This past weekend, our campus hosted the 26^th Annual Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities Conference where many of your fellows Aggies were participants. The conference attracted 550 students, more than 1,000 attendees and showcased the great interdisciplinary work that our faculty and students are doing.

Undergraduate research is one of the core principles of a large public research university like UC Davis and is something that I want as many students as possible to participate in.  It is something that I was fortunate to have experience s an undergraduate at the National Technical University in Greece and it helped me solidify my interests in electrical engineering and taught me how to think critically and analytically. For those of you who are not yet engaged in research, I encourage you to visit the Undergraduate Research Center and seek out a faculty member to explore your research interests. I think you will be very happy you did and it will add a great deal to your education at UC Davis.

As always, you can email me your thoughts and questions to askkatehi@ucdavis.edu. I will try my best to answer you in my Ask Katehi column.

Let’s play a game. I’m going to give you two scenarios. I want you to guess which one is the more likely response to being sexually assaulted. Ready?

Option A:

Amy was raped by a stranger a few weeks ago. During the assault, Amy was completely terrified, but reacted quickly and cleverly. She escaped the situation right away and called the police. Amy told her friends, family members and even a therapist about what happened to her and has found comfort in the incredible support she has been given. Amy tends to hide in her room for fear of running into her attacker (she knows how unsafe it would be for her to see him ever again), and has decided to remain abstinent from sex until marriage. While things have been tough for Amy, she seems to be dealing with her situation in a healthy way.

Option B:

Sara was raped by her boyfriend a few weeks ago. She loves her boyfriend – everybody does. He is charming, charismatic and the kind of guy everybody wants to be around.  Sara stayed with her boyfriend even though he raped her. She continued to have sex with him, but also had sex with other guys. She liked to feel in control again. She loved to go out, get drunk, and wind up with a random stranger. Sara refused to talk about what happened to her, and how would anybody know? She continues to be a straight-A student and an amazing athlete. Nothing can bring Sara down.

Did you guess A? I thought you might have. Seems like a pretty reasonable response.  I mean, if you were just raped it’s not like you’re going to be sleeping around or going out to parties. It’s not like you’re going to keep spending quality bonding time with your attacker, right?

Wrong. While I can’t say for certain that Amy isn’t out there somewhere, every survivor I’ve encountered has behaved a lot more similarly to Sara.

People have a distorted understanding of how a victim of rape should behave. Think about it. If you’ve never experienced rape, or real trauma of any sort, you’re going to assume that when people are traumatized, they’re just experiencing normal feelings of fear (but to a greater degree). You’re going to think, “Okay, so if I’m terrified of talking dolls (after watching Chucky), then a rape victim must be terrified of their rapist… or men… or the outside world… after being raped.” It’s more or less a logical conclusion to jump to. It’s why our society assumes that every victim’s response will be as “normal” as Amy’s response was.

But here’s the thing: our brains process severe trauma differently. Rape is not on the same level as your fear of heights. It’s on the same level as attempted homicide. And that process is something you have not experienced until you have. It’s something you do not understand until you have to.

Listen up. There are two main structures in the brain at play when processing a traumatic event: the hippocampus and the amygdala. The hippocampus is the brain structure that processes and forms memories. The amygdala is the part of the brain that processes emotional stimuli – including fear. The amygdala and the hippocampus must work together to process information. Normally, this process works pretty well.

However,  the hippocampus and the amygdala are sensitive to hormone fluctuations, and during a traumatic event, your body basically goes crazy with hormones. It produces adrenaline to help with a “fight or flight” response. It produces cortisol (the stress hormone) to aid in your body’s energy, to give you strength to fight back. It produces opiates to relieve some of the emotional and/or physical pain you experience during and after the assault. And it produces oxytocin – a hormone designed to increase positive emotions – in attempt to help  numb the severity of your pain.

These hormones are essential for your body’s survival during an assault, but they completely interfere with your normal processing. Your body is simultaneously releasing so many different hormones when it is in ultimate survival mode. It’s trying its best to save you. It is acting out of desperation—and this means sacrificing certain key parts of your functioning.

Which brings me to my point. These activated hormones in your body, released during rape, hinder your brain circuits controlling rational thought (located in the prefrontal cortex).  This means that victims literally CANNOT think rationally. Not during the trauma and not for a long, long time after the trauma. It means that a survivor is solely functioning through their amygdala – the emotional center – and is temporarily not capable of making any rational decisions. Any.

If we understand the real biology behind what happens during severe trauma, we can understand that Sara isn’t so crazy after all. No, she’s doing her BEST to function while her brain returns to its normal processing state. Her reaction isn’t going to make sense to anyone, it doesn’t even make sense to her. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong or not “normal.” As weird or confusing as her reaction might be, it IS understandable. Hell, if she walked around campus wearing a gigantic bear costume and only communicated via growling it would be pretty understandable too.

There is no “normal” response to rape. There is only surviving – which more often than not means doing really ridiculous and stupid things. Make a conscious effort to understand what real rape victims look like and why. Because sometimes they look like crazy gigantic bears. And sometimes those bears could use a hug.

Like her bluntness? Contact Maddy Pettit at mepettit@ucdavis.edu

There are numerous misconceptions about what autism is, what the causes are and how it is experienced. Autism, like any other disorder, is complex and variable. Unfortunately, it gets simplified by many of the misunderstandings surrounding it. I want to highlight five of the many myths people have about autism, in the hope that readers will gain insight into the complexity of the disorder.

Tendency to homogenize autism

One misunderstanding that people have is that everyone with autism has more or less the same experience and set of symptoms. Generally, it is assumed that they are all socially withdrawn, non-communicative, unresponsive and engage in repetitive or self-abusive behavior. However, autism is not a homogenous disorder— it is a spectrum disorder. This means that autism is a broad category containing various forms of the disorder. The disorder ranges from mild to severely impaired. Some people may have Asperger’s syndrome or may be high functioning autistics, either being mild cases.

It is incredibly difficult to predict the child’s future, especially considering the immense variability in diagnosis and treatment. For example, at age three, two children may exhibit the same set of symptoms indicating that they have a severe form of autism. However, only one of them may end up significantly recovering, while the other may not. Unfortunately, there is no standard method of determining how the child’s disorder will end up. To illustrate, Temple Grandin, an autistic woman, was labeled as severely impaired at the early stages of her disorder. She is now a Professor of animal science, an autism activist and has published a bestselling book. Grandin even has her own biographical film.

Tendency to fear autistic individuals

People unfamiliar with autism tend to be easily frightened by the autistic. This might be due to their outsider perspective. It is assumed that if a person cannot articulate what a majority considers culturally appropriate, or that they do not follow social norms of communication, then that person is crazy, weird or scary. If you think back and reflect, how many times have you turned away from a disabled person, afraid to look them in the eye? How many mothers have you seen tell their children to look away from a disabled person? Although it may be unusual to be socially withdrawn, non-communicative or unresponsive, it does not legitimize these reactions.

People with autism are cold and unempathetic

People with autism tend to be characterized as uncaring and cold. However, it is not that they are incapable of feeling, rather that they have difficulty reading other people’s emotions. To empathize with somebody, you need to be able to read their emotions, communicate your sentiments and have a mutual cultural understanding of how to appropriately display empathy. This is a difficult task for autistic individuals because many of them have trouble reading faces and making eye contact. The ability of reading body language is crucial to empathy, but it is an ability difficult to obtain for autistic individuals. In addition, many people have problems with nonverbal and verbal communication, so even if they do feel empathy, they may have difficulty expressing it. Thus, autism’s so-called unfeeling nature is more likely due to a lack of social communication, rather than a lack of emotional response.

Vaccines Cause Autism

Many people blame vaccines for their child’s autism. It was believed that the preservative, Thimerosol, contained in vaccines might increase the risk of autism. However, studies have yet to indicate this link; in fact, many studies suggest the rejection of this claim. There have been nine CDC funded studies disregarding the link between autism and vaccines. The vaccines are incredibly safe and beneficial.

“Refrigerator Moms” Cause Autism

There was an assumption, particularly in the 1950s, that autism resulted from cold and distant parents. However, there is no indication that parenting causes autism, especially considering that it is a problem with neurological development. That is not to say that parenting has no influence over the experience of autism. Of course, abuse and neglect would hinder recovery, whereas deep care and acceptance would facilitate it.

Tiffany Marquez can be reached at tmmarquez@ucdavis.edu.

Graphic by Tiffany Choi.

Just the right amount of sunlight, just the right amount of rain. With these balances and a little fertile ground, the seed becomes the tree. The branches will find a shape of their own design, but by what providence have they grown under? It is the nurturing of the Earth that brings the tree up hearty and strong – the nutrients beneath its roots, the wind beneath its leaves. In this loving care, the tree rises from its green cradle to stand tall on its own. But it’s never really alone.

In many ways, human growth follows a path similar to that of the trees. There are many factors that affect how we become who we are, but the providence by which we grow is the loving care of what or who raised us. However, unlike the wild trees I described above, we’re part of society’s carefully cultivated garden, and those who have raised us have been the most gracious and compassionate gardeners the world has ever known. They are the mothers and mother figures in our lives. With Mother’s Day coming this Sunday, I’d like to say a few words about what they mean to us and to the Earth.

Now, there are many ways people go about being mothers, and that’s one of the reasons we see such wonderful diversity of character all around us. But I can only talk about my own experience, and I am incredibly blessed and grateful to say that my mother is one of the most generous, caring, compassionate persons I’ve ever known. She’s been there through all of my life’s brightest and darkest moments to support me and make sure things are alright. Sometimes this has consisted of big stuff: going to any length to help me when I’ve made a mistake too big for me alone to fix, or holding me when my world feels like it’s falling apart. More often it’s just little things: the hugs she would give me before school every day, or the great food I can count on receiving nearly every time I go home. But at the center of it all is the one guiding spirit all mother figures share: the selfless love with boundless generosity.

What I’ve come to see, and what I want to share with you today, is that the source of this love lies at the center of the source of all things, Mother Nature herself. Now, some might find this strange; maybe to them, nature seems a dispassionate monolith, doling out rewards and punishments according to impersonal and unvarying laws. But how can such a reduction capture how it feels to see the look in a mother’s eyes when she gazes upon her newborn child? To smell the rain as it brings new life to the parched land? To feel the warmth of a loved one’s embrace spread through your body all the way to the corners of your soul? Everywhere around us, we can see and feel how Nature nurtures and embraces the beautiful world to which she gave life. And even with all her power, it is with a most intimate tenderness that she coaxes her progeny higher and stronger into the best version of whatever they were made to be.

To mother, therefore, is to accept Nature’s highest calling. Caring for the people and things one loves is what we were meant to do, an inclination embedded so integrally in our roots that it fails to even require a reason. Those who mother connect with the greatest and truest good that nature offers: the deep and abiding love living in the heart of all things.

So this Mother’s Day, we should all try to find a way, if we can, to give back to those mothers and mother figures who have given us so much. But in the spirit of the selfless love mothers really work under , I’d like to suggest that we all take the next step and pay it forward. Plant a flower; make a new friend; tell somebody you love how much they mean to you. When raised by gardeners, gardeners we too can become. Spend some time nurturing the garden of your loved ones, and like a mother you too can bring a little more love into the world.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! I hope you liked this one; it’s for you.

Look up, look out, look around – love is in our nature.

Nick Jensen can be reached at njensen@ucdavis.edu

Graphic by Sandra Bae.