...Fields who is working on getting his doctorial degree. In these last few months I have worked on many exiting projects, learned how create experiments and analyze them. From the first day of lab I learned to work with many different lab instruments, software and mastered the structures of the mice brain. The instruments I started working with were a digital microscope and its software Stereo Investigator that took pictures at HD quality of mice brain. Shortly after came the analysis of the pictures we captured and the software used was ImageJ and Excel. In ImageJ you can measure different thresholds of the mice brain and get analysis which is imputed into excel and then the numbers from excel are put into a statistical software where graphs are made and you can check if your experiments had any change from the control. What I also learned was how mice brains are put on a slide. First you would use a cryostat, which slices the mice brain at the amount of thickness needed. While you are slicing the mice brains you are putting them onto a slide. Then they are taken from the slide put into a buffer solution, which lets you add to another side where you can stain the structures in the brain where you want the analysis completed. In the last few months we worked on some experiments involving the Toll-like receptors (TLR2), which have an important role in the innate immune system (first response), they are able to indicate when there is a presence of infectious bacteria and if there...
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...telling them not to do those kinds of things. They rebel and do bad things that will come back to bite them and things they will most likely regret. Teens are getting worse and worse when it comes to their decision making everyday. It is their fault if they make a bad decision because they have full control of their mind and body, and they need to start taking more responsibility for it. Parents can persuade their children but ultimately, teenagers make their own decisions. Obviously, like any other human being, teenagers have a brain and a mind of their own. Parents can try to convince their child to do the right thing in a certain situation all they want. However, it is the teenager who ultimately decides what to do with their own brain. Our parents always know what is best for us and will always tell us the right thing to do. Our parents want the best for us and would never encourage or tell us to do something dangerous or something that wouldn't help us. Most of the time parents always try to persuade their teens to do the right thing as much as they possibly can. Although sometimes, like said in the Sad Teens Today article, “how teenagers feel about themselves plays a significant role in whether they choose to drinks or use other drugs”. Parents can help in this way by making their child feel good about themselves by...
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...love? What about the brain, is it also involved? Everybody hears the cliché when someone gets dumped; "My heart hurts". But does it actually hurt? And if it does, is it because they were in love? All reactions in the body start from the brain, right? Then the final question is; what should we use then in the name of love, our HEART or the BRAIN? The purpose of this article of mine is to put an end to this mystery and bring out the facts. I am assured that many young people like me are enthusiastically interested regarding this topic. Researching data of co notational definitions, BRAIN is the king of every living animal, and HEART is the genuine source of emotions. These two vital organs do really have a linking nexus. However, when it comes to love, it’s even more difficult to decipher what is really the actual function of these internal parts. So, can we say that brain is the starting point of love? And we feel the love through the heart, is that it? Let’s find out. According to an analysis by a Syracuse professor, it depends. That might be a very broad answer but based on her findings, she assimilated that you experience a similar sensation to one of using cocaine when you fall in love. You get a euphoric feeling but it also affects certain areas of the brain. There is also another very common platitude. This is the idea of "love at first sight". Researchers found that yes, there is such thing as love at first sight. But, do you fall in love by your brain or by...
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...Philosophy 390M Thinking About Thinking What does it mean to think? This question may have a lot of different answers depending on who you ask You may get as simple of explanation as picturing a cat in your head. Or you could Google it and come up with the definition of “think” which is directing one’s attention toward something or to have a particular opinion idea or belief about someone or something. People in the science field may try to say that thinking is brain activity. Someone may have a answer completely different from any of these, but are these examples really thinking? I believe that true thinking is something far more than the simple idea of a cat or someone’s opinion of something. Before we can figure out what it means to think we have to look at what it is not. First of all, thinking is not remembering which is easily confused on a daily basis. When try to remember something we say that we are trying to think, but we are not. We are trying to recall something to our memory such as a past experience or the name of person you met last week You are not trying to think of that persons name because they already have one, you are simply trying to put a face and name together. Which brings me to my next point, thinking is not puzzle solving. Putting something together as simple as a four year olds puzzle or as complex as a car motor require the same amount of thinking, none. Each piece of the puzzle has only one way in which it will work. We may figure out how they fit...
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...Since the ancient Greeks, one of the most provocative and oft-discussed questions in philosophy has been whether we have free will in determining the course of our actions, or whether our actions are determined by forces beyond our control. Before the advent of secular thought, those forces might have been identified as the whims of the gods, though the tradition of naturalism in Western thought goes back at least as far as the Milesian School of Greek Philosophy, in the 6th century B.C. In more recent times as the cognitive sciences have developed, it has seemed increasingly likely that our brains work along deterministic lines (or, if quantum effects are non-negligible, at the very least along mechanical lines). So a new debate has arisen: are the concepts of determinism (or naturalism or mechanism) when applied to the brain sciences logically compatible with free will? So some of the attention has shifted from the debate between the “determinists” and the “anti-determinists”, to that between the “compatibilists” and the “anticompatibilists”. Two declared opponents in this debate are Peter van Inwagen (author of An Essay on Free Will, Oxford University Press, 1983) and Daniel C. Dennett (author of several books including Elbow Room, MIT Press, 1984, which I will be referencing here). Each argues for his conclusion from premises he regards as antecedently plausible, with van Inwagen taking the anti-compatibilist line and Dennett the compatibilist. As van Inwagen is the more...
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...auditory. Visual perception is as it suggest, the seeing and viewing of things through the eyes. Whereas auditory perception is the perception of hearing things and understanding how close they can be. Perception is used even when we do not believe we are using it. Understanding visual perception is not complex, but I always try to think of things in a different manner. Ironically, I see visual perception as a sort of streaming process that allows the eyes to pick up all kinds of details and situations. The eyes are very complex, but we only see the things the brain believes to be important. The brain tells the eyes to compress...
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...Saklain Alam Saklain Alam Blame my brain! Yesterday, I slept until lunch time and then crawled out of my bed, leaving my dirty underwear on my bedroom floor. Is there something wrong with that? Absolutely not! I’m a teenager with a pea sized brain and as the scientists have proven, I’ll probably be like this until I’m at least twenty. So parents – just get used to it, it’s going to be a long road ahead. If you are a teenager just like me, if your dad shouts at you in the morning because you are not getting out of your bed for breakfast, if your mum yells at you when you cover the shiny, cleaned bathroom floor with your impure and filthy underpants, then this is exactly what you need to do: Tell them that this is not your fault. Why? Because the motivation part of your brain, the right ventral striatum, has not developed fully yet. These are not my words which I just made up for excuses. These are the words of scientists. Proven facts! How cool is that?! Finally, Scientists are backing up the teenagers. I thought science is just about cells, space and atoms. No, it is not! It is useful in this case. As I read the article “Teenagers’ pea-sized brain” in the Daily Mail from Max Davidson, I was amazed and thought that this was the most interesting and useful article I have ever read. After reading it, some ideas immediately came to my head on how I can defeat my parents when answering back. Parents need to understand that we are just not as easily enthused as we were. It is...
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...Alzheimer's Disease, I've been curious of what it really is. I knew it wasn't good news, so I was kind of scared of what was happening, being so young. I thought of the few basic questions average people don't tend to know the answers to: How is Alzheimer's caused? What changes go through the brain with people who have it? Is it preventable? The only knowledge I really had about the disease was that you lose your memory to where you don't know familiar people's names, older people get it, and that it can be spread down from your parents or through your family. I was nervous for my parents, siblings, and I because it has ran down both sides of my family, so...
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...Since the ancient Greeks, one of the most provocative and oft-discussed questions in philosophy has been whether we have free will in determining the course of our actions, or whether our actions are determined by forces beyond our control. Before the advent of secular thought, those forces might have been identified as the whims of the gods, though the tradition of naturalism in Western thought goes back at least as far as the Milesian School of Greek Philosophy, in the 6th century B.C. In more recent times as the cognitive sciences have developed, it has seemed increasingly likely that our brains work along deterministic lines (or, if quantum effects are non-negligible, at the very least along mechanical lines). So a new debate has arisen: are the concepts of determinism (or naturalism or mechanism) when applied to the brain sciences logically compatible with free will? So some of the attention has shifted from the debate between the “determinists” and the “anti-determinists”, to that between the “compatibilists” and the “anticompatibilists”. Two declared opponents in this debate are Peter van Inwagen (author of An Essay on Free Will, Oxford University Press, 1983) and Daniel C. Dennett (author of several books including Elbow Room, MIT Press, 1984, which I will be referencing here). Each argues for his conclusion from premises he regards as antecedently plausible, with van Inwagen taking the anti-compatibilist line and Dennett the compatibilist. As van Inwagen is the more...
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...in fact a type of system that is fed an input (types of symbols that mean various things) and then has an output (answers/responses to the symbols). Some other outside source (i.e. real brain/human of understanding) initially programs the physical symbol...
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...elegant and reflects the functions of its component neurons. The central nervous system is composed of the brain and spinal cord and functions mainly to process information and determine the appropriate responses.The peripheral nervous system is composed of all of the sensory and motor neurons of the body and functions to gather sensory information and to control the actions of our bodies.The peripheral nervous system includes two basic types of neurons: sensory neurons and motor neurons. You may remember that sensory neurons are neurons that collect sensory input and send it to the brain, and motor neurons are neurons that transmit signals to...
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...Neuromarketing: controlling peoples minds? 05/04/2014 Special accessories that can gather specific brain waves and tell us how people’s minds react to certain things have been amongst us for decades but new technology can now tell us more precisely which certain parts of the brain activate as people have to buy products, make certain brand choices or have to watch advertisements. Today, every neuroscientist’s dream of being able to have a look into the brain while it’s active has become possible! Rita Carter, a science writer, uses a perfect quote to describe this new achievement: “Brain-scan machines are opening up the territory of the mind, the same way the first ocean-going ships once opened up the globe.” Neuromarketing is the application of neuroscience into marketing to improve the ways of selling products. The application of brain-scan technology to marketing, especially the use of fMRI, a new device that captures images of the brain while it processes information, gave importance to this event. Ale Smidts, professor of marketing research, is who have gave the name to this new application in 2002 and Gerry Zaltman, professor at Harvard, is the first marketing specialist to introduce fMRI as a marketing technique. However, the idea of neuromarketing has been around for about forty years, even if no one had given a name to it until today. Neuromarketing is an improvement on the way that scientists a look inside people’s heads with devices. In the late...
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...cells are called neurons. There are two main types of nerves: motor nerves and sensory nerves. Motor nerves are used by the brain to control all the muscles throughout our body. The brain sends signals via the motor nerves to tell us what to do what is certain situations. For instance when we are lifting weights the brain obviously knows to push harder instead of not push at all. There are the things that we do every day....
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...detect chemical changes in the environment from afar than what your other senses are able to. It can differentiate from one smell from another by means of the olfactory sensory neurons that send the signal to the brain. The anatomy of the sensory system starts with the two nostrils housed in what is called the nose that is position on the front of the face. The nostrils have little hairs that act as a barrier to help keep pollutants in your environment from entering your body and endangering your internal organs. You also have another set of little hairs in...
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...best way for us to function in the world, you need all senses working together and three, it’s hard to disprove what your senses tell you. First, it is believed that sensory information is one of the first areas to fully develop in an infant's brain. We rarely stop to think how important our five senses are in terms of providing us with information about the world. For example, our senses tell us when there is a bug crawling up our leg, if we are going to fall, and whether there is smoke in the room. Without the ability to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste we would live in complete isolation, unable to not only sense, but also to think and learn due to a lack of experience with which to develop ideas. When we discuss sensory integration we add to it the two senses of vestibular (Reponses to movement) and proprioception (body awareness). Each sensory system has its own specific receptor that specializes in optimal responses to a specific type of sensation. Because seeing is so important for our functioning in the world, efforts to understand how perceptions are generated have most often focused on vision. While adults process different visual cues into one unified chunk of information, kids separate visual information. Researchers have long known that youngsters don't fully integrate sensory information until after about age 8. Before then, information received by touch, sight and hearing isn't as closely linked as the same information would be in the adult brain. But...
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