Push on your eyeballs to lower heart rate

My professor told me that if you push on your eyeballs, your heart rate drops.

I just tried it and it works.

I'm glad I was sitting down though, because I got dizzy and light headed. My professor said that sometimes when he used a certain instrument that pushes up against someone's eye, that person might faint if they have low blood pressure.

Why does your body do this?

He explained that your body is designed to lower the heart rate when there is pressure on the eyes because there are pressure sensors there. If there is pressure on the eyes, the theory is that your body assumes that you are under water and slows down your heart rate to conserve oxygen. However, this causes a lack of oxygen in your brain, which may cause you to faint.

So if a bad guy is chasing you and you know that bad guy has low blood pressure, you can try two things:

1. Reach behind and try to press his eyes so that he might faint.
2. Tell him that he "might be able to run faster if he presses his eyes," so that he'll try to press his own eyes himself.

This plan is flawless!

Personality Test

We took a personality test in my business class last week. It was pretty interesting to see how true that test was. Basically, our professor said that there are four basic personalities:

1. Playful/Popular
2. Powerful
3. Perfectionist
4. Peaceful

These four personality types have been called a bunch of different things throughout history, such as the four temperments: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic.

My professor put up a slide with four columns of adjectives, and we had to choose one adjective in each row that described us. Then we added them up to see which personality we were.

I showed it to Katie and she said it's like those quizzes in Teen Beat magazine that shows was color lip gloss to wear to match your personality. I think this test is pretty much just as accurate as the lip gloss test.

If you want to try it, this test is pretty similar to the one my professor gave us.

I was a Peaceful/Perfect. Katie was a Powerful/Perfect.

I think you could also apply this to the Houses in Hogwarts, where Gryffindor = Playful/Popular, Slytherin = Powerful, Ravenclaw = Perfectionist, and Hufflepuff = Peaceful.

But that would mean I would be in Hufflepuff. Dang it. No one wants to be in Hufflepuff. At least I'm not a Slytherin, like someone else I know (**cough** Katie **cough**).

Art and Medicine with Frank Netter

I learned about Frank Netter today, but I was aware of his work before today. Frank Netter was born in the early 1900's and grew up wanting to be an artist. During high school he went to a design school, but his family didn't want him to be an artist. He decided to go on the medical school and he became a surgeon. He opened up a practice, but it was not profitable at all. This was in the middle of the Great Depression.

He did some freelance art work for pharmaceutical companies, most notably CIBA, and it tuned out to pay a lot more than his own private practice. He then gave up the practice of medicine and started to make medical illustrations full-time.

Doctors still use and love his illustrations. I have seen them in my current Histology and Physiology classes. There were posters of Netter's illustrations hanging up in the cadaver lab at BYU.

Here's an example of his art:

From University of Waterloo

I guess I think he is really cool because I like drawing and I like the human body. It reminds me of when I drew a bunch of pictures to study for my anatomy class. 

Your liver can REGROW!

I remember hearing from someone in Middle School that if you cut off a piece of your liver then it will grow back. I thought he made it up. I told him that was just a myth perpetrated by the story of Prometheus getting his liver eaten out each day and then it growing back. 

But it is true.

You can donate up to 60% of your liver and it will regrow. It may not grow to it's original shape, but it will regain it's function--which is AMAZING!

Also, in other news, I opened up my portrait shop again (but I increased the price and added a few weeks to the delivery time to account for the fact that I'm in school now.)

That is all.

Cuttlefish eyes

Cuttlefish are related to squids and octopuses and they are really neat creature. But studying eyes has made me really appreciate how cool their eyes are.

From Wikipedia

Here are some amazing things about cuttlefish eyes:

• They can't see any color, but they have two focus-point areas (fovea) on their retina: one to look forward and one to look behind.
• The "w" shape of their pupil allowed them to see the polarization of light, which enables them to see with greater contrast. 
• They focus their eyes by reshaping the entire eye, not just the lens.
• They have no blind spot because their optic nerve is behind the retina
• Scientists have speculated that their eyes are fully developed while they're still in their eggs, and they prefer to eat things they have seen swim by whilst in their eggs.

I have no idea what it would look like to be able to focus on two objects at once, or be able to perceive the polarity of light--all I know is that it would be AWESOME.

Tracy Chapman

Every time I hear Tracy Chapman sing, I have one thought go through my head:


"Is Tracy Chapman a man or a woman?"


And I have to Google it every time, because I can never remember.

Bonus Post

Because I forgot to post yesterday, here's a neat secret I learned about Google.

If you Google "do a barrel roll," then Google will do a barrel role.

Try it.

Treating disease is easier than treating patients

Patients don't always do what you want or expect them to do. My professors have often said that it's easy to know what needs to be done to fight a disease, but it's hard to make sure the patients actually do it.

Here's an example to illustrate the point. This is true story. No joke.

A women brought her teenage son in my professor's office one day because he had a red eye. He looked at it and saw that it was a bacterial infection and wrote him a prescription for some antibiotics. He gave them the paper with the prescription and told the mom to make sure her son took it every day, and then to come in again for a follow-up exam in a week.

A week later, the mom brought her son in again and the infection had gotten worse. He couldn't understand what was wrong, so he asked her if he's been taking the prescription.

"Yes, every day!" she replied.

"Okay, show me how he does it."

The women pulled out the piece of paper with the prescription on it and she proceeded to rip a small piece of it off, rolled it into a ball, and popped it into the boy's mouth. She had been giving her son pieces of the paper instead of filling the prescription.

Moral of the story: don't assume anything. If you are going to expect the patient to do something, make them show you that they know how to do it before you let them out of the office.

Watery eyes

I hardly get watery eyes anymore. This is a good thing, because I used to get them whenever I thought about something painful or someone with inflammation in the eye. And I don't think anybody would want to visit an optometrist who couldn't look at your eye infection without crying.

This has come gradually over the past seven weeks of school. I think looking at pictures of bloody, pus-filled eyeballs every day has dulled my senses. Also, learning about what is happening to the eye (what is being inflammed, which cells are causing it, what treatments would be necessary, etc.) helps me analyze the eye instead of saying, "Oh man, oh man, there's an actual hole in that eye and something gooey is coming out."

Are you brave? Don't look if you're squeamish! Click here to see some nasty eyes!

Anyway, school is going great. My classes are very hard, but they're super interesting.