Tut Tut and Apricots

Every Thursday, the Systems Neuroscience Journal Club meets and is lead by a student or professor in the neurobiology department. Yes, to most of you this probably sounds terribly dull. "Skip the page," you're thinking, "Just another boring blog entry." Well, you're probably right! The paper we read yesterday was an fMRI study (an fMRI or functional MRI is one that takes lots of little repeated scans of your brain over time, instead of just a single scan). The paper was concerned with whether certain areas of the brain can predict a person's decision well in advance of the actual decision making process. The authors described that it is possible to see changes in brain activity 10 seconds before the decision is made and argue that this is somehow incongruous with our ability to have free will, i.e., our brain is unconsciously determining our next decision before we even become aware of it. A whopping 10 seconds may not sound like a lot to you, but in dog-years that’s about 70seconds and in brain-time it's like a couple centuries! Just like back in America, the majority of the people in the Journal Club argued as to how significant the results really were and bickered about whether it really deserved to be published in Nature, one of the top science journals in the world.

In addition to learning about fMRI studies, I also discovered that I have very poor listening skills. It turns out that Leo's name is actually Lior and Autumn is actually Rotem. Go figure? I discovered their true names when I was exchanging e-mail addresses with them and had to write them out. Lior is a Hebrew name meaning "light of mine" and Rotem is a type of bush with white flowers that grows in the Israeli deserts. To make things easier, we jokingly decided to go back to the roots of our names and just call each other "Light" and "Bush." They decided "Clay" or "Earth" was a bit dull for me and have chosen "Lord of Marshes," the folk etymology of my last name ("Moses" was also a bit dull).

For lunch, Lior and I met up with an Israeli girl from the Math department and ate outside in the Weisgal gardens. We had fresh apricots, apples, cucumbers, and tahini on pita bread (tahini is the name of that strange sesame seed paste). We had a nice chat about a wide variety of subjects. One exciting thing I learned was that in elementary school, everyone used to collect the pits from the apricots they ate and then use them like currency in a game of marbles. All the little kids would gorge on apricots all morning so that they could have the biggest and best collection of pits to use during recess. In addition to learning about apricots, I found out that the Israeli girls' grandmother had been killed a month ago by an Arab rocket. A bit scary.

After work last night Lior and I went to dinner at Tut Tut, an Asian restaurant in Rehovot. Urging me to try something other than boring ol' chicken, Lior had me get the Pad Thai—noodles with nuts, shrimp, and calamari. It was surprisingly tasty—I'd never eaten calamari before and now know there's absolutely nothing to fear. As an appetizer, Lior ordered us some sushi which was alright. For the most part, I found the sushi rather flavorless and sea-watery (I'm not very fond of raw fish). Of course, that was until I accidentally mistook a slice of ginger for salmon and stuffed a large piece into my mouth. That woke up my taste buds! For desert we ate ice-cream topped with maple syrup and bananas fried in oil and sugar. In addition to the delicious food, Lior and I also had an intriguing conversation. Lior continued to teach me about the militaristic aspects of Israel and how Israel shouldn't really be a country or state (a bit of a controversial topic for most Israelis). We also talked a bit about music and art, sharing the names of our favorite bands. I listened to some of his music which was performed by an Arabic band inspired by Nigerian beats, a very thumpy and upbeat rhythm mixed with a bit of wailing and high pitched voices. Lior also told me about how he'd broken up with his girlfriend of three months that afternoon. He was a bit upset about the break-up but figured it was all for the best—"It's summer! Now, I've got more time to show you around Israel. And now we can both get girls in Tel Aviv!"