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.