On the Wrinkles in our Brains

I remember when my second grade teacher told me our brains have wrinkles. I was completely shook - wrinkles were for grandma and grandpa, what could they possibly be doing in my seven year old brain?

Even though this was probably the most tangible way one could explain dural folds to a second grader, it was a fact that marked a divide in my learning. I will explain that but first let me speak briefly on the annotated bibliography.

The most recent assignment we completed for EMC was the annotated bibliography. In compiling all of my notes from all of the articles I've read since the beginning of this project, I noticed a divide similar to my brain-wrinkle one but with respect to the glymphatic system. Any article that was published prior to the system's discovery in 2012 contained presumptions as to how the brain eliminated waste products. Some research teams even neglected to do so, assuming that there didn't even exist one. Once the system's discovery entered the literature in a bout of serendipity and chance however, the following year approximately brought with it a slew of papers trying to decipher what exactly this discovery meant. How would it help disease research, cognitive conditions, and most importantly - how does it interact with everything else we already know about the brain?

As time went on though, and the existence of a glymphatic system became well established, papers contained fewer speculations and more conclusions rooted in results. It was interesting to see how once the system was discovered, there were less people running to prove it wrong and more people attempting to understand its meaning and thus disseminate that information. I wondered, why is this case? What I noticed however is that while scientific arguments are always occurring, it was crucial to realize that the discovery of the glymphatic system wasn't presented to refute an alternative explanation. The only reason neuroscientists believed that the brain lacked a drainage system was simply because they couldn't find it in the brain's anatomy. What resulted, although at first was largely acceptance of the system and its explained functions, soon turned into various theories concerning these intricate nuances.

Similarly, when my second grade teacher told me about the dural folds in our brains - the wrinkles on the amazing matter in our heads - I was confused at first because I didn't know such a fact to exist. It was foreign in the sense that I had a little background knowledge that could possibly refute it but not enough to reject the introduction of a new idea. After getting over that initial shock of the ridges in my brain, I started asking my teacher questions about the folds. How many do we have? Does everybody have the same number? What does too many folds mean? Too little? There was just no end to the questions one could ponder about those wrinkles. And this, along with my much more recent realizations about the Glymphatic system's discovery have shown me the difference between the introduction of new information where there previously was none and an attempted refutation of knowledge that has already been established as fact.