Assalamualaikum and Welcome to...

KIKI'S BRAINY SCIE-SS-ENCE



Glucose: the only form of sugar accepted by the brain.
Glucose up-close (Haworth Projection)


Hello Frengers. My name is Khayriyyah. Friends and lazy people call me the one syllable version of my name= Kye (rhymes with bye,hi,and sigh).

To avoid confusion in the future, allow me to clarify what this homepage is all about. This home of mine, in the form of a page, is in fact, a course requirement for the KOS 1110 "Computers in Science" course my classmates and I are taking at International Islamic University Malaysia. I'm in the Biomedical Kuliyyah, in my first year, first sem, but none of this today would be possible if it weren't for the compassion of my parents.. a couple of people who have seriously high tolerance toward teenage impulsive, indecisive, and incomprehensible behavior. Thanks mom and dad. I owe you a big one. (haha, understatement of the century...) And then of course we mustn't forget the good people behind the policy making... giving me loans and whatnot. Though they are charging 4% interest. (but who's counting?)

Anyway.
A final token of appreciation would be to the one and only, Dr. Ibrahim Noorbatcha! My dear lecturer whose love of tazkirah has inspired the whole class to do more than just numbly sit in through class. I'll never forget the first class when he gave the definition of knowledge: THE CONTENT OF A PERSON'S MIND. I was blown away.

And then of course, came along the syllabus and the assignments. Some of them were pretty nerve-wrecking with intricate love-hate relationships involved. For the first two weeks, I learned that there was much more to Excel than just columns and rows. Heh. Learned to plot graphs and all that jazz. Then we came to learnHyper-Text Mark Up Language(html), which of course gave birth to this little baby. And then came Chem Sketch, which made my Biochem lab reports look way neat... THEN the mother of all computer science assignments... MAPLE. Yes, the reason I almost went bald. But we did learn about vrml and 3D pics... which wasn't so bad. You can even see a model of the enzyme Hexokinase and my littleJewel. Last but not least, the last of all Maple assignments.. the killer of murderers.. but not too bad on the eyes.. check out my Maple 3D plots and Animation!

That's about the gist of my Computers in Science course, but here's what I really want to gab on about..The beauticious brain! So, let's waste no more time. Let us dive into the convolutions...

Main Functions

Quick riddle: What's pale, heavy, folded and on the verge of a nervous breakdown?
Answer: My brain after trying to figure out how to do the 24 questions of the KOS 1110 computer assignment.

Okay. Riddles and jokes about computers and assignments aside, let us take a look at one particular computer with the ability to process an infinite amount of assignments without breaking a sweat. The human BRAIN.



Main Functions:-

Sounds simple? Sounds complicated? Here's a brief overview of the brain working in an everyday situation.
Let's say I'm on my way back from school. I'm walking, I'm walking, and *gasp* I see an angry looking pit bull across the street.

BUT THEN. A voice calls from the house behind. Something along the lines of, "Flower, come get your dinner!". The angry dog loses its hard look and begins to pant. He happily trots away.

And here's the cool part. All of that can happen under only a few seconds! So you thought Michael Schumacher burning rubber on the Sepang Circuit was the equivalent of speed, huh? Let's see Schumacher try to beat the speed of an average human's thought or the transmitting of an impulse along a nerve axon! Well, assuming that person isn't under the influence of drugs that is... But simply put, everyone knows how wonderful and enigmatic the heaviest organ in the human body is. How dependent we are on the King of the High Throne. Yet, how many of us really know how our brains look like? I'm guessing none. Unless you've gone through brain transplant and managed to get the neurosurgeon to take the picture of your brain. But chances are for most of us, if we were walking back from the train station and bumped into our own brains, we wouldn't recognize it enough to say hello. But to put it generally, this is how your nogan would look like.

well, somewhat anyway...


Anatomically, the brain is divided into 2 hemispheres. The right hemisphere and the left hemisphere, respectively. Here's a quick one. Which hemisphere controls detailed imaging in lefties? Left? Right?
If you answered left, good guess. However, the correct guess would be right. Courtesy of www.forumgarden.com, Professor Glyn Humphreys from the University's School of Psychology had this to say:

"In right-handed people the right hemisphere sees the whole picture, whereas the left hemisphere attends to the details. However, we have found that in left-handed people, this is completely reversed. Not only our language function, but even the way we see the world can depend on our handedness."

But on the physiological side, I've always been intrigued by the more abstract functions of the brain. Subjects such as dreams, ambitions, sadness, joy... Why do we love? Why do we hate? Why do we desire? All of these are somehow related to the brain.. yet somehow not.. if that makes any sense.
To put into example by what I'm really getting at, which is a long ehem, 'thoughtful' tazkirah on the brain, man and the Creator, which will be served a bit later, let's just look at a common, best-beloved human past time, sleep, and how it still is baffling neurophysiologists all over the world.

Sleep...


So, why do we sleep? Oh, because we're tired... But, then. Is getting tired the function of sleepiness, or is sleepiness the function of weariness?How's that for a tease for your brain. :)

Prior to the 1960's, sleep was linked to the brain's inactivity. But later, experiments began to show scientists that the oxygen required and consumed by the brain during sleep, i.e it's 'inactivity' was equal if not exceeded the requirement during awake-state. Thus, came the conclusion that sleep, instead of being a state of inactivity, is very much an active process. Analogically, and this is me trying to make things easier to understand for myself, perhaps the human brain is like a big rechargeable cell. After being drained handling physiological functions of an average man on his average day, sleep is the brain's equivalent of plugging itself to an electrical socket.. (though, don't quote me on this one!)


Sleep has also been recently discovered to be linked with immunity. As many sleep-inducing factors identified are also the same substances which enhances the immune system. Maybe that's why they say there's no better drug than sleep, yeah? A final word on sleep would be to relate it to dreams. The two major phases recognized in sleep are:
  • REM a.k.a Rapid Eye movement
  • non-REM a.k.a Slow-wave Sleep

Ironically enough, it is during REM sleep that humans make a trip to Dreamland and face odd events in bizarre settings. The eyes move behind closed lids, as if following the action of the dreams. Sleepers are most likely to wake up spontaneously from periods of REM sleep. Think back on that horrible nightmare you had recently. Didn't you suddenly wake up with a jolt, profusely sweating? Only during REM folks. Only during REM.

Sleepwalking...

Sleepwalker, don't be shy Now don't open your eyes tonight You'll be the one that defends my life While I'm dead asleep dreamin'

Cupid, don't draw back your bow Sam Cooke didn't know what I know I'll never be your valentine The sleepwalker in me And God only know that I've tried

Let me in, let me drown or learn how to swim Just don't leave me at the window I could be the one to be your next best friend You may need someone to hold you

Sleepwalker, take this knife You may see someone tonight You'd be the one that saves my life When I'm dead asleep dreamin'

Yes, The Wallflowers made a beautiful song called 'Sleepwalker'.. and as much as I adore Jakob Dylan and his heartfelt lyrics, I doubt he was talking about the sleep behavior disorder when he penned down that song... Truth be told, how many of us really know about sleepwalking? Here's just a bit of on-the-surface info for the more curious cats among us.

Sleepwalking (somnabulism= somnus, meaning sleep; and ambulara, meaning to walk) is most common in children, and the frequency of episodes is known to decline with age. Yeah, we can relate with that. Or wait, maybe we can relate to the opposite of that. Hands up to people who, once or twice in their traumatic childhood days, woke up in the middle of the night with the urge to visit the bathroom... then later in the morning discover that your detailed trip to the loo was all but in your head, your bum feels damp and cool, and your mom's screaming at you? But then, bedwetting is another disorder for another time. Excuse my digression. But like the above example, all the actions happen like those in a dream. Quite the opposite to sleepwalking, which only happens during deep sleep. (recall that dreams only happen during REM, and not deep sleep) Sleepwalking, which generally lasts somewhere between 30 seconds to 30 minutes, is experienced with the sleepwalker's eyes open, allowing freedom from nasty trips and bumping into lamps and etc. Some sleepwalkers are even known to do tasks like washing dishes and folding clothes! (perhaps if one had a sleepwalking roommate, one could conveniently leave one's laundry at the foot of her bed every other night...) And here's the cool part. Although the sleepwalker's eyes were open throughout the episode, upon waking up, the sleepwalker will have little, if any, recollection of his or her nocturnal adventure...
Tazkirah

Tazkirah time! Done we are talking about the scientific aspects of sleep, dreaming, and sleepwalking, allow me to invite you for a brief moment of pondering... for how dreadfully boring life for the human brain would be if it wasn't spent on at least a few minutes of deep thought, worry, confusion, and enlightenment.

We all know that Prophet Muhammad, Rasullah SAW received revelations from Allah SWT and from those revelations came the Al-Quran. Often, as modern Muslims, we take this phenomenon for granted. For a man to receive revelations from the Heavens, at a glance (and a secular scientific glance at that) seems absurd. How do revelations come 'down'? Where does 'it' come down to? The logical deduction, seeing as to how the act of receiving any information is associated to 'thinking', and 'thinking' is associated to the functions of the brain, we assume that revelations fall from the Heavens into the brain/mind of man. Yet, how this occurs is an untangible mystery. One, which perhaps, is better left undeciphered. The closest that science has come to deciphering 'dreams'(another 'normal' physiological process that men undergo, which is in scientific fact, rather 'abnormal') are neurological processes and chemical reactions, with loopholes here and there. But, WHY do men dream? WHY do men think? WHY am I, in this moment in front of my computer, completely besotted by why I think and why I'm besotted by why I think? A novice in science and the scientific community, the more I learn and read and understand about the natural world and occurences, it is always the How and What that science explains... and Why is often left to speculation. So far, it must be said, that the line that holds me to faith and religion is the WHY surrounding humans and the world. There is a comfort in believing that there is a reason for everything that has happened, and will happen, and one day that reason will be made known...

Perhaps, the fact that men think, half with their brains, half with Wallahualam, is the biggest retort to evolution. At least the evolution that believes humans are just a more developed species of animals, anyway. For some reason, some human brains prefer to accept flimsy theories of evolution (Ernst Haeckel's 'ontology recapitulating phylogeny' being one of the flimsiest, not to mention fraudulent) than to humbly accept that there is a greater omnipotent Being that no one can really claim to see, understand or can be sure of His existence, other than through pure faith. Lifting from ''Ulum Al-Quran-An introduction to the Sciences of the Quran' by Ahmad Von Denffer (Islamic Foundation, 1983):

"No empiricist would deny that the earth and universe do exist. It is only that he does not always perceive them as 'creation', for then he would have to argue from material evidence that he has to a mighty and puissant cause, to reason and purpose behind it."

"Despite this, man denies God and disregards His communication with man. Suffice to say that the cause must be seen in man's self-perception, his arrogance and false pride. Having discovered that he and his kind constitute the peak of 'creation', he thinks himself autonomous, self-dependent, absolutely free and fully equipped to be master of the universe. Somehow, this self-perception too has been with man from his early days. He has always thought himself better than anything else."

Guilty as above charged... and yet, at the same time, I can't help but wonder if the reasons behind my questions is directly related to Allah SWT's good grace.

"And those (pagans) who have no knowledge say: 'Why does not Allah speak to us or a sign come to us?' Even thus said those before them, the like of what they say; their hearts are alike; We have indeed made clear the signs to people who are certainly sure." Holy Qur'an (2:118)

There is a force that beckons man to wonder his origins and not merely accept his being as the means and end to his being. There was a before, and there will be an after. But the mechanics of either are only understood by faith.


To experience my indulgence into narcissism,link to my personal homepage by clicking on the wittle girl.Caution: She's not as sweet as she looks...


Sources: Cliparts courtesy of fotosearch.com and www.brainconnection.com. Information based on Dee Unglaub Silverthorn's 3rd edition of "Human Physiology: An Integrated Approach";Pearsons. Ahmad Von Denffer's 'Ulum Al-Quran- An Introduction to the Sciences of the Quran';The Islamic Foundation.