Today was a bit of a challenging day for me in my core classes. I found myself wanting to reject the critique I had gotten on my brain health paper in humanities. It is a persuasive essay about how school start times should be delayed so that teens will struggle less with insufficient sleep. Although I knew that this person was just trying to help, I had some very negative and closed off emotions towards refining my work. Thinking about it I really just didn't want to do more work, more refinement. I’ve been struggling with this a lot lately, giving up more often, putting in less effort. The same thing happened in Biology. We were given a paper and we had to create a mind map on our topic that includes: neurotransmitters, basic needs, emotional needs, hormones, macromolecules, etc. All I ended up doing was staring at my paper and wasting time. We were even given ten minutes to come up with a connection from our topic to an article we read on brain plasticity and I ended up coming up with mine at the last minute. I didn’t matter though because even though it wasn’t a bad connection it didn’t go over what we were supposed to make a connection about. The connection being, “the article talks about how the hippocampus experiences a temporary disruption during pubertal onset. I know that the hippocampus is responsible for storing memory and it mainly functions at night. I connected this to sleep-phase delay and how this occurs during pubertal onset so the change in drowsiness times could cause sleep deprivation. Then sleep deprivation could be connected to less time for the hippocampus to work making it harder for teens to learn and retain information when at school.” After being told to go back and look for more information, I did some research and came up with a new connection. During sleep, the brain uses cerebral spinal fluid to flush out any toxins and get rid of any unnecessary connections made throughout the brain and in turn strengthens the necessary ones so that your brain has more capability to learn when you wake up the next morning. If you don’t get enough sleep you don’t give enough time for your brain to clear the unnecessary connections and it makes it harder for you to retain information and learn, thus affecting your brain plasticity. This was really the highlight of my brain, I didn’t realize how little I actually understood about my topic so making this new connection felt great for me.
0 Comments
This week our class got the opportunity to go and visit UCSD (University of California San Diego). When we went we got split into two groups and we each got to visit two laboratories each. I got to see the Salk Institute where they gave us a presentation on astrocytes and I got to think about how my mental health topic (lack of sleep) is impacted by their function in the body. Astrocytes secrete a protein called Chrdl1 that prevents you from being able to retain information but at the same time increases your brain plasticity. My thoughts were that by having an insufficient amount of sleep, one’s body might somehow send a signal to astrocytes to actively secrete this protein. This would take part in the difficulty of learning that adolescents face when not having enough sleep. The second lab I visited was Kauffman Labs. I’m actually doing my internship there so I was very excited to get some insight on what I would be working on during the four weeks of May. They are studying hormones in mice and a certain protein called kisspeptin. Here we got to participate in three different stations, gels, brain slicing and using microscopes. My favorite one was the brain slicing lab, they showed us the equipment they used in order to cut precise slices of a mice’s brain. They gave us a chance to try cutting a brain slice on the machine and placing it on what they called a slide (rectangular piece of glass). Something that I’m still wondering after this week is whether my thoughts on astrocytes and their effect on sleep are true, so my plan is to do some more research on that.
I’m sitting at home with my parents having some casual conversation until they ask me what I did in school today. The only thing that comes into my head is the odd facial expressions everyone in Biology class made as they chomped on their cheeks. We were doing a science experiment, visualizing our DNA in fact. Biting on our cheeks before swishing a salt solution in our mouth would create more clumps of DNA in our final product. We then spit the salt solution into a cup and poured it into a plastic tube with some soap. Carefully we rocked it back and forth for three long minutes. Then we layered a alcohol based solution on top with a pipette and spun our tube around to see the little strings of our DNA rise into to top solution from the soapy layer below. I can’t help but imagine how silly we must have all looked to the Spanish teacher that walked in while we were doing this experiment. Yet as I think back, I think about how eye-opening this experience was for me. It’s one thing to looks at pictures and draw DNA but seeing it with your own eyes was something else. It helped me realize the scale of how small DNA really is. The chunk we each observed in our test tubes wasn’t just one strand, but hundreds to thousands of strands all clumped together to create this little white string that was barely visible. Something I’m still curious about is exactly how all the DNA strands come together, how they attach themselves to one another.
|
About the AuthorBringing the inside scoop to what's going on inside the head of an 11th grader trying to organize a piece of her life, through this blog giving you the details of the Nuvia/Hood-Esparza team at High Tech High Chula Vista. Archives
June 2019
Categories |