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.