End of semester is near...

With many papers to grade comes much caffeine consumption. I am caught up with grading now, and ready for the end-of-semester trifecta of Final Exam, Second Paper, and Course Evaluations.

Bring it!

Ever wanted to be a Psych professor in New Orleans?

Now's your chance. Tulane University, Loyola University, University of New Orleans, and Xavier University are all looking for Psych professors. I may be applying for one of these. Good luck!

Emerging Adulthood

My students are taking an exam *right now* over Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood. Which, even when I was in college, Emerging Adulthood didn't exist as its own life stage.

As the New York Times is so good at doing, here is a fantastic (but long!) article detailing the experiences of the Emerging Adulthood cohort: lots of education, little job prospects, maybe moving back in with mom and dad, or at least getting in on their healthcare insurance until they're 26.

What does that mean for this new stage in life? It's an interesting thought to project to the future and how Emerging Adults will be seen - just like how the "appearance" of Adolescence as a life stage brought about societal changes, Emerging Adults may have compulsory college attendance or something of the sort. Who knows? I'm interested to see how this plays out in society and psychology over the next few generations.

More TV to add to my queue

I came across a show which was discussing "The United States of Tara", which is a series on Showtime depicting a mother with Dissociative Identity Disorder (the artist formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder). From what I understand, and this is all secondhand information, it seems to be a more reasonable depiction of a person with DID. And, just about to update my Netflix queue with some of that action.

For reference, the last TV series I watched which depicted someone with DID was Heroes - Ali Larter's character. It was kind of bizarre to combine the sci-fi powers with the multiple personalities, but those are two of my favorite things anyway (that is, sci-fi and psychology).

Reading list: Next up...

Waiting for me after a good night's sleep is my local library's copy of "The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager". Having just completed our unit on Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood (another *even newer* developmental stage!), I'm pretty excited to read about a historical perspective on teenagers and how generations and cohorts have experienced these years differently. Next semester I'll be teaching Adolescent Psychology online, so this should bump up my perspective.

In other news, one of these days I'm going to get myself a Kindle or some kind of eReader. For some reason that gives me the feeling that I'll be doing more book reading and less blog reading.

Until that time, here's a really cool picture from Pablo Garcia Lopez as shown on The Beautiful Brain:

 Psst. It's a wig!

SFN is coming!

Well, it's not coming *here*, but the Society for Neuroscience has their annual meeting next week in Washington DC!  The last SFN that I attended was in DC, but boy, that was before I got mired in dissertation work. I enjoyed the experience, but the ridiculous number of attendees (35000!) inspires a sense of agoraphobia for me.

I was so young!

This year, with work and everything, I'll stay home and give my Human Growth and Development students an exam. Woohoo!

And, thanks to the joy of bloggers, I can catch the major headlines from the SFN interactive crew. 

I'll be subscribing to a couple of these bloggers in my sidebar, and I say a couple because I was never really sure which division my research falls under. One one hand we have Homeostatic and Neuroendocrine Systems, blogged by Dormivigilia, and on another hand we have Cognition and Behavior, blogged by Future Dr. Science Lady. For good measure, we will include Scicurious (also found at Scientific American), which I like because of the name, blogging Disorders of the Nervous system.

I'm pretty excited to read some Neuroblogger posts and get some sense of what is happening at SFN this year!

Brains are everywhere

Brains are everywhere. And when you have spent the better part of a decade looking at brains, pictures of brains, brains under microscopes, and brains in a powerpoint presentation, you know one when you see one.

A while back, I was shopping at Central Market when I saw this enviro-friendly bag hanging in the checkout aisle and got a picture with my camera phone:

Those are supposed to be flowers. What's that you say? Looks like dendritic spines? You're probably right. Ramon y Cajal would have thought so. Here's proof:

Above: Drawings of dendritic spines, by Ramon y Cajal which I found on the IBRO website as part of the history of neuroscience.

If I had been in my right mind, I would have bought the bag and saved myself countless plastic grocery bags. Alas, I was too busy getting a picture with the camera on my phone, and now I wish I'd bought it at the time. Eventually, I will see one at Goodwill and snatch it up. Until then....