You never know until you let go.

[kaia]

I have come to the realization that all the different points in my life can be summed up by Usher songs.

This is the type of stuff I think of after I've been studying Biochemistry for hours. I can't tell you what forces are responsible for stablizing proteins at their various levels (it's probably hydrogen bonds, that is the answer to every question in life), but I still know the words to songs I haven't heard in years.

Comments

[sekai-kitai.livejournal.com]

Music is probably the only thing that our brains can recalled and recognize with some ease. I'm the same way. I may not remember anything I would study the previous night, but I can sure as hell remember song lyrics.

[night-owl-9.livejournal.com]

I'm right with you there. I remember song lyrics and melodies more than my GPA.

[ragnarok-08.livejournal.com]

I know exactly how you feel.

[giallarhorn.livejournal.com]

There was a really interesting paper I read a while back of how melodies are really effective as mnemonic devices due to the capacity to attach a lot of information to them, and it had to do with how the information was theorized to be stored in some portion of the brain. Something about melody->song->lyrics, or something.

Though I can't actually remember song lyrics to save my life.

You tend to find hydrogen bonds, but you can also see ionic and hydrophobic/hydrophillic forces as key players in determining protein structure and shape. Disulfide bonds also crop up sometimes but a lot more rarely. Primary tends to be peptide and covelent, secondary is made up of beta sheets and alpha helixes stuck via hydrogen bonds, tertiary are all hydrophobic (maybe not all?) and quarternary is governed by disulfide, I think.

/end memory of what I learned in biochem