Reflexes Lab

In this lab, we tested 5 different reflexes; the Photopupillary reflex, the Knee Jerk reflex, the Blink Reflex, the Plantar Reflex, and tested for reaction time. A reflex is an automatic response from the muscles without getting a signal from the brain.
In the Photopupillary Reflex, I covered 1 eye for around 2 minutes and then opened it while having a light shined on it. My pupil automatically adjusted to lessen the amount of light it let in. Here is a video of the reaction.

In the Knee Jerk Reflex, I was hit just below the patella. Here is a video of the reflex. After doing strenuous activity the reflex would no longer appear because the muscle has run out of ATP which reflexes run on.

The Blink Reflex was the automatic closing of my eye with a total awareness that there was a piece of saran wrap in front of my eyes when a cotton ball was thrown towards them. This is a protective response for the eye.

The Plantar Reflex is activated when there is firm contact dragged up the from the heel to the base of the big toe. The reflex is that the toes will move closer together, but that was not what we witnessed on Beaudine. Maybe we just did not do it hard enough.

For the Reaction Time test, I dropped a yardstick right through Grant's and Beaudine's open hand and the distance that it took to grab the stick was then converted into an estimated time based on a chart we were given. We tested this reaction time 3 times for each person averaging .14 seconds for Beaudine and .127 seconds for Grant. We then adjusted the test and had each person texting while attempting to catch the yardstick. This upped their average times significantly with Beaudine's Average being .303 seconds and Grant's being .223 seconds. Texting doubled their response time which could potentially be the difference between life and death in some situations.

Brain Map

1. The frontal lobes control personality, problem-solving, memory, language, judgment, and impulse control.
2. Selective attention allows you to prioritize important info over unimportant info in memory.
3. The frontal lobe and do exercises to slow deterioration.
4. It governs senses, spatial awareness, and motor skills.
5. It organizes thoughts and actions to match with internal goals.
6. There is no such thing as multitasking, the brain is just switching between tasks really fast.
7. The Broca's Area is responsible for language comprehension, speech creation, and interpreting the actions of others.
8. The Somatosensory cortex is responsible for interpreting temperature,
9. The Visual Cortex differentiates colors and distinguishes complex things such as faces.
10. If the Occipital Lobe is damaged it can completely change the way a person sees the world. There are studies that show that the difference between real and imaginary is less in children so they believe in imaginary things easier. Imagining yourself doing an action in a very detailed way makes you better at that action.
11. If the temporal lobes were damaged there would be no long-term memory.
12. The "fast brain" is the Eye Feilds.
13. 3 ways to help the neuron is exercise, eating healthy, and omega fatty acids.
14. The more dendrites that fire in a memory, the better the memory can be referenced.
15. Big picture learning and mnemonics affect dendrites by stimulating more of them at the same time for a memory to make it easier for the brain to reference later.
16. Dopamine is a natural chemical that increases the sensation of pleasure. Without Dopamine, the brain would not know what memories are useless and ready to be deleted.
17. The Corpus Callosum oral language and how language is formed, print, handwriting, and movement of the eye.
18. Studying music helps increase the connection between the 2 hemispheres.
19. The Thalamus controls memory retrieval. If the Thalamus is damaged then finding memories becomes difficult.

This tutorial taught me how important it is to keep certain parts of the brain healthy. For example, if the Occipital Lobe is damaged, it would not matter how well a person could see prior because the mind would not be able to process the info. It also taught me that there is a whole section of the brain that is used just for differentiating colors and faces. It makes me wonder if people who have a hard time remembering others have damage to their visual Cortex or a smaller one. I also did not know that Dopamine also controls how the brain selects memories to delete. It was interesting to hear how studying music can strengthen the Corpus Callosum and how that strengthened connection can help in other areas as well. It was interesting to hear how healthy eating and exercise can help neurons do their jobs better.
Here is the link to the website.

Brain Dissection Analysis

all them pins

Today we dissected a sheep's brain. The brain we had did not have much of a meninges,  a protective layer that surrounds the brain. After removing that, we identified the cerebrum, cerebellum brainstem, anterior and posterior parts of the brain. Red is the brainstem, yellow is the cerebellum, green is the cerebrum, white is the anterior half of the brain and black is the posterior half of the brain. We identified these sections of the brain through the clay brain model we made earlier in the unit.

The function of the Cerebellum is to coordinate voluntary movements such as posture, balance, coordination, and speech, resulting in smooth and balanced muscular activity.

The brainstem regulates heart rate, breathing, sleeping, and eating.

The Cerebrum controls the high thinking such as thought and action.

The function of myelin in a neuron is to protect the neuron.

horizontal cut

Thalamus Yellow -  consciousness, sleep, and sensory interpretation

Optic nerve Green - transfer visual information from the retina to the vision centers of the brain via electrical impulses

Medulla Oblongata Pink - regulate breathing, heart and blood vessel function, digestion, sneezing, and swallowing

Pons Purple - It is a bridge between various parts of the nervous system

Midbrain Blue - a portion of the central nervous system associated with vision, hearing, motor control, sleep/wake, arousal (alertness), and temperature regulation.

Corpus Callosum Red - integrates motor, sensory, and cognitive performances between the cerebral cortex on one side of the brain to the same region on the other side.

Hypothalamus Brown - links the nervous system to the endocrine system via the pituitary gland

In this dissection, I did all of the actual dissection, such as cutting the brain in half both horizontally and vertically. During said dissecting, it was hard to find certain parts of the brain because it was so different to the diagrams we had been learning the parts of the brain from. 

Sheep Eye Dissection

 This is a sheep eye. on the outside we have the cornea. eyelid, sclera, optic nerve, and some fatty tissue.

 After cutting the eye in half, we are now able to see the lens, vitreous humor, choroid, tapetum lucidum , retina, and cillary bodies. The lens and vitreous humor are used to help maintain the shape of the eye while the choroid is used to nourish the retina and vitreous humor. The blind spot is the concentrated collection that turns into the optic nerve. The tapetum lucidum helps reflect more light for better night vision.

 This is the cornea and pupil. The cornea protects the delicate portions of the eye while the pupil controls the amount of light that enters the eye.

Clay Brain

This is the left hemisphere along the Sagittal Plane and the Right Cerebral Hemisphere that we made out of play-dough. We looked up a lot of pictures to determine what the left hemisphere along the Sagittal Plane and the Right Cerebral Hemisphere to figure out where everything is.

Brains

IN the article "The Woman with a Hole in Her Brain" by Helen Thomson, it tells the unexpected discovery made by a Chinese doctor in one of their patients. The 24-year-old woman went her entire life without knowing that she was born without her cerebellum.Without that portion of her brain, she was expected to have terrible fine motor skills, epilepsy, movement disorders, and other problems, but she only has a slightly slurred pronunciation and very mild motor deficiency.

Here is the article

The midbrain controls walking, sleeping and other reflexes so without it affects those reflexes very much. There is a birth defect called hydranencephaly which is the absence of varying amounts of the cerebral hemispheres. It is possible to live and survive without the midbrain. According to this article, Trevor Waltrip lived for 12 years with only his brainstem.

Unit 7 Reflection

For the past few weeks, we have been learning about muscles like how they work which is a very complex system. Every time a muscle moves, it is the end result of muscle fibers contracting and relaxing. The muscle fibers are made of myofibrils which are like threads. In sections of the myofibrils, there are protein fibers that overlap, that place is called a Sarcomere and is the main component of movement. My tablemates and I created a Film to show exactly what process the body goes through in order to move.

Earlier this year, a classmate and I taught the class about weightlifting and its effects on muscles. We only vaguely described the process of how muscles actually grow but during this unit, we went more in-depth about how muscles grow. I found that this article described the process better than I ever could. It also discusses how hormones affect the growth of muscle. We also discussed how hormones affect the growth of muscle but extend the scope from just hormones to a number of substances that enhance performance such as Creatine and Androstenedione.

It became clear to me this unit that senioritis has fully set in. As soon as I got an a acceptance letter, I pretty much lost all drive to work in school. I know that I have to keep it together for just a few more months, but that is not much motivation.

Chicken Dissection Analysis

Earlier this week we dissected chickens to test our knowledge of muscles and their functions. When you move, the muscles attached to the bones by tendons in that section of the body are expanding and contracting. For example, when we dissected the chicken's arm, we flexed and extended its forearm to find the biceps brachii and triceps brachii.

The Regurgitation Station

During today's lab, we dissected owl pellets. Owl pellets are collections of bones, fur, feathers, and other non-digestible things that owls swallow from their prey. Our jobs were to compare the structure of the small animals eaten by the owl to that of our human bone structure, while also trying to identify what animal was eaten.

In the pellet my partner and I had, we believe to have found a shrew, or at least some of the main parts of a shrew. The only skull we found was extremely small, only 1.2 cm in length, which is the median measurement of a shrew's skull. The mandible is also very distinct with its 2 large teeth and smaller teeth on the inside of the large ones.

In terms of similarity to human bones, there were quite a few bones that are shared between the two species. They include ribs, femur, and tibia/fibula. The ribs are exactly like ours, curved inward, but I did not find a sternum so shrews might not have one. The skull and mandible of the shrew is completely different from our skulls and mandibles. The shrew's skull if much more elongated and flat whereas our skulls are more vertically long. The nose holes for humans are a triangle with a thin separation between the two canals, For the shrew the separation between the two canals is significantly spread from each other. The mandible for us was split in two, shown on the left, and has a large incisor on each half of it. The other teeth on the inside of the large ones and are significantly smaller in comparison.

Unit 5 Reflection

This unit was about the organs digestive system, endocrine system, and diseases and problems that affect them two. There was a big focus on how different organs produce different hormones. The hormones if not functioning properly are severely detrimental to normal life, such as type 1and 2 diabetes. Diabetes is caused by either a lack of insulin production, type 1, or the reduced ability for the insulin to attach to the blood sugars for absorption aka insulin resistance, type 2. This unit was different from other units because there was a lot of new information thrown out about organs that I didn't know or had no idea what they did. This was pretty challenging for me, but interesting nonetheless. We only really had one lab this unit and that was the digestive system lab.  http://derudesandstorm.blogspot.com/2016/01/what-goes-in-must-come-out.html
I didn't really learn anything in particular from this lab because I remember doing something similar back in elementary school, but it was pretty cool to be able to measure out pretty closely to what the actual length of my intestines are.
The endocrine system is something that I didn't know anything about. I still have a few questions about it like what would happen if there was backflow? Would the capillaries burst? How would the body react to such an incident?
So far I haven't really done much to progress my goals. I will be starting to study more today in preparation for our test tomorrow.

What Goes in Must Come Out

1. In this lab, we made an approximate model of the size of the digestive system from start to finish.
2.I am 1.8 meters tall, but my digestive system is 9.7 meters long. My digestive system is over 5 times longer than I am. The way the digestive system fits inside the human body is by being small, but layering itself on top of other portions of itself.
3. I would say it takes 6-7 hours for food to be digested and absorbed. It takes 6-8 hours to digest food depending on sex, and size of the individual.
4. In digestion, food is broken down to basic elements that the body can absorb. This is done mostly in the stomach and beginning of the small intestine. Absorption takes place in the majority of the small intestine and some of the large intestine.
5. What would happen if the intestines were shortened?

Shooting for the Net

I will get down to 180lbs by the end of this semester. My progress is measurable by each pound lost. I was that weight prior to football this year and would like to go back to it. I'm going to go to the gym 3-4 times a week, eat healthier, and maybe start to run.

I will get an A on at least 1 test in this class. My goal is measured by the points I get. This goal is very attainable through studying and better understanding of the material. This isn't relevant to my GPA due to college acceptance but for me personally as a sign of pride. I will need this done by the end of the semester.