Day 5

Monday March 21, 2011

Victoria and I decided to change scenarios and go work at the coffee shop in Squamish. We asked each other feedback on the wording of our questions (or tentative questions...). I got significant feedback, and she reinforced my original idea that I need to reword my question. I am thinking: When does reward become addiction? But I wouldn't want to have an assumption in my question (that reward will always lead to/become an addiction.

We worked on our experiential learning forms for about 3 hours, doing research on potential places where I could go to gain experience in any of my fields of interest. I thought of looking up internships of volunteer opportunities at mental institutions, but my main interest would be to be able to participate and do research at a laboratory (preferably with research dedicated specifically to addictions). I asked Neal if he knew about any, and he has actually worked with Eric J. Nestler. The Nestler laboratory of addictions dedicates their research almost entirely to addictive behaviors, which would be great for me. I really want to look into it, even though it's apparently a very competitive internship to get. Another down side is that, as a research assistant at that lab, the meetings are biweekly and sometimes once during the weekend. They also require the lab assistants stay a minimum of 4 months, so I would have to go for the whole summer. I would also have to find a suitable way to decide how many blocks this experiential learning would count for, as we would meet up to 3 times a week for 4 months.

After working on the experiential learning forms, I met with Brian and apparently I am keeping up with the pace of the course and I have been investing time in useful research. I am very motivated to keep on exploring other opportunities for internships. 

I met with Neal to discuss my seminal works. From all the books I picked from SFU, Neal suggested that I picked 4 and then the other seminal work could be a collection of journal articles by an author that specializes on addictions. Neal gave me three names of reasearchers on the topic of addictions, so I looked up their articles on PubMed and Jstor to decide which ones I would use for my seminal works. It took me about 3 hours to examine different research papers from the 3 authors. It was a challenging task as I still have a lot of Molecular Biology and Neuroscience terminology to learn, but I made my decision based on the fact that Eric Nestler bases all his research on roedents rather than humans. The advantage I see in this methodology is that many of those experiments suggest that rats often self administer drugs (such as cocaine) and trigger specific brain structures when they do so. This, to some extent, reduces the subjectivity of a conscious and human decision to take the drug; instead, the rats take the drug affects the animal in a similar way that water affects a thirsty animal, or food affects a hungry one.