Rainy days of May

At the moment I'm in the crossroads of deciding where to go with my day. There's always so many things that I could be doing, so I really just have to prioritize all the time. Cleaning is a pretty important thing, I think I will do that. But first, I will write.

I can never complain of boredom, that's for sure.

This is an interesting thought really. My freshman English professor once said to me that the people who get the most done tend to be the people with the most things to do. (And, so it would follow, the people that consistently don't get work done probably don't do much work? Or maybe it's that they do too many things to do anything well, which is very possible... Confounds abounding! This is why science is hard.)

Anyway, I think that this whole idea of complicated and busy lives ties into something we learned in my physiological psych class last semester: the richness and complexity of the environment that one lives in has a major impact on learning and memory. Researchers have found, for instance, that rats raised in environments with stimuli from many modalities (ie, auditory, tactile, visual, social, etc) have much better performance on learning and memory tasks than rats raised in single housing isolation cages. The more senses used, the better.

A man by the name of Donald Hebb sort of pioneered this enriched environment movement (way back in 1949) and lots was learned about human development, and lots of other areas, as a result.  He also found that people kept in sensory deprivation had extreme symptoms after a short amount of time- the subjects would hallucinate and found that normal thought processes were difficult. Without input from the environment, a brain goes insane and cannot function normally.

I think it is interesting that despite the wealth of evidence supporting the idea that environmental enrichment is better for brain function and well being, that lab animals are still housed in individual cages. At the BRL we are studying the impact of the enriched environment (EE) on stem cell migration, versus standard treatment in standard housing. (Among other things!)

I have a feeling the EE isn't standard because it is more difficult for researchers to keep track of animals, keep cages clean, etc. But if that's the case, that wouldn't be good science, right? We don't keep people in individual plexiglass containers when they recover from stroke or brain injury, so why do so with the rat model? Simply for the convenience of the person doing research? (Yes, I'm sure confounds abound here too, but it is definitely something to consider.)

Ok, Sarah, get back to cleaning! Enough prattling on about lab ethics!