Alok Singh

Why I never thought I was a bio person. But then I overheard Viv talking about MAOIs at a party. I asked her: > - What are MAOIs? > - monoamine oxidase inhibitor > - What does that mean? > - It prevents reuptake of neurotransmitters. > - But what *is* a neurotransmitter? What does reuptake actually mean? > - ... > - So life uses chiral properties of space to implement things... Viv had the most important trait of a teacher: patience. I asked the most naive questions and they answered them. They walked with me, all the way down to the very beginning, rebuilding my understanding. It was amazing. I wanted to know more. Roadblock: finding lifeforms to study. I wondered if non-medical students could watch dissections. You can’t get more information about an object than by directly interacting with it. The concrete world contains the abstract one. I even asked my doctor at a physical if she knew of any, and she said to look at community colleges. After some searching, I found this: Bio 848NV. Forget viewing the dissection, you’re doing the dissection. 5 hour dissection for $60, free if you just watch. The only bureaucratic hangup is that you must pay by check. This is why I love the Bay Area: there’s stuff like this and you can just do it. yes it’s weird no they can’t stop you. The boundary between scientist and serial killer is paper thin sometimes. Takeaways * I’ve done this a few times now. Turns out that there’s way way way too much information to understand it all in one 5 hour session. Each time, we pick out areas and focus on them. * Seeing how everything fits together ‒and how big it is‒ makes understanding at different scales much easier. * There’s a common template to life. Seeing it in you hits different. * Brain has interesting connections to fractals and graph theory. * Maybe pan-psychism isn’t totally wrong. What & how & why I tell my friend Leah and she says “This is the most appealing activity that I’ve ever seen you do”. Dunno whom that say