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Fortesa Latifi, from The Truth About Grief.

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an alumni from my school told me something that really stuck with me so i thought i would share it with any of my followers who are also students. she said “try to get good grades, but make it the least impressive thing about you.” soft skills are just as important! practice empathy, leadership, and communication! have hobbies and find new things that you’re good at!! know what your values are and how you act on them!! these things are so important 🌱

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build your own taste ;)

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Cultural Dark Academia

here’s pt. 2

After my last post about the lack of representation in academia, I felt it neccessary to provide some examples of what I’m talking about. Obviously there are more countries in the world than I can list and provide books for, so for a quick list this is what I got. !! Keep researching !! If you have any more books by POC please reply them !! If a country isn’t listed, that doesn’t mean it’s not important, this is just what I could get together real quick. If I made any mistakes, please let me know, we’re all learning. We need to help each other end eurocentrism in academia, so value representation and educate yourselves 💓💓💓

Chinese:

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

The Dream of the Red Chamber

The Water Margin

Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The Journey to the West

The Scholars

The Peony Pavilion

Border Town by Congwen Shen

Half of Man is Woman by Zhang Xianliang

To Live by Yu Hua

Ten Years of Madness by agent Jicai

The Field of Life and Death & Tales of Hulan River by Xiao Hong

Japanese:

A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oë

Haruki Murakami

Pakistani:

Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid

Ghulam Bagh by Mirza Athar Baig

Masterpieces of Urdu Nazm by K. C. Kanda

Irani/Persian:

Rooftops of Tehran by Mahbod Seraji

Savushun by Simin Daneshvar

Anything by Rumi

The Book of Kings by Ferdowsi

The Rubiyat by Omar Khayyam

Shahnameh (translation by Dick Davis)

Afghan:

Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Indian:

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Aithihyamala, Garland of Legends by Kottarathil Sankunni

The Gameworld Trilogy by Samir Basu

Filipino:

Twice Blessed by Ninotchka Rosca

The Last Time I Saw Mother by Arlene J. Chai

Brazilian:

The Patriot and The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma by Lima Barreto

Broquéis by Cruz e Sousa

Don Casmurro by Machado de Assis

Colombian:

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Delirio by Laura Restrepo

¡Que viva la música! by Andrés Caicedo

The Sound of Things Falling by Jim Gabriel Vásquez

Mexican:

Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolf Anaya

Adonis Garcia/El Vampiro de la Colonia Roma by Luis Zapata

El Complot Mongol by Rafael Bernal

Egyptian:

The Cairo Trilogy by Nahuib Mahfouz

The Book of the Dead

Nigerian:

Rosewater by Tade Thompson

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Malian:

The Epic of Sundiata

Senegalese:

Poetry of Senghor

Native American:

The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King

Starlight by Richard Wagamese

Almanac of the Dead by L. Silko

Fools Crow by James Welch

Indigenous Australian:

Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe

First Footprints by Scott Cane

My Place by Sally Morgan

American//Modern:

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

Internment by Samir’s Ahmed

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurtson

Rivers of London Series by Ben Aaronovitch

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urgg want to read books so muchh

but im so tired cannot even open my eyes

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(Image caption: The left image shows degeneration that typically occurs in the eye (lower right corner) after a patient has a stroke in the visual processing area of the brain. The area of degeneration corresponds to the location of blind areas of the patient’s visual field. Carnegie Mellon and University of Rochester researchers found the eye is less likely to degenerate when the brain continues to respond to visual stimuli despite the patient’s blindness from the stroke. The right image shows lesion in black and visual cortex activity to stimuli presented in blind areas of the patient’s visual field in orange)

New Study Reshapes Understanding of How the Brain Recovers from Injury

New research, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, sheds light on how the damage in the brain caused by a stroke can lead to permanent vision impairment for approximately 265,000 Americans each year. The findings could provide researchers with a blueprint to better identify which areas of vision are recoverable, facilitating the development of more effective interventions to encourage vision recovery.

“This study breaks new ground by describing the cascade of processes that occur after a stroke in the visual center of the brain and how this ultimately leads to changes in the retina,” said senior study author Brad Mahon, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Rochester. “By more precisely understanding which connections between the eye and brain remain intact after a stroke, we can begin to explore therapies that encourage neuroplasticity with the ultimate goal of restoring more vision in more patients.”

When a stroke occurs in the primary visual cortex, the neurons responsible for processing vision can be damaged. Depending upon the extent of the damage, this can result in blind areas in the field of vision. While some patients spontaneously recover vision over time, for most the loss is permanent. A long-known consequence of damage to neurons in this area of the brain is the progressive atrophy of cells in the eyes, called retinal ganglion cells.

“While the eye is not injured in the stroke, cells in the retina that send projections to parts of the brain that are damaged will degenerate over time,” said Mahon, a faculty member in CMU’s Department of Psychology in its Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “Once this occurs, it becomes more and more unlikely for vision to recover at that location.”

The new research sought to understand the mechanisms of vision loss after stroke and whether it was possible to identify areas in the field of vision that could be recovered. The study involved 15 patients treated at Strong Memorial and Rochester General hospitals for a stroke that affected the primary visual processing area of the brain. The participants took vision tests, underwent scans in an MRI to identify areas of brain activity and were administered a test that evaluated the integrity of cells in their retina. The team found that the survival of the retinal ganglion cells depended upon whether or not the primary visual area of the brain to which they are connected remained active. Eye cells that were connected to areas of visual cortex that were no longer active would atrophy and degenerate, leading to permanent visual impairment.

However, the researchers observed that some cells in the eye remained healthy, even though the patient could not see at the corresponding field of vision. This finding suggests that these eye cells remain connected to unscathed neurons in the visual cortex and that visual information was making its way from the eyes to the visual cortex, even though this information was not being interpreted by the brain in a manner that allowed sight.

“The integration of a number of cortical regions of the brain is necessary in order for visual information to be translated into a coherent visual representation of the world,” said study co-author Dr. Bogachan Sahin, an assistant professor in the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) Department of Neurology. “And while the stroke may have disrupted the transmission of information from the visual center of the brain to higher order areas, these findings suggest that when the primary visual processing center of the brain remains intact and active, clinical approaches that harness the brain’s plasticity could lead to vision recovery.”

The study also suggests new clinical approaches to maximize the potential for recovery by more effectively targeting blind regions in the field of vision. URMC researchers Krystel Huxlin and Dr. James V. Aquavella have developed a visual training regime that has been shown to help with vision recovery after stroke and the new study could help refine how this technology is employed.

“These findings suggest a treatment protocol that involves a visual field test and an eye exam to identify discordance between the visual deficit and retinal ganglion cell degeneration,” said Colleen Schneider, an M.D./Ph.D. student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and the first author of the study. “This could identify areas of vision with intact connections between the eyes and the brain and this information could be used to target visual retraining therapies to regions of the blind field of vision that are most likely to recover.”

Data from this study is openly available in KiltHub, CMU’s comprehensive institutional repository hosted within figshare. In the future, it will be incorporated into The Open Brain Project, a new, digital platform for exploration of the human brain. Ana Van Gulick, research liaison for psychology and brain sciences and program director for Open Science at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, is a key contributor to this joint effort of CMU and the University of Rochester.

“The field of neuroscience is currently undergoing a dramatic shift toward open science that will encourage new collaborations and methods of research inspired by data science,” Van Gulick said. “A cornerstone of this is providing open access to datasets in a standard format so that they can be aggregated and reused to extend scientific discovery. The data currently available in KiltHub and the larger collection that will later be discoverable through The Open Brain Project will provide a rich open access resource for education and research in neuroscience.”

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Okay…So 2020 is coming up in the next few days….and I will be leaving for NYC on the last day of the year to start my work as a research assistant in the neuroscience field. My work is full-time and starts from the first week of January to mid-February 2020. I am really looking forward to moving to one of my favorite cities as well as my work and what it would bring. So I am thinking that probably I can document my job and work-related things on this blog, basically typing up what I will be working on, my tasks and goals, and what I accomplish each day. This is pretty similar to “study blog” or “days of productivity” challenge that I’ve done before. The only difference is that this documentation would focus more on what I do and how my life is as an intern in NYC, not as a college student anymore. This challenge is called [winter/spring work 20] *i know lol. what a fancy name :) Hashtags would be #winterspringwork20 and ma-workblr. I will try to document my work every weekday, except on weekends because well…it would be so bizarre to work on weekends in a vibrant city like NY. This is an online project among many other ones that I’m excited to do this new year. Hope that I will be able to keep up with it!

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12.27.19

💻started off with brunch at 12pm. had a great badminton game for an hour and a half. sent a few emails to professors in college. self-learned r studio statistics program by watching tutorials. watched some fun youtube videos.

📚 gonna skim through some of the articles on ERPs to prepare for my phone meeting tomorrow and then i can go to bed.

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it’s 1 am and I’m craving for coffee ☕️

great job ma :)

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*repost

Urgg I am so stressed! Finals are killing me!

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Urgg I am so stressed! Finals are killing me!

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pick a plant if you’re having a bad day:

🌼  don’t hate yourself for relationships and friendships you lost or sabotaged - accept that you built walls or adopted some coping mechanisms. be gentle with this and acknowledge that this has happened, but you are able to grow into a wiser person and have meaningful relationships in the future because of this. don’t mind-read others and think they hate you - that’s a lie. you can still make genuine friendships, you’re still a loveable, valuable person.

🌺 you will find something else you love, new friendships, new hobbies, new music, new obsessions, new things that give u meaning. when one thing ends another one begins, so  don’t dwell on people who aren’t in your life anymore or things you don’t enjoy anymore. those might be in the past, but don’t give up on searching for new things that could be even better. 

🌷bad days and bad weeks always end. there are good things ahead. please don’t conclude anything about yourself or your life from a temporary time. it won’t always be like this. 

☘️  there is always a chance of success and there is no one path to happiness. you’ve already come so far from where you started and you should take a moment to be proud of yourself. you never know what great things can happen. don’t lose hope 💛

🌸 keep going through tiredness and there will be something beautiful and new that will fill the emptiness you feel right now. document and romanticise your life. you’ve had days where the world is bright and soft and kind and you will have those days again. 

🌱take your time. it’s ok to rest. stay in bed, drink water, take plentiful breaks, do nothing but breathe. when you’re ready, pick yourself up and piece things back together. there is no pressure.

🍄 pay attention to influences that make you feel bad and try to remove those from your life and thoughts. sometimes things like too much social media, untidy room, too little sleep, too much time in your room, or spending time with someone who doesn’t appreciate you can wear you down. make sure your environment helps you thrive.

🌻 you’re not invisible or forgotten, even if you feel alone. someone appreciates your smile, someone wanted to speak to you but was too shy, someone remembers you fondly even though you haven’t spoken to them for a while. you’re not  insignificant and alone. maybe you can reach out first and you’ll see that you were loved all along. remember, if you’re alone for a long time you will think you’re unloveable, and this is the biggest lie in the world, so try to force yourself to interact with others in a nice and fulfilling way even when you feel scared of embarrassing yourself. people who matter won’t judge you.

🍁 sometimes the hardest, but most worthwhile thing is changing everything you do or think. if you’ve been spiralling, maybe it’s good to assess what you’re doing that is making your situation worse. sometimes your thoughts and actions can be the problem but those can be changed. the first step is accept that your past moulded your current reactions to situations, then make a conscious effort to change every negative thought that you believe in. changing habits and mindsets like perfectionism, self-hatred, procrastination, jumping to conclusions, believing everyone will hurt you is really hard but it can be life-changing. take one step at a time  it’s hard to change what you’ve always known but you can do it, and don’t forget there is help out there. I hope happiness will play a big role in your life one day.

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New rule: chopping my hair off every summer ⛅️🌤☀️

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Try stuff. Put plants in your room even if you aren’t the best at caring for them. Attempt that dessert recipe even if it turns out ugly. Listen to that music you’ve been meaning to try for a while. The world is full of infinite sources of goodness and the best thing to do it to try and find as many as possible.

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✎ 10.20.2019 // two days of writing papers. four meals. three iced coffees. one gallon of water. fifteen references. sixteen pages of content. one overwhelmed n tired graduate student.

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Below is a note I came across online and since it speaks to me so powerfully, I felt the urge to save it here. The experience it illustrates is something I started to feel in the last couple of weeks and continue to feel it. It is refreshing to find my old self again and from there I am able to drag myself up from the dark muddy hole of depressing illusions that I created and locked mind in.

“When she started letting go, her vision became clearer. The present felt more manageable and the future began to look open and full of bright possibilities. As she shed the tense energy of the past, her power and creativity returned to her. With a revitalized excitement, she focuses on building a new life where joy and freedom were abundant.”

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It is writing that finds the demons in me, take me to a place of utmost vulnerability where I am forced to examine my brokenness and grapple with all my unanswered questions.