaniacs when dealing with actual people’s lives for fuck’s sake.

I might be paraphrasing.

Also today, when I got home, I had a nice long chat with my sister Anne on the phone. She and my sister Catherine are going to see what they can get done in order to cure my financial ills.

Which is wonderful news. But honestly, the best thing about it was the conversation with my sister. I hadn’t talked to her in many many years and it was so good to hear from my brilliant vibrant redheaded sister again. We had a tendency to trip over each other verbally because to be honest, we are both people with a really strong urge to speak, and so not interrupting one another was a real dos-y-dos.

But I loved hearing from her. I honestly should be the one to open the lines of communication more. I have the time, and connecting with my family always makes me feel a whole lot better. Reminds me that there are people out there whom I love deeply and who love me.

And frankly, I need to be reminded about that a LOT. I have a tendency to slip into feeling like nobody cares about me and nobody wants me around. And nobody wants to hear from me. If I contact someone, I will just be interrupting what they are doing and bothering them and they will be sitting there wishing I would just shut the hell up and leave them alone already.

I know that isn’t true. But those tapes run deep. There is a lot of ice separating my heart from the truth, and in many ways I am still that lonely planet that can’t really feel the rays of the sun.

All it can do is shine, shine, shine, and hope someone reflects its own warmth back at it. ^[1]

Also on the Funding Crisis 2015 front, my GoFundMe has attracted $160 of donations from people who are literally, scientifically, and morally the most wonderful people on the face of Planet Earth.

A lot of people will say they care. But when push comes to shove, it’s the people who step up and contribute who really count. The people willing to contribute whatever they can to get you out of a jam.

And that means even more to me than the money.

Makes me feel like ol’ George Bailey at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life.

And I can’t possibly thank people enough for that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.