New President - Lost Helicopter - Updates

Dr. J. Clay McDonald

Dr. George Goodman

As of March 1st of this year, Logan College of Chiropractic will have a new president.  Dr. J. Clay McDonald, pictured on the left, will be presiding over Logan College after the retirement of Dr. George Goodman, pictured on the right.
Per an email sent out by Logan we learned that Dr. Goodman has been president of the college for over 20 years but, from what I've learned during my time as a student.  Dr. Goodman started with Logan in the early 70s, I believe it was around 1973 which means he's been serving in the field of education for 40 years.  That's quite an accomplishment.

 My girlfriend's parents bought me a really cool remote controlled helicopter for Christmas.  It even has a video camera in the nose of the aircraft and, since my Cessna flying lesson days came to an abrupt halt upon my entry into Logan this helicopter was a pretty sharp substitute :)
Unfortunately, I'm not a very good pilot and the helicopter found it's way into some woods earlier tonight and I haven't been able to find the darn thing.  I'll search again tomorrow and hope the electronics can handle the snowy weather.

Oh, interestingly enough, When I Googled a picture for Dr. Goodman there were pictures of other Logan faculty which came up in the search that I recognized.  I think I saw a new caption feature here so I'm going to try it out...

Dr. Kane

Dr Ralph Baralle

Dr. Norman Kettner

I think that worked.  Dr. Kane is a clinician at the St. Peter's outpatient Health Clinic where I am an Intern.  Dr. Ralph Baralle (not exactly sure of the spelling there) works in the post grad department - at least he was working there Friday and really helped me out with a situation.  Dr. Kettner is kind of a phenom at Logan.  If I had half of Dr. Kettner's knowledge I'd probably be among the top 1% most brilliant chiropractors around.

I spent about 8 hours today on my Senior Research Project (SRP) and mainly gathered up and organized all the data I had collected since my first attempt at SRP 1.  I currently have on hand 42 different references for my paper on the Neuroplasticity of Happiness.  I was hoping to have 20 pages written by Monday but, so far, I just have two pages which consist of all my references but it is a start.  I sort of got hooked in the beginning of my organizing by reading a lot of the articles since they were pretty interesting.  

One particularly interesting article is from a journal called Neuropsychologia called Neuroanatomical correlates of pleasant and unpleasant emotion.  I really had to take my time and made up a new document to help better understand certain parts of the article such as exactly which areas of the brain receive significantly increased blood flow to help indicate which areas of the brain are activated during pleasant or unpleasant emotions as well as distinguishing those emotions from neutral emotions.  I'll have to read through the article again, maybe with a better night's sleep under my belt.  thus-far, it seems like 

neutral emotions activate the medial prefrontal cortex (Brodmann's area 9), thalamus, hypothalamus and the midbrain.

Pleasant emotions - head of the left caudate nucleus

Unpleasant emotions - bilateral occipito-temporal cortex, cerebellum, left parahippocampal gyrus, hippocampus and amygdala.

yeah....well....  the amygdala and unpleasant emotions makes sense to me and I'm pretty sure the caudate nucleus is right behind the lateral ventricle.  I think of the thalamus as our 'primitive brain'.  I'm not entirely certain about the occipito-temporal cortex and can't help wondering why the brain would favor the left side for these emotions.  Hmmmm.  I do remember learning about two parts of the visual cortex where impulses of light end up but forgot the names of those two parts (so, I'm looking them up in my Clinical Neuroscience book) ...I feel a bit disgruntled that the names aren't more familiar to me.  I remember drawing these pathways out and it making so much sense to me at one time.  I probably need to find my old notes.  looks like the lower wall of the calcarine sulcus is the lingual gyrus and the upper wall is the cuneus.  guess they could have been called Albert & Fred for all I remember.  But, at least I did remember there were two divisions.  Neuroanatomy was quite a while ago.  Back in the days of bitemporal hemianopsia which, I remember can be caused from a pituitary tumor.  

Anyway, I've got my work cut out for me with this paper which is due in 2 weeks & 5 days.  

I think my mind is back on the Cessna's ....in fact, I'm sure of it because of the Googled image page of airplanes currently to the left of my blog.  Almost trying to recall and recreate the sensations of taking off.  I'm recalling I never used the rudders much on take-off and now I'm wondering if my instructor was doing that part for me.  I just remember having to get to a certain speed to take off - I was thinking it was 80 mph (Google to the rescue again) - OK, for the Cessna 172 it looks like take-off speed is 64 KIAS which is Knot Indicated AirSpeed and a knot is about 1.15 mph so, about 73.6.  I wasn't too far off.  I remember seeing the telephone lines perpendicular to our path and always hoping to clear them - probably newbie type of thinking.  

I don't have my pilot's license nor do I have the Porsche 968 I was in the market for prior to starting at Logan.  hmmm...and, after the 15th of March I'm not going to have a motorcycle anymore either since I'll need to sell that to help pay for the Summer tuition.  

BUT - I may have a realistic countdown to a graduation with a D.C. degree.  That would be something good to Google - When is this coming December's commencement ceremony?  Let's see - this past December graduation was on Saturday, December 22nd, the end of the third full week in December.  So.... I'm thinking the December graduation in 2013 would be on Saturday, December 21st at 10 a.m.

now the fun part - I'll go to timeanddate.com to get my countdown.

321 Days, 5 hours and 40 minutes from now I could be sitting in a seat in the Purser Center awaiting my diploma.  That - would - be - REALLY - cool!  

hmmm, I've stared at that clock so long that I'm now two minutes closer to graduation.

Actually, I need to stay on top of things and really try to make this happen.  About a week ago I sent out an email update to my family and a few others and I was thinking of them as kind of coaches - maybe get any advise or to relay important information.  

I wonder why those particular people showed up on an image search for Dr. Goodman.  The clinician I have at the St. Peter's office is Dr. Hogarth.  This is kind of funny.  When I did a search on Dr. Hogarth to get a picture, a picture of Dr. Goodman came up right next to him.  I suppose after 40 years in the business, Dr. Goodman can have his picture shown twice.  :)  I'll have to get to that update tomorrow, pretty exhausted right now.

Dr. Hogarth

Dr. Goodman