Week Recap
Week Recap

This week’s class revolved around electricity, and how we put and biological forms have put it to work. Covering the three greats of electricity: Volta, Ampere, and Ohm, we discussed the history of the field and how electricity came to be understood.

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Joanna Cutts
Psychology of consciousness

In this workshop, we finished last week’s introduction to the nervous system. We learned how information travels within a neuron and how information gets transmitted from neuron to neuron. Contrary to our intuition, the signal that travels down the axon of a neuron is electrical, but the signal that moves across the synapse (which is where information flows from one neuron to another) is actually chemical. The conversion of the signal from electrical to chemical happens at the synaptic cleft.

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Joanna Cutts
Sensory systems

In this workshop, we finished last week’s introduction to the nervous system. We learned how information travels within a neuron and how information gets transmitted from neuron to neuron.

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Joanna Cutts
neuroscience 12/2
neuroscience 12/2

We learned why the human brain is so wrinkly — to accommodate large amounts of brain tissue within the limited space inside the cranium. The ability for an animal species to perform complex tasks is related to the number of folds (gyri) and grooves (sulci) found on the surface of the cerebrum. We then compared the human brain with its many folds to the brains of different non-human animals and pondered why some brains had more gyri and sulci than others (we were quite fixated by the opossum brain, which had little to no folds, and the shark brain, which was much smaller than we had expected).

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Joanna Cutts
Flow

What does the flight of airplanes have to do with how bacteria swim? Our circulatory system with plastics manufacturing? They are all connected by the physics and mathematics behind fluids.

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Joanna Cutts