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
Leave a Reply. |
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 |