What I know before about the brain was basic. I know that there were chemicals that affected different portions of the brain and actions that people would do. This week I was able to learn a lot more about what the brain can do and the different changes that the brain can make in order to help itself develop. We had a critique on work that we did in class recently, and by we I mean my group mates. We had created a Little Book Label, T-Shirt design, and a NAMI Walk activity. We had these three items critique by people who are familiar in the fields of neuroscience, computer design, and others. Originally for a T-shirt design my group had dynamite and the fuse take shape of a head surrounding the dynamite, sort of like the image except the fuse would make the shape of the head.. The dynamite is supposed to represent the stigma that people have about teens and how we can be “ticking time-bombs”, but after getting critique me group and I realized that our design doesn’t change the stigma that people have, instead it encouraged it. The other item that we got critique on was our Little Book which is what it is, it’s a book that gives information on our topic, stigma, and other information about the brain that people may or may not know. This week has been fun and eventful and I hope that we can rock this NAMI Walk Exhibition
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Something that I learned this week is that the book that I had gotten for my group is REALLY interesting, it’s called The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life The author of this book is Joseph E. LeDoux, he is also a part of a band known as The Amygdaloids. In the Book Joseph LeDoux tells you about how the brain has a certain way of being able to process a certain emotion and the response that the body might give out in order to carry out that specific function/emotion. An example of this in the book is when you see a bear you’d normally think that you get scared then run away, but the author states that it’s the action of you doing the running away that causes you to feel the fear. This week I’ve come up with slogans for my class, some better than others but I still think that there are things that people could do in order to be able to change the stigma around the teen brain and mental illnesses. An example that I can think of that people use as a common misnomer is that people with mental illnesses are crazy, psychotic, lazy, different, unusual, etc. These words can often lead to making people with mental illnesses feel worse about themselves and that is something that my class is trying to change.
Something that stood out about my week this week is that yesterday my class went to a hospital that was a part of UCSD. This was one of the most exciting trips that I have taken because I feel like I was able to learn more about what it means to be a psychologist and the difference between psychology and psychiatry. Some of the activities that the C.A.R.E researchers had use do was a STROOP test which was interesting for me since I was one of the volunteers. What they had me do was that they showed me a piece of paper with words like ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘blue’, and so on, and they had me read the color out loud but the ink print was in black. Next they handed me another paper similar to the previous one but this time the word would associate with the ink color, so ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘blue’, and so on. This part was a little quicker since the color matched the word but what they did next was really hard to do, for the last paper the color of the ink did not match the word, ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘blue’, and so on. This was more difficult because when I started doing this test my mind wanted to say the actual word but I had to say the color of the ink.
A memorable moment that I have from the college trip would be when we stayed at the hotel and while we slept someone smacked someone else in their sleep making the person that got smacked move to the floor. I chose this as a memorable moment because I was in the room while it happened and I thought it was kinda funny. Something that the alumni at the colleges told us that I remember the most was that each campus library is able to exchange books with each other so in case the college library that you are at doesn’t have the book you want you can ask to call another UC that might have the book and it will be sent to the library that you are currently at and you can read it. I think that I might have to go to a 4-year university because I want to become some sort of therapist or a high school guidance counselor, But either way I would like to enjoy whatever college I decide to get into, I say that now but wait till I get there. A school that we visited that I liked the most, well I have two, are UC Santa Cruz, and CSUMB (California State University of Monterey Bay) we also visited UC Berkeley and Cal Poly State. I would like to attend either one of these, not just because of the scenery, but because I like the programs that they have. For example UCSC has some majors in psychology which is what I would like to study and if that doesn’t work out I would like to study marine biology and CSUMB offers those majors.
For this week, we had a teen brain health proposal, in which we had to be able to pick a topic in which we had to research for, the topic that I chose was Split Personalities which I titled “Fifty Shades of Me”. What I learned from Multiple Personality Disorder was it is mainly caused by having some sort of traumatic sexual, physical, or emotional abuse. The reason that the brain makes multiple personalities is it is a way for the body to be able to cope with what happened. Certain events may also trigger a certain personality to emerge. Disorganized Attachment and the Orbitofrontal Cortex as the Basis for the Development of Multiple Personality Disorder. There were many presentations I was able to learn from, for example one of the presenters did their presentation on emotions and their presentation interested me because I was able to learn more about how people have different reactions to different emotional situations. I’ve also learned is that there are many things that are in the brain that help the brain function in different ways. For example, the Amygdala functions in different ways depending on whether you are male or female, when the male brain tries to recall a certain memory one amygdala will light up while the other remains dormant. I also learned that there are different glands in the brain that release different chemicals called hormones. There are certain levels of hormones that the rain receives a little bit after birth and those hormones help you become either more masculine or feminine. What can also affect the way that you are, or the way your brain is, is that there are different types of “events” or “situations” that may have different effects on the brain not just psychologically but also physically. What I mean by this is that some people may have had a rough childhood and that might cause them to be a certain way. Axcel Martinez Biology-Mrs.Nivia February 3, 2017 This Little Piggy Something you can learn from a fetal pig specimen when dissecting it is that the pig anatomy is similar to human anatomy… How? The placement of the organs in the fetal pig are similar to humans. Weird right? For some reason doing this dissection didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. I thought that I would be gagging and needing to maybe go outside and throw up, but I guess I have a stronger stomach than I thought I did. What I learned, through the pig dissection, about brain health and the nervous system is that there are a lot of nerve endings that connect to the spinal cord and they are connected somewhat tightly to the rest of the body through the bones. The nerves are connected to the bones because, I think, that since the bones are covered by the muscle tissue and the skin then it would be safer for the nerves to connect with the bones and branch out from there. It was pretty obvious that the nervous system was connected to some of the other systems because it was easy to see that the nerves connected to majority of the body. What I can say about the atmosphere of the class was that a lot of people were excited to be able to remove the brain from the skull because it was a challenge that nobody wanted to pass up, also the smells of the class… luckily we had candles to block the smells but they were still pretty strong. I take pride in the work and the dissections that I was able to do in class because I feel like I was able to learn more about anatomy and this certain “activity” has given me the time to consider some other profession that I might be interested in. An experience that I had where I felt that I learned something was when Doctor Kauffman came in and he taught us somethings about the male and female brains such as Females having more Kisspeptin than the Males do and that’s what helps the females and their reproductive organs so that they can have the hormones needed to think and act like females. Something else that I learned from Doctor Kauffman was that a little bit after birth males gain a boost of testosterone that helps the brain develop more like a male rather than not receiving any type of hormones and then ending up acting like a female. Since Doctor Kauffman can’t work on human brains he has tested on male and female rat/mice specimens which help in his research to see how an injection of estrogen or testosterone can change the brain for either the better or for worse. Something else that I learned from Doctor Kauffman was that the human brain has two Amygdala and each is about the size of an almond. Each Amygdala activate differently between the male and female.When a male tries to remember a certain “emotional” event the left Amygdala becomes more active than the right Amygdala and in females the right Amygdala becomes more active than the left side. When it comes to remembering a certain event males tend to remember more the “gist” of said event and the females tend to remember more details, hence giving the impression that females have more memory space than males. Male and Female brains may be similar in some aspects but they are very different once you think about it. |
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April 2017
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