Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

Stuff gets done here

recent posts

  • Prefrontal cortex, I need you

    An intriguing piece in the April Scientific American describes how even mild stress can inhibit conscious self-control. (Find a summary here; to read the entire article requires a subscription.)

    According to Yale professors Amy Arnsten, Caryolyn Mazure and Rajita Sinha, stress does more to us than trigger hormones that drive the fight or flight response. It also messes with our higher order brain center, the prefrontal cortex. That’s the part of the brain that keeps us from eating that extra cookie, reminds us that it’s time to exercise, helps us bite our tongue so that we don’t yell at the boss.

    Stress apparently bumps high level control from the prefrontal cortex to the hypothalamus and other earlier evolved parts of the brain, Arnsten, Mazure and Sinha say. So those higher-order decision-making functions drop into the part of the brain where binging seems like a good idea.

    My job as a reporter has plenty of stress, some of it mild, some of it more intense. Of course, it’s not as stressful as many other jobs — police work, firefighting, soldiering, those are serious blink-and-you-or-others-could-die stressful. But journalism stress is nothing to be sneezed at. It’s pretty relentless, and sometimes the stakes are high.

    Given that, my current weaknesses —  the overeating, the excess drinking, the lost weekends as a couch potato — all start making some kinds of sense.

    It also helps me understand why sometimes when I’m covering a night meeting — where a school board is making a decision at 8 p.m., and I have to write a cogent story about it by a 10 p.m. deadline — I sometimes just freeze up for several minutes, my brain a blank, and its difficult to even get the first sentence down on the screen.

    The authors refer to this weakened state of the prefrontal cortex under stress as a “devastating handicap in circumstances where we need to engage in complex decision-making.”

    I wonder if knowing this will help me be more resilient, and I wonder if there is a cumulative effect where years in this stressful biz make it harder to keep my PC engaged and doing its higher-order thing.

  • Help me!

    You know how it is. You need some advice right now for your planted aquarium. And it’s midnight or Sunday morning and your local store isn’t open, so you Google your question and then get lost in the endless chatter of the various aquarium forums online, which often turns out to be (no offense) uninformed people advising other uninformed people. Or, conversely, really well-informed people belittling the newbies.

    Here’s where I’ve found helpful information:

    Rex’s Planted Tank Guide: Something seems to have happened to Rex, who hasn’t posted anything on his site in over a year, at least as far as I can tell.  But he has easy to understand information and a blunt style of communicating that I really like. For my first two small planted aquariums, his site was my go-to place and he kept me from making a lot of dumb mistakes. Plus he lives in Portland, Oregon, just up the highway from me.

    The Barr Report: Good information in those forums, although it helps if you know a little something about planted aquariums before you venture in. If you don’t, definitely start on their “new to aquatic plants” forum. It’s weird how I always feel both inspired and yet kinda stupid after my visits there.

    The Green Machine: The website for a planted aquarium store in Wales. I’m so crazy about this web site, I actually want to visit Wales just so I can check out the bricks and mortar store. I learned about them after stumbling on this great how-to video which was helpful to me and they’ve got a tips section that I’ve used. The advice for how to spruce up my aquarium was great. Only one caveat: a lot of the advice centers around the products they sell (buy this! it will help you!), but they are merchants, after all.

    Of course the danger in checking out these Web sites is that there are glorious pictures and pretty soon you will find yourself wanting to aquascape yet another tank and all your money will be in glassware, filters, flora and fauna and your friends will be talking about you behind your back. Still, small price to pay…

  • The livestock

    Clown loaches and yoyo loaches in my 40 gallon ADA rimless aquarium (a few cardinal tetra in the background). The yoyo loach that had been near death is on the right, recovered now and happily rooting through the glossostigma and Hemianthus callitrichoides for bits of food. So here’s what I have learned since setting up this tank in early February.

    If you want a pristine “lawn” of low-growing plants, like the most excellent HC, do not under any circumstances have loaches in your tank. They dig in it, sending up small clouds of sand or dirt or whatever the planting medium is. They uproot HC whose roots are quite delicate. If you are fantasizing about one day having a perfect Takashi Amano style tank like this, you will be unfulfilled.

    On the other hand, if you are not a perfectionist and you enjoy the livestock as much as you do the plants, go for it. The more robust glossostigma can stand the abuse and appears to be thriving despite the fish. Because I overplanted the HC, it hasn’t completely disappeared, although I do fear for it longterm.

    I have enjoyed this well-lighted tank, a sunny summer landscape during the last couple of rainy chilly weeks.