The Finale

I don't have really anything different to say that isn't already here and in my presentation itself. Except for maybe the fact that I actually got distracted part way through my presentation and forgot to mention how easily distracted I would be during the actual process of creating the frames for the animation, but that's just about it. I plan on continuing this animation, adding color, making it flow even smoother, making it longer, and experimenting with some movements that I had to cut out of this animation because I just couldn't at all figure out how to animate them. But below will be the final product my animation that I was able to do for this class, and my presentation itself, since it was recorded.

Reflexes Lab

In this lab we worked with some of our different reflexes, for example, when something is thrown at your face or is jokingly fake thrown at your face, when you blink during that. A reflex is a rapid, predictable, and involuntary responses to stimuli. Reflexes work by setting off an electrical impulse that causes the unequal distribution of ions that goes through the nerves until it reaches the brain or spinal cord. Then the same process goes back through the nerves and to the body part, which then moves to react.
The photopupillary reflex is the automanic reflex, which is the reflex that regulates smooth muscles, heart, glands, saliva secretion, and changes in pupil size. For me the response of the pupil contracting at the sudden light worked really well, this function in humans is probably caused by us maybe used to hunt at night or from if we needed to, to defend ourselves from predators that might get us in the middle of the night.
The patellar reflex is the knee-jerk reflex, which is a two neuron reflex arc, which goes from the sensory neuron to the spinal cord, to the motor neuron, and back to the knee. At first it didn't work for me, but that's probably because of the fact that at first my partner wasn't hitting my leg in the right spot so the response didn't work, but when I did it to myself, the knee-jerk reflex worked perfectly fine. I believe that we have this response so that when we have to, we can start running after prey or away from a predator and our legs will be able to carry us the distance without our brain really thinking about having us run, instead it can be thinking on how to take down the prey or where to go to escape the predator.
The blink reflex is another automanic reflex, I believe, since most of the time we don't control when we blink, and we defiantly don't control ourselves blinking when something comes right for our face. When my partner threw the cotton ball at me when I was holding the clear plastic sheet infront of my face, and I blinked. I think that we blink when this happens, because it's our brain's response to protect our eyes from any foreign object from entering, so that they don't get damaged and we can continue to be able to see.
The plantar reflex I would say it's part of the somatic reflex or the withdrawal reflex. For me, my toes curled up, when the pen was dragged up my foot. This reaction, I'm pretty sure is because of us protecting our feet maybe, so it's basically either the same reaction when we step on a sharp rock or when we stub our toe on something.
The last part of the lab we did was to test not our reflexes, but instead to test our response time. We took a yardstick and taking turns, we put our hand under the yard stick while the other person holds the yardstick and drops it at a random time for the person to grab it as fast as they can, where ever they catch on the yardstick, that measurement will dictate how fast was their reaction time. After three measurements, we did the same thing another three times while texting to see how texting affects our reaction time. As expected, the average of my normal reactions was much faster than the average of my reactions while I was texting. My average reaction time was 0.13 seconds, while my reaction time while texting was 0.185 seconds. Texting really delayed my reaction time by a lot, for example, I used to be a pitcher in softball and if you didn't react quick enough then you would get nailed in the face by that line drive to your face. Comparing my two reaction times based off of that is just the difference of me having my glove up and catching the ball vs. the ball nailing me in the face and getting taken out.

20 Time Reflection

I decided to just try and create an animation of one of my characters that I've drawn before. The challenge for me was getting used to drawing digitally and teaching myself how to do some basic animations, and on top of that, finding a program that I could actually work with in making an animation actually work. The reason why I chose to do an animation for my project was because I've always loved watching animated things and animations that people online have done have always inspired me to either draw or want to animate my own characters in a similar way. Overall, I think I was more focused on self improvement, even though the whole point of this was to create an animation that actually has some good, smooth flow between each frame.
To achieve my goal of creating an animation, I first had to get myself a drawing tablet, which I successfully did and worked on getting myself used to drawing with it, since it is a bit different than what I'm used to with pencil and paper. Next I had to find an animation program that would work for me and that I could actually figure out how to use, which out of the three that I had tried, only the one worked, even though it was the worst out of all three of my options. The one that worked for me might have been the one that isn't that is recommend to use, it's the one I'm using because I figured out pretty quickly how to use it to animate, since it is pretty basic and most people would probably not be able to create something really well with it, but I'd say I was pretty successful on my end.
What I've learned from all of this is that if you're passionate about learning how to do something, you should just do it, and if you enjoy learning how to do it and doing it, then you should go ahead and do it and have it as one of your skills. If I had the chance to do this project again, I would have spent a lot less time practicing drawing digitally and I would have focused way more on the actual animation, which would probably give me a longer animation than the one that I get outta this. After this is over, I'm going to continue in teaching myself how to animate and hopefully improve on my skills that I have gotten by doing this project.

Brain Map

The following is answered using this website.

Cerebral Cortex

1.      What do the frontal lobes do?

 It controls your personality, but it's also where problem solving, memory, language, judgement, and impulse control occur.

2.      What is the relationship between selective attention and learning?

 Learning is all the information you are taught, selective attention is what paying more attention to the more important facts rather than the little details.

3.      What is the last part of your brain to develop and what can you do to prevent it from deteriorating?

 The frontal lobe is the last part of your brain to develop, and there are certain exercises you can do to prevent it from deteriorating.

4.      What does the neo cortex do?

 It helps you to be able to navigate your body, it controls your senses, spatial awareness, and motor skills.

5.      What is the role of the pre frontal cortex?

 It creates your personality and how you behave in social situations, it also organizes your thoughts and actions to match your internal goals.

6.      What do we know about the pre frontal cortex’s relationship with multitasking?

 That multitasking doesn't exist and what's actually is happening is that the brain is just switching from one task to another.

7.      Which part of the brain is associated with speech and language development?  Give an interesting fact about this region.

 Broca's area is responsible for speech production and language comprehension, and even people who have had a tumor in this part of the brain, were still able to speak perfectly fine. 

8.      Which part of your brain is responsible for thinking the following: “Is it hot in here or is it just me?”
       The somatosensory cortex is responsible for interpreting temperature.

9.      What does your visual cortex do for you?

It takes the visual data and sends it to the other parts of the brain to identify and organize it.

10.  State three interesting or significant facts about your occipital lobe.

It allows you to process short and long term memories, this part of the brain stores imagined and real autobiographical events, and imagining yourself doing a task over and over will improve your performance of the action in real life.

11.  What would happen if your temporal lobes were damaged?

If it was damaged, you could loose your long term memory.

12.  What is your “fast brain” and what does it do?

The eye fields are your "fast brain", it controls your eye movements and helps your brain register information really quickly.

Neuron

13.  State 3 things that you could do that would influence your synapses, and have a positive affect on your life and health.

Three things that will help are sleep, eating a healthy diet, and exercising.

14.  What is the relationship between multi-sensory or multi-modal learning and your dendrites?

If you learn using multiple senses, then you will learn better than if you only learn it using only one of your senses.

15.  How does “big picture thinking” and mnemonics affect dendrites and/or learning?

It helps you learn the information since your brain stores the information in sort of a pattern.

16.  Describe a neurotransmitter that you feel is very important.  Justify your reasoning.

Dopamine is released when you have an enjoyable experience, it's an important neurotransmitter because it helps keep important memories, since they set off the response that releases dopamine, it will stay in your memory.

Limbic System

17.  What does the corpus callosum do?

It connects the two hemispheres of the brain so that they can communicate and exchange information.

18.  What is the relationship between music and the corpus callosum?

It helps the two hemispheres to communicate with each other more, which strengthens the connection and leaves a long lasting affect.

19.  Why is the thalamus important?
      It is responsible for motor control, sensory information, it also helps with your states of consciousness. You could not live without it, and if it gets damaged, you could go into a permanent coma.

Brain Dissection

2. The function of each of these structures are as follows:
Cerebrum: integration of complex sensory and neural function, and initiation and coordination of voluntary body functions.
Cerebellum: coordinates and regulates muscular activity.
Brain Stem: connects the brain to the rest of the nervous system.

3. The function of myelin in a neuron is to protect axons and to enhance the transmission of electrical impulses.

5. The functions of the labeled parts are as follows:
Thalamus: consoisness, sleep, and sensory interpetation.
Optic Nerve: transfers visual information from the retina to the vision centers in the brain.
Medulla Oblongata: helps regulate breathing, heart and blood vessel function, digestion, sneezing, and swallowing.
Pons: connects various parts of the nervous system.
Midbrain: part of the nervous system associated with vision, hearing, motor control, sleep/wake, alertness, and temperature regulation.
Corpus Callosum: interconnects the two hemispheres and allows them to exchange information.
Hypothalamus: links nervous system to endocrine system.

Sheep Eye Dissection Analysis

We dissected a sheep's eye in class, here's some labeled photos that were taken during the dissection as we went step by step through the whole thing. On the topic of dissecting a sheep's eye, we were able to see and learn about the anatomy of our own eye essentially, since a sheep's eye is very similar to that of a human. The parts of the eye that we identified are the lens, the suspensory ligament, extrinsic muscle, retina, tapetum lucidum, sclera, vitreous humor, eyelid, optic nerve, fatty tissue, cornea, extrinsic muscle, pupil, iris, and ciliary body. The pupil is the hole in the eye where light can enter, the size of the pupil is regulated by the iris, which either expands or contracts the pupil depending on the amount of light. The lens of the eye is suspended a bit behind the pupil by the suspensory ligament, which is connected to the ciliary body. The ciliary body is able to change the shape of the lens very slightly to adjust the light so that it hits the retina. The retina is what detects the light and produces colors, using rods and cones. In the eye of a nocturnal animal, behind the retina is the tapetum lucidum which allows animals to see better in the dark and is also the reason why when you take a picture of some animals, their eyes will seem to be glowing. In the middle of the eye is the vitreous humor, which is a clear jello-like substance that helps the eye maintain it's shape. Around the inside of the posterior part of the eye is the choroid, which is dark and thin, it brings nourishment through the posterior end of the eye. The cornea is the thin layer that is at the anterior end of the eye and goes over the pupil and iris, with some aqueous humor (liquid), found behind it. Two things that effect the eye are cataract and glaucoma. Cataract is when because of aging, the lens turns cloudy and it reduces the amount of light that is able to reach the retina. Glaucoma is when the fluid pressure of the aqueous humor and vitreous humor becomes too high, which causes eye damage.

Well, That Didn't Work

So, looking back at my last post about my project. About that program I was waiting for to download. Yeah, you see, it did not download at all, during the multiple hours I was letting it download. So I just ended up stopping the "download" and removed all of that completely from my computer. That being said, I know that Paint isn't the best thing to animate with and that it won't produce the best results that I could have been able to create if the other programs that I tried had worked. But seeing as they haven't worked for me at all, my only option is to use Paint and to try my best to go forth with the animation. Which so far has gone really well, except for the fact that I've had to delete the same frame twice since I've now ran into a part of the animation that I have no idea how to do the motion that I want to do. So this is going to be pretty interesting, I have to relearn how the head moves from a almost side view to a face on view, and all I can really say is that it's way harder than it sounds. I'll leave this with a sneak peak of the animation with a couple of frames that I have done.

Clay Brain Diagram

We took some different colored playdough and put it on a computer screen sized cardboard box after we sketched out the brain and did some rough labeling. After we had color coded, to a extent, the brain, we wrote up some labels, slipped them into the ends of the pins, and pinned them to either the corresponding playdough or (for some of them) the general area in which they are.

Living Without Part of Your Brain

I didn't expect at all for someone to be able to survive without a pretty major part of their brain. Since if you're missing your cerebellum, that's a pretty large part of your brain missing, taking in the fact that it contains 50% of all of your brain's neurons. I also found it very surprising that 9 people have managed to survive past a young age while missing that part of their brain, since the likely hood of them living past a young age is really rare. Also the fact that no one knew that she was missing her cerebellum until she was 24 years old is very surprising to me, then again, they didn't know that those young kids had their's missing until they got the autopsy done.

I looked up if it was possible for you to survive without your thalamus, and I was able to come up with an answer. No, you cannot live without your thalamus, let alone get it damaged. If your thalamus gets damaged, you can be stuck in a permanent coma. Since the thalamus is what controls your state of sleep and wakefulness, it also regulates your level of awareness and activity, and motor controls. So, it's really part of your brain that you cannot live without, that is, unless you don't want to be able to function.

Animation is Loading...Please Stand By

Here's another progress report on my 20 time project. Well, I've run into a set back, which hopefully I'll be able to resolve tonight. In the meanwhile, I did find the desired program after looking for some time, but I might have to then find another program to use with said program to be able to create an animation. So that makes up to having two set backs at the moment, but I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to overcome them quite quickly after I figure out what  I need and what I need to do for this all to work smoothly. My next steps are making sure that the download is successful and then figuring out how to use the program and how to animate with it. Which shouldn't be that difficult, I hope.

Unit 7 Reflection

This unit was about the different joints in your body, movements your joints can make, how stretching affects muscles, different types of muscles, the functions and features (find the actual word for this ya fuck) of muscles, how muscles work/what causes muscle contractions (we created videos illustrating it, the video will be below), major muscles of the body and what they do, a chicken dissection, how muscle fibers respond to different types of exercise, and what are the causes and effects of using performance enhancement substances (we created a advertisement for one). When you think of joints, you usually would think of your elbow, knee, shoulder, and hip as being examples of joints. But there are other joints that people wouldn't normally consider to be classified as a joint, like the small cube like bones that are in your hands and feet, between those are one of the lesser known type of joint. Something that I would have liked to know about is about the micro tears that happen in your muscles when you exercise and how it can either lead to injury or lead to strengthening of that muscle. But that seems to be my only unanswered question for this unit, that is unless it is covered in the next unit? Guess I'll find that out. As a student, I've learned to keep everything in kind of a schedule so I can get everything done in time while doing it well and with my best effort. I've been working on my new years goals and for the most part it has been going as planned and working.

Performance Enhancement Advertisement

The causes and effects of using performance enchanting substances varies from each different substance, but they do all tend to have similar effects on the body. Some of the causes of using those substances are peer pressure, body image, media influences, and role models. Some of the common effects on the body when using the substances are really bad acne, stunted growth in teens, high blood pressure, unhealthy cholesterol changes, heart disease, blood clots and stroke, liver damage, jaundice, or liver cancer, headaches, aching joints, and muscle cramps, increased risk of ligament and tendon injuries, hepatitis B and C or HIV which causes AIDS, and baldness.

Chicken Dissection

In this lab we took a frozen Safeway chicken and we went ahead and cut it in a way so we could see and find the different muscles, the tendons, and sometimes the bones in the chicken. But of course, before we could do any of that we first had to remove the skin off of the parts of the chicken that we wanted to see the muscles, which in some areas was way easier than others (removing the skin off the torso vs removing the skin off the arms or legs). While we were doing the dissection we labeled some of the muscles that will be shown below. When seeing how it all works, the bones, muscles, and tendons; you can see how the bone is the base structure, but it's also used for movement, the muscle is for helping support the weight that the bones bare and also help the bones move, and the tendons are what keep the muscles and bones connected and provides movement when the muscle pulls on the tendon which moves the bone. In the chickens we were dissecting, there were main differences in how their muscle are compared to ours, for example the two most major differences between us and the chickens are in our pectoralis major and pectoralis minor. Their pectoralis major and minor are huge compared to their relative body size, unlike ours which are rather small compared to the rest of our bodies. This is because of two reasons, first being that chickens need those muscles for flight, and second being we raised those chicken for their white meat, so that's why their pectoralis major and minor are actually bigger than they are supposed to be.

20 Time Update

I've learned that I am fully capable of doing this project, but it's just gonna take quite a bit of work on my part, and patience. What I've learned so far about myself, one thing isn't much of a surprise, but I'm really stubborn sometimes about trying different programs to animate, I keep making things way more complicated than they actually should be, and I'm not always the most patient one out there. I've already hit one set back, which was using a program and not being able to figure out how to correctly use it, but I switched to a different program and am already planning to try using another program to see if it works better than the one I am currently using. I'll leave this off with what I have figured out what to do so far, don't worry about that meme, it's nothing and can be ignored.

What happens when you stretch? Relate and Review

This reading was about the different things that happen in your muscles on the microscopic level when you stretch. For instance when you hold a stretch for awhile, your muscles will try to go against it at first, but after awhile they will relax and it will allow you to gain a larger range of flexibility over time. It also goes into some interesting details of how your muscles react when they are stretched.

"The total length of a stretched muscle is a result of the number of fibers stretched -- the more fibers stretched, the more length developed by muscle for a given stretch."
So when you repetitively stretch, over time more of your fibers will be stretched and will allow you to increase the length of your stretched muscle.

"Gradually, you can train your stretch receptors to allow greater lengthening of the muscles."
Just like how you can train yourself to respond to something with quick reflexes, you can train your muscles to do something quite similar.

"While this type of control provides the opportunity for the greatest gains in flexibility, it also provides the greatest risk of injury if used improperly."
My thoughts on this quote are, yes, if you push yourself too hard in doing something (in this case, trying to become more flexible) you do have the potential of injuring yourself badly.

Unit 6 Reflection

This unit was focused around basically the anatomy and physiological aspects of bones. We talked about how our bones are almost constantly being slowly destroyed by osteoclasts and being rebuilt (slower or faster depending on your age) by osteoblasts. We also talked about the types of bones, from their classification (long, short, flat, irregular) to the types of bone that are found in bones (spongy and compact). Another thing about bones we talked about were some of the disorders that happen within the skeletal system (arthritis, osteoporosis, scoliosis, lordosis, kyphosis, and rickets). Arthritis is the inflammation of your joints, osteoporosis is when your bones become porous and overall weaker, scoliosis is when there is a sideways curvature of the spine, lordosis is when there is over extension of the lumbar spine, and kyphosis is also known as having a hunched back. The lab that we did this unit was the owl pellet lab, where we took an owl pellet and separated the bones and cleaned (to a certain extent) from the pellet from the fur and/or feathers. Next we measured the skull and the mandible (if the pellet had them) and then we tried to identify the animal the skull and bones belonged to before trying our best to reconstruct the skeleton with what bones we had. I felt really good about this unit, since I've always loved the topic of bones and have always been interested in them. Checking back in on my New Years Goals, I'd say that I've been holding up to them so far and haven't strayed far from them.

20 time and animation

20 time is when you take a certain amount of your time (about 20%) to work on a project that you want to do, whether it's to help improve something that already exists or for your own benefit to learn how to do something new. I really did not ask an essential question, instead I'm just planning to learn how to do something that I've been very interested in learning for quite awhile now. I have chosen to teach myself how to animate for my 20 project, the reason why I chose this was because of the fact that I've been wanting to learn how to animate for a few years now. My goal at the end of all of this is to be able to animate pretty well, with still room for improvement.  To see how I progress with this, I'll be posting what I manage to animate, and I'll be I guess evaluating how my animations are.

Owl Pellet Lab

In this lab, we took an owl pellet and took it apart, so that the bones and fur of what that owl had eaten were in separate piles. We then took the bones and tried our best to identify what it was and tried our best to reconstruct the skeleton of the animal with what bones we had. What we think our animal was, is that it's a rat. We decided on this because the average skull of a rat is 30 mm in length and about 25 mm in width, and the skull we had was 30 mm in length and 21 mm in width. Another feature of the skull that made us think it's a rat would be the way the teeth in it's skull were. The differences the skeleton of a rat to a human are the shape of the pelvis is long in a rat unlike that of a human, the rat's skull is elongated and has a different set up in teeth, and the rat's tibia and fibula are fused together at some parts unlike that of a human's. The similarities between rat and human skeletons are that their ribs are roughly the same shape, the scapula are also roughly the shame shape, and that the overall skeleton is roughly the same, just with slight differences in length and built.

Unit 5 Reflection

This unit was about the digestive system, diabetes, the endocrine system, and the lymphatic system. We learned about the parts of the digestive system and what their job is, we also learned about how food travels through it. In the diabetes section we learned what causes it, the differences between type 1 and 2, and also what happens when their blood pressure and blood sugar becomes too low. And we also learned about the endocrine and lymphatic system, which we talked about what organs are part of that system, what the system does in the body, what hormones are used, and what those hormones do in our bodies. I would say that this unit went pretty well, but it could of gone smoother if it wasn't for mixing up all the hormones and parts of the endocrine and lymphatic systems. We did a lab where we measured out string to about the length of how long our whole digestive system would be, and that was pretty fun, especially when you got to see how something so big fits into a small portion of your body. I think learning more about what effects your metabolism and why those things effect it would be an interesting thing to learn about while learning about what your metabolism is. Looking back on my new year's goals, I've taken a stab at them, but I need to start working on them more when I can or else I won't be able to achieve them in a timely manner.

Digestive System Lab

In the lab we measured out what would approximately be the length of our digestive system, using some colored ribbons and some string. I would have to say that my main take away from this lab was how something so big can fit into a tiny space in my body cavity. 

My height compared to the length of my digestive system is really different, my digestive system is roughly 11 times longer than the space in me that it occupies. I think it's able to fit inside my abdomen because of the fact that it has all of the folds in the small intestine and large intestine to make them able to be compressed so they can fit into a small spot. I feel like it takes about five hours on average for food to move through the system. but it actually takes about six to eight hours for food to get through. The factors that would influence how long it took would be how complex the food was and what is it made of. Digestion is when food is mechanically and chemically broken down into smaller parts, this includes the mouth, esophagus, stomach, and small intestine. Absorption is when nutrients the body needs are taken in from what is left of the food, this includes the small intestine and the large intestine.

New Year's Goals

I will study more before the day of the actual test to get better test scores. To achieve this I will start studying many days in advance for the test, instead of just studying a couple days before and the day of the test. And to monitor this goal I'll check my test grades after every unit to see if there is any improvement in the scores.
I will continually prepare for my Anat/Phys final presentation. To achieve this I will start to plan out a presentation as I work on my project, editing the plan as I go. To monitor this I should be able to have my whole presentation done and ready to go well before the day that I have to present my project.