When I used to lay awake in my bed late at night thinking by candlelight, I always felt like "my" mind shifted a few inches forward in space, almost like it was sticking out from right behind my eyebrows, and sometimes out beyond them even. It's funny that now, years later, I words and descriptionfs for that same kind of racing, analyzing thought as "cognitive" and "prefrontal cortex." I haven't been able to think whole thoughts in a long time. I ussually get distracted before I can finish sentences. When I'm writing, I often write the clauses seperately, as if they were whole thoughts unto themselves. That's why editing is so good for my papers, because I can grasp bigger chunks, whole things at once.

This semester's classess have been very interesting [they haven't been that bad, or hard] but I still feel like I haven't had anything make concrete sense yet. It's as if I'm reading a lot of words but haven't connected them to ideas in my head. Which is strange, because in many cases I'm just expanding ideas from last semester. It's as if I'm stuck in second gear, and doing donuts: my cognitive thought is very active, but it's not getting anywhere. I don't have the powerful ideas that let me move into higher gears and go straight in one path. And reading all these words is very tiring.

Reading some of these technical papers [i.e. for molecular mechanims of memory] is a very similar experience to reading Harry Potter in spanish. This summer I got five chapters into the third book. I'm able to follow the plot, and some of the tenses, and recognize enough words to understand the dialogue. But its not a natural feeling yet; I strive to get through every page. I don't ever pause to think about how funny a joke is, I just congratulate myself if I understand it and move on.

A lot of my reading so far has felt the same way. I get through it; I understand enough words to talk about it intelligently and to summarize if need be and to extrapolate a few conclusions, but the context of each piece, what it is, where its coming from, and what you would use it for as a source, all seem beyond me. This is especially true with the universe of imaging literature that I'm reading for Sterling's class. I know that a lot of understanding and context is actually being created just by reading this, and that the next time I read even the same chapter or article I'll understand more. It's like reading HP tres: every book makes the next one easier. Hopefully by the time I reach HP seis o siete the text will flow naturally in my head. I'm doing the hard work now and setting the groundwork. But it's still hard.

The Potter Analogy can be carried over to work: learning in this type of situation is an iterative process. So much of it is just exposure. So much of it is just familiarity with the vocab. Some of it comes naturally now, some of it doesn't. The canonical HRF? Check. BOLD undershoot? Check. Affective vs self? Possibly. T2*Star weighted k-spaced fourier transformed frequency filtered image? Not really.

Well, this entry has been going pretty well. This little exercise has helped me to stretch out my working memory by a few words. And I think I'm making sense. Maybe this bodes well for class. I would like to be able to reflect a little bit more on the readings. I don't have that many, anyway. Next time I'll put the book down in between pages and make sure I understand what's actually going on. Or try to, at least. Working less, and finishing the database, will definitely help. Huzzah! I feel that my mind has pulled back from outside of my forehead, which means that it's not racing cognitively, which means I may be able to get to sleep.