Since beginning my midlife educational experience, or crisis if you like, here at Flinders College of Medicine and Public Health. I have discovered, while sipping hot chocolate, that I believe in miracles – and yes! It’s a rather sexy thing.
No matter your ‘ist’ persuasion, a creationist, an atheist or evolutionist, everyone agrees that the mere existence of life on earth is nothing more than an astounding miracle. After devouring the many books and articles written about this evolving biochemical soup, we call life. I have gained a reverent appreciation for the almost impossible task of treating the large number of diseases and conditions that have plagued the earth since the beginning of life itself. It’s a miracle physicians and medical scientists can even diagnose the diseases we know about.
What many may not realise is I have also been studying a massive array of topics far beyond the courses I have enrolled in over the past 4 years. These extracurricular topics include psychology, philosophy – from the classics to the modern, anthropology and abstractions used in psychoanalysis. It’s not often that one gets the chance to take a moment out of life to study full time, so I made sure it was jammed packed – FULL. I recommend to everyone starting University as a full-time student to go broad and suck up as much information as you can – I for one am much less ignorant for it; mind you, I’m still ignorant.
Eventually, most of this information I have learnt over the past 4 years will fade off into the past and become distant memories difficult to recall. That’s just a neuroscientific fact – use it or lose it. Memories of people, however, seem to last much longer than dry facts. Maybe because people are not – dry facts that is. I have met the most interesting, kind, weird, wonderful, loving, intelligent, shy, strong willed, over the top, competitive, normal, naughty and nice human beings one can imagine, and many of them are old enough to be my children. Ah yes! Old enough to be my children – how life wakes you up with a slap in the face like that.
So, I finish my journey this year as an honour’s student in vision neuroscience, studying how hoverflies process visual information. Hoverflies are just that – flies that hover. They may not be as complex and large as we are; nevertheless, their complicatedness as an animal is far more than miraculous. Even the nervous system of a fly can be considered as one of the most complex systems in the known universe - the mind baffles to comprehend the sheer enormity of a statement like that. Understanding the nervous system of animals should keep neuroscientists busy for the next several hundred years and even then, I’m not sure they will know everything. So much for Elon Musk’s neurolink - uploading and downloading memories - good luck with that. I would like to thank Professor Karin Nordström, Sarah Nicholas, Dr Yuri Ogawa, Dr Joseph Fabian, Dr Richard Leibbrandt and Luke Turnbull for accepting me as a member of the Motion Vision Neuroscience team here at the Flinders Medical Centre. You have all become an important part of my life, a mind-bending thought-provoking experience I will never forget.