20 Time Reflection

For our 20 Time project never really had a final product for our discoveries and self experiment but we still had a lot to take away from it. You can watch our Ted Talk about our project here to see everything about it. Our experiment of sorts was to observe our own lives to find what aspects of a student's life cause the most stress and how our extracurriculars play into our stress levels. After we started this, it became a very large part of how we reduced stress because of how we were recording our feeling by ranting, that release relieved a huge amount of stress from our lives. On this blog post you can see our realization of how we were noticing pattern in our lives and when our project became what it is.

Making a Ted talk for the project was actually pretty fun to do because I got to work with Amelia, and I knew that we could rely on each other to carry the weight needed to have a good Ted Talk. Because we rehearsed the talk a few times it went quite well even if I forgot a few things since I get a little nervous. After re-watching our talk it was better than I thought but definitely was not as professional and comfortable as the real Ted Talks scientists do. I feel like we did pretty well because we payed attention to the rubric carefully even if we did forget a few things and did exactly what was required.

I completely plan on continuing to record my feelings to reduce my stress because it really did help. I hope other teachers can put something like this into their classes to get student more passionate.

Reflex Lab Analysis

For this lab we got to test and observe some of the reflexes our bodies have developed to protect ourselves. Involuntary reflexes happen when the information received doesn't pass through the brain, it hits the spinal cord, is very quickly processed and it sent strait back to the muscle that it needs to activate. We first tested one of my favorite reflexes, the photo-pupillary reflex, because it was one I messed around with and watched my pupil grow and shrink in a mirror. To test this and show exactly how it worked, I covered one eye for about a minute to really get it to adjust to no light, then I uncovered it and stared right into the flashlight of Amelia's phone while she recorded the pupil shrinking at the light. Now I am going to go further into detail about each of these reflexes. The first one of the photo-pupillary reflex happens because the eye needs to adjust to the amount of light provided so that it can see clearly and function in different amounts of light. Amelia took a short video of my pupil shrinking but you couldn't see it very well as my hair came down and obscured it.

This is the pupil when there is lots of light entering it. 

Next we did the experiment every kid knows about, the "hitting your knee with an hammer and kicking someone" or more scientifically, the patellar reflex. For this we took a rubber hammer as to not injure our knees, and tested the reflex and observed how vigorous the reflex was and then re-tested it after doing 30 squats. After the squats the reaction wasn't reduced too much but it definitely wasn't as fast or violent because all thing in the body require ATP, so when the ATP had been used up by the squats (contracting the muscles that would cause the patellar reflex) the reflex would not occur.

After testing that we went back to the eyes and tested our blinking reflex by throwing a cotton ball at our friends eyes, which were protected by cling film to see how we blink even with protection in front of us. Our corneas are very delicate and because they have no blood supply, they cannot heal themselves so it would be very bad if we hurt our corneas. That is why we instinctively blink, so that we protect our eyes from being damaged.

Next we tested a reflex not too many people know about which is used to test for brain damage, but if present is called Babinski's sign, where when a pen is drawn up the bottom of our foot, it will either curl up or spread out depending on our brain. If the person extends their toes, unless they are an infant, it is a sign of serious brain damage, but if they curl their toes, which I did in our experiment, they are healthy.

The final test was probably the most relevant to our lives today as teenagers who are glued to phones. We tested our reaction times, something that does require thought bc it is something that we need to think to do. We had our partner drop a ruler and we had to catch it as quickly as we could, and suing that measurement, estimate our reaction time. The first table below s the data from that control test and the one below shows the results of the same test, but we were texting while trying to catch it. As you can see, our reaction time was slowed significantly by the "multi-tasking" which does not technically exist as the brain can only do one thing at a time. Everyone in our class had a slower reaction time while their minds were preoccupied as you can see in our data tables as well as the graph that pooled together all of our classes data on response time as well as the difference between girls and boys.

Control Reaction Times

Reaction Times While Texting

Your Brain Map

Cerebral Cortex

What do the frontal lobes do?

The frontal lobes are the command center and leadership of the brain. They control our personality, our decision making, judgement, language and executive behaviors. The frontal lobes also control the animalistic instincts of immediate gratification to allow stronger willpower and organization. 

What is the relationship between selective attention and learning?

Selective attention is the minds action of keeping track and remembering only important details rather than as much as possible. It is a persons way to filter out unnecessary information and being able to remember what is needed, learning more efficiently. 

What is the last part of your brain to develop and what can you do to prevent it from deteriorating?

The frontal lobe is the last part to develop and to prevent it from deteriorating quickly you can actively think rather than be on auto pilot, and transform memories rather than pure memorization. 

What does the neo cortex do?

This part of our brain takes care of our spacial awareness and governs our senses by being the main receptor for them. 

What is the role of the pre frontal cortex?

The pre frontal cortex is the part of your brain that makes up your personality and how we act around others. It is referred to as the "central bottleneck" as to filter our thoughts to know what to do.

What do we know about the pre frontal cortex’s relationship with multitasking?

Multitasking does not really exist because our brain is really just constantly switching between the two tasks and takes much longer to complete then than if you were focusing on one. 

Which part of the brain is associated with speech and language development?  Give an interesting fact about this region.

Broca's area is responsible for speech and language development and it is the part of the brain that allows you to learn a new language and be bilingual. 

Which part of your brain is responsible for thinking the following: “Is it hot in here or is it just me?”

The somatosensory cortex is the part of the brain responsible for processing temperature. 

What does your visual cortex do for you?

This is the part of the brain that discerns colors and complex objects such as faces.

State three interesting or significant facts about your occipital lobe.

The occipital lobe is not just where visual information is processed, it is also the place where the imagination originates, is stimulated when you "visualize" a situation, and is not fully developed in children meaning that they have a harder time telling the difference between real things and fake ones. 

What would happen if your temporal lobes were damaged?

If your temporal lobes were damaged we would not be able to learn, remember locations, or remember much of anything really because the temporal lobes don't interpret sounds but are in charge of recognition. 

What is your “fast brain” and what does it do?

The "fast brain" is the eye fields that can process information on milliseconds.

Neuron

State 3 things that you could do that would influence your synapses, and have a positive affect on your life and health?

You can exercise, eat a healthy diet with omega fatty acids, and socialize to influence the synapses and improve brain function. 

What is the relationship between multi-sensory or multi-modal learning and your dendrites?

With multi-modal learning, you are stimulating the dendrites many times and also in many places simultaneously causing you to learn more. 

How does “big picture thinking” and mnemonics affect dendrites and/or learning?

Thinking of the big picture stimulates different areas of the brain making more regions remember the information and be more effective at learning the information. 

Describe a neurotransmitter that you feel is very important.  Justify your reasoning.

Dopamine is a very important neurotransmitter because is is released when you are happy and most of the time if you are happy, you are healthy. Dopamine increases alertness, energy, and learning abilities, and without it, you would not be interested in trying any new things in life.

Limbic System

What does the corpus callosum do?

The corpus callosum is the connection and communicator between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. It also is the area that allows us to understand language and read because it is the part that understands handwriting.

What is the relationship between music and the corpus callosum? 

Scientists believe that music can help make communication between the two hemispheres more efficient and even more ambidextrous. 

Why is the thalamus important?

The thalamus is important because it is the main processor in sleep and consciousness. 

Relate and Review 

In this simulation we learned about the major parts of the brain and their function along with their association with learning. Many parts of the brain overlap in their functions making the multi-modal learning possible because when multiple areas are stimulated, the easier it is to learn and remember information. There are so many ways to stimulate the mind and make sure that information is remembered better but it does take effort that students are not always willing to commit. Most people do live their lives on autopilot and I always had thought that it was a good thing at times because it meant that you had gotten to used to that activity that you didn't need to think about it but this taught me that you shouldn't because it deteriorates your mind.

Looking in a Sheep's Mind

The anterior part of the brain is comprised mainly of the frontal lobe which mainly deals with higher function and decision making while the posterior part of the brain is mainly the occipital lobe which deals with eyesight and processing. The cerebrum is the area of the brain that surrounds it which is the section that humans have the most of because it is what makes us able to think and be different than animals. The cerebellum is one of the older parts of the brain that controls motor function and other basic bodily functions. Lastly the brain stem is the oldest part of the brain that controls essential bodily functions like respiration, circulation and those types of functions.

Myelin is the fatty tissue that surrounds the axon of the neuron and its purpose is to increase the speed at which the electrical signal pass down the myelinated fiber.



Starting from left to right in the diagram we first have the medulla oblongata. This
is responsible for our unconscious body function like circulation, digestion, and other essential system that we do not consciously control. Next the pons is the center for many different nerves and acts as a sort of bridge between the medulla and the midbrain. The midbrain is associated with basic functions like speech, movement, sleeping, and body temperature regulation. The thalamus is a major cross road in the brain that sends many signals to the appropriate part of the cerebrum. By itself it deals with sensory input and sleep. The hypothalamus is small but essential to the endocrine system as it is connected to the pituitary gland. The corpus callosum is the bridge that connects the two hemispheres to the brain to allow for contralateral control. The optic nerve is a continuation from the eyeballs that bring the visual input to the occipital lobe to be organized and analyzed.


Here you can see the white matter and the gray matter, the gray is darker and the white is lighter because it has myelinated fibers while gray matter does not.

Relate and Review
In this lab we got to look at a non color coded brain so we could test our ability to identify structures in a real brain. It was not as difficult as I had thought it was going to be because the brain is very unique and actually does have relatively clear parts and markers to give hints as to the location of the structure. When we first got the brain it was very interesting to see how it separated so easily after peeling the meninges off, seeing how the brain truly is two hemispheres. Compared to the eye dissection they were equally entertaining and both surprisingly easy to look through even if the eye was slightly harder to slice through than the amazingly soft tissue of white and gray matter. Different parts of the brain overlap in function which goes to help explain plasticity and plasticity is a great word for it because the brain feels like a very soft plastic material. Of course that is not why it is called plasticity but I feel like it is a perfect term.

Seeing From a Sheep's Perspective... sort of

This is the sheep eye that we got to dissect once it was cleaned of all of the fat tissue and as much of the external muscles that Amelia could cut off. You can see the cornea, sclera, and the nub of the optic nerve. 

We cut it open in have to make anterior and posterior hemispheres (which was tricky because the sclera is quite tough to puncture and cut through since it is meant to hold the eye's shape).

Here we have taken out the vitreous humor and the lens and we noticed that even though it is jelly like, they both have a lot of structure to them. The lens was also very hard but still has a little bit of give to it because it does need to be able to change shape and focus our vision on stuff.

Here are the two hemispheres completely separate. On the left you can see the vitreous humor filling the eye and the slightly yellow orb is the lens. On the right you can see the layer of the retina on the choroid and the green color of the tapedum lucidum which is something humans don't have.

For this we have carefully scraped the retina off of the choroid (black layer) and then peeled part of the choroid off of the sclera to expose the 3 layers. Notice how the retina is attached at one point because that is where the optic nerve is and creates our blind spot.

This is an outer view of the eye with the clouded cornea cut out to expose the iris and the rectangular pupil.

Play-Dough® Brain

We got to do a super fun activity of modeling the the major parts of the brain using Play-Dough® and then labeling them. Using the many different colors we had to create a representative of the internal structures of the left brain (on the left) and the outer structures of the right brain (on the right).

A Missing Piece in the Brain Puzzle

This article told the story of a 24 year old woman who managed to live her whole life without a cerebellum, aka the little brain. This part of the brain is very important for basic functions like walking and speech, but because of the amazing plasticity of the brain, her brain was able to minimize the affects of that and cause her to have only slight trouble gaining those basic skills. We learned about the brain and its functions and plasticity in my psychology class and went over how the brain is able to transfer responsibility from one area to another if the area is missing or damaged but it is really cool to read a story of it happening so dramatically and with a huge section of the brain. With most cases of people missing their cerebellum not living to adulthood, her case is very interesting to learn about and take note of because it does show scientists the amazing capabilities the brain has. I think it could hint the scientists at how to help people with other missing parts with a bit of studying on what other parts took over for her.

The somatosensory cortex is the part of the cerebral cortex that interprets almost all of our sense of touch. If someone were to be missing their somatosensory cortex they would most likely not be able to receive any information form their skin like heat, pressure, and just feeling everything around us. A person should be able to live without the somatosensory cortex because it is the thalamus that directs sense to the different parts of the brain so the sense of touch could possibly be transferred to another section of the brain. If that were to happen then the persons sense of touch would still be severely affected because of the lack of a specific part of the brain working on that sense and organizing those impulses. Basically, a person would be able to survive pretty well without their somatosensory cortex because of the brain's plasticity and the essential role the thalamus has in sorting info and most likely being able to reroute the sense to another part of the brain. 

Emotional Equations for Life

Name of Book: Emotional Equations by Chip Conley

Name of Chapter: "Anxiety = Uncertainty x Powerlessness"

Summary: This chapter of the book talked about using the equation of anxiety being the result of uncertainty and powerlessness magnifying each other to create the feeling we recognize as anxiety and how we can use that equation to deal with the rough times in our lives. The author describes his experience with anxiety and how he was part of the unlucky 20% to have some kind of anxiety disorder along with many other significant figures in media and science like Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, Michael Jackson, etc. He explains that a lot of anxiety comes from overestimating what bad things could result from the situation and amplifying them even more to make us freak out and for him, throw up before his water polo games. Letting the anxiety go through your mind but not linger is actually healthy, but when we dwell on it and stack up our uncertainties and our lack of control, the anxiety level rises exponentially. He describes how if you take a short while to run through the anxiety and then push it away, it helps with the anxiety in the rest of our lives. These "emotional equations" can help us deal with tough situations by looking at them simply and recognizing it for what it is made of. 

The author describes his book as an "owners manual for emotions," which does capture it quite nicely; however, not everyone can perfectly think in mathematical terms and blend the left and right brain traits so easily. For me though, it is very practical  and is something that would help a lot of people figure out emotions and get through hard times and enjoy the good ones. 

Unit 7 Relfection

This unit was all about movement: what moves, what causes the movement, and what types of movement there are. We first learned about the different types os movement that synovial joints can do and had to make a dance out of the, sounds easy but to just move your arm there are probably three different things you need to specify about it like: Is your hand supinated or pronated? Is your wrist flexed or extended?  How about your elbow? What type of movement is your whole arm doing? Adduction? Abduction? Circumduction? Is your shoulder elevated or depressed? There is a whole lot to think about when you move your body because so many things are happening simultaneously and there is a term for each and every one of them. As a dancer of sorts this was all very fascinating and also slightly painful because one thing you never do as a dancer is invert your feet... ew, just no.

Now we move onto the structures that cause all this movement, the muscles themselves. We did review smooth muscle and cardiac muscle and how it different from skeletal muscle, but we focused on the relationship between the skeletal muscle and the joints. Skeletal muscles are attached to the bones via tendons, and are held together by several layers of connective tissue to keep the fibers in a muscle shape. Muscles also come in pairs, the antagonist and the synergist, because when one muscle contracts, the other muscle needs to relax to allow movement. The muscles all work together to create the movement and this was shown very well during our chicken dissection when I discovered I could make the chicken wave hello by rotating the humorous. I would put the video on this post but apparently the file is too large this time so here is the post about the chicken dissection with the video on it (it's really funny, I recommend watching it).

Muscle seem to have confusing names at first because they are all complicated latin words but each of the words have a pretty strait forward meaning and once you know those, identifying muscles is pretty easy. The different categories of classification are shape, size, number of attachments, location, and/or action. Each muscle in your body has a specific purpose and is designed to do that job. The steps for each muscle cell to do its job are quite complicated because muscle contraction is very quick and many things have to happen instantaneously. Firstly, your brain has to send a neural impulse to the muscle to send the action potential and release the acetylcholine to the muscle cell. The Ach causes the second action potential in the sarcoplasmic reticulum, releasing calcium into the sarcoplasm and attaches to the TT complex to change its shape. This shape change allows the myosin bonding sites on the actin to be available. ATP then attaches to the binding site on the myosin crossbridge and turns to ADP and P which causes the myosin head to extend and grab onto the actin. The P leaves followed by the ADP moving the myosin head downward, pulling the actin, causing the sarcomere to contract. We made a stop motion video showing all of this and you can watch it here.
We also learned about steroids and how they affect the body. Steroids are commonly heard about but there are many more types than people think because a steroid is a performance enhancing drug and PED's range from Human Growth Hormones to caffeine. The performance enhancing substances have temporary positive affects, but worse side affects that aren't worth getting those "mirror muscles" as Mr. Orre always says. Human Growth Hormone, for example, may gain muscle mass, but it causes joint pain and weakness making those large muscles useless. This is just one example, but many of those types of drugs have similar side affects. We actually made a satirical advertisement for this which you can view here. I drink too much caffeine and knowing what it does to my body won't stop me from drinking it when needed but I will definitely make sure not to become completely dependent on it.
I really wish we had more time to talk about the muscle themselves because this unit has gone by so fast and seems like we just learned all the material without time for it to sink in so I couldn't fully appreciate the part of the unit that I personally like the most, the muscles and their movements. I would love to have several weeks focusing on just the major muscles, and maybe even some of the non-major ones, so we could fully understand what and where they are and what they do. The unit may have gone by very quickly because I haven't exactly been staying with my goal to get sleep so the lack of sleep makes school seen very fast and overwhelming but I find the muscles interesting so I managed to keep it together. 

Human Growth Hormone Ad!

No performance enhancing drug is worth the number of negative side effects that come along with the muscles. Some PED's are relatively harmless but most bring along some very threatening risks. Specifically Human Growth Hormone, or gonadotropin, makes the muscles of the body look much bigger, but it weakens the muscles and hurts the joints giving the opposite affect than desired. HGH also causes your body to have more HDL in your blood stream, or the bad kind of fat which is linked to heart problems. HGH is used to help for many different insufficiencies like in kidney insufficiency or just someone without enough natural HGH. Even with the legal medical uses, the common uses of HGH are not FDA approved, legal or safe.

Chicken Dissection

In this lab we got to dissect a chicken. It was really fun... kinda gross... but really fun. We started out by making sure the chicken was clean and not going to give us salmonella and then we peeled the skin of the chickens breast to expose the pectoralis major and then to the pectoralis minor underneath. We noticed that the structure of the chickens muscles and location was very similar to humans, but as we saw in our owl pellet lab, there were clear differences in size and use, as chickens have wings to move around and we don't. For the rest of the chicken we repeated the process of: removing the skin, locating the muscle and sometimes messing around with moving the tendons and seeing the rest of the limb move.

This is a video of me rotating the humerus and causing the brachioradialis to rotate and flex the chickens arm... and saying hi to my friends... and laughing a lot. 

Our muscles are how we move our body. The muscles attach to the bones of our body via tendons, so when we flex or extend or limbs, the muscles pull the bones in the direction our brain says to, causing movement. The tendons are attached to two points on the bone, the origin and the insertion. The origin is the point that does not move, it anchors the muscle so that the insertion on a different bone can be pulled toward the origin point, causing the movement. In our legs, our rectus femoris is attached to the ilium of our pelvis and flexes our hip and thigh.

Chickens live very different lives than us humans so their muscles are slightly different than our own. These chickens specifically are bred to be eaten the the desirable pieces of meat are the breasts and the thighs so we notice that the pectoralis muscles are huge and down the entire torso while in humans they are relatively small, and the thighs are also very exaggerated. The trapezius in chickens and humans are different as well; in humans they are split into two parts while in chickens they stay an one bundle.

The semimembranosus extends the thigh.

These muscles everts and planter flexes the foot.

The rectus femoris flexes the thigh and hip.

The sartorius is responsible for leteral hip rotation.

The gluteus maximus is responsible for the extension and rotation of hip.

The gastrocnenmius plantar flexes the foot and flexes lower leg.

The biceps femoris flexes the lower leg.

The pectoralis minor helps the flexion of the arm.

The pectoralis major is responsible for the flexion, adduction and rotation of arm.

   

The flexor carpi ulnaris helps flex the wrist

The deltoid if responsible for the a(b/d)duction of the arm.

The brachioradialis is responsible for the rotation of the forearm. 

The biceps brachii are responsible for the flexion of the elbow. 

The triceps humeralis is responsible for the extension of the elbow.

The latissimus dorsi extends, adducts and rotates arm. 

The trapezius does many things, including extension of the head.

            

Unit 6 Reflection

In this unit we learned about skeletal system. That ranges from the building, the breakdown, the fracturing, the remodeling, and the connections between them all. We started off by learning the the different parts of the skeletal system, those being the bones themselves, the joints, the cartilage, and the ligaments (as well as tendons which connect bone to muscle). The skeleton is comprised of 2 major groupings of bones: the axial bones such as the skull, spine, and ribcage, and the appendicular bones which is made up of everything else. Those branch into smaller categories: long bones, short bones, flat bones, and irregular bones, each of which have slightly different make ups of dense and spongey bone tissue. Of course we learned the names for many groups of bones but we did not go into extreme detail of every single bone.

 

Next we got into the make up of the bones and what causes the breakdown and build up of the bone tissue. There are three main cell types to do with the bones: osteocytes, the mature ones; osteoclasts, the bone destroyers; and osteoblasts, the bone builders. When there is bone damage or a bone is broken, the bone goes through remodeling because of the vitamins and minerals in the body such as calcium, and Vitamins C, K, and D. We also learned about the many different types of fractures and the process they go through to heal starting with a lot of blood clotting and inflammation and going from a rough structure of fibro-cartilage and spongy bone, to a bony callus and finally back to normal dense bone tissue.

I would really have loved to go into the tedious process of learning the exact name for each bone in the body and what it looks like because that is the kind of stuff that I love to have in my head and is more the area that I want to focus on when I go to university. I am still slightly confused on joints and how each of the different types differ from one another and how to distinguish between the similar ones. 

My favorite part of this unit was dissecting the owl pellet  because I loved being able to recognize each bone we pulled out of the hairs and being able to generally identify what it was and recreate the animal from my own knowledge. In doing this unit I found the specific part of this subject that I an really passionate about and would be fully happy studying further because it is something I would look up in my free time, like the 20 Time project which is also something I am passionate about. Thinking about my goals, I have recognized them and taken some steps to achieve them, but I really haven't been able to because other things that have immediate priority have gotten in the way which is another thing I should improve on.

Dissecting An Owl Pellet

In this lab we got to dissect an owl pellet. We learned about what exactly an owl pellet was (I learned that it is not in fact poop) and how it was created inside a barn owl. We got our pellet and had to separate the hair from the bones and organize the bones we found into the different types: long, short, flat or irregular, or more easily into what parts of the body we recognized them to be: skull, vertebrae etc. Sadly, my partner and I did not find any skull or obvious identifying parts to come to a sure conclusion of what animal it was but we knew it was a rodent.

Even without a skull, we had two pairs of pubic bones that looked most like a shrew pubis so we decided that our animals were shrews. After sorting through our pellet we found full sets of legs that also fit the shape and size of a shrew leg, making us more sure of our conclusion.
A rodents skeleton is at the same time, very different and very similar to a humans; we have all the same parts and generally they have the same shape, but rodents use theirs differently so they need to be different. A large difference is the skull shape with the teeth but seeing as we could not find a skull in our pellet I will focus on what we could find. One difference we found was the tibia and fibula. In humans, our tibia bears more weight and is therefore thicker than the fibula but that is switched in rodents and are also fused together as seen here:

Another part that is different is the pelvis. The rodents had a much more elongated ilium than humans giving it a strange shape compared to our own. Given the different shape, it still have the same general structure as our own:

The last difference we could tell with our set of bones was the amount of vertebrae that the rodents have. Majority of the bones that we extracted form the pellet were different vertebrae of all shapes and sizes showing just how many more they have than humans because of how they live.