The Brain and Behavior

I completed the activities "Seeing More Than Your Eye Does," "Ambiguous Figures," "The Three Doors of Serendip," and "Ant Colonies: Social Organization without a director." I found that I learned the most from the ant one. What it did is set up a colony with 25% of the ants as midden workers, 25% as patrolling workers, and 50% as foraging workers. You could remove workers, follow a specific ant, and a lot of other things in order to find out if there was an order to the ants, if one group of ants were different than the others, etc. What I found the most interesting is after doing all of the experiments, I found that there really wasn't a leader of the ants. I thought that was really cool. I think that in todays society, we give specific people way too much power. I think that the ant colonies are one of the most organized societies. We should try to model them in certain areas of life. For instance, there doesn't always have to be a boss over coworkers or a captain of a team. Also, the ants helped each other out and worked where ever was needed. They didn't stay to their specific job.

One thing that I learned in chapter 2 that I found interesting was the amygdala. One thing that has always bothered me is my temper. Now I learned that the reason for my unreasonable temper was the amygdala. I hope that someday there will be a surgical cure for aggression, but until then, I will just blame it on the amygdala. :)

I also found all of the different transmitters interesting, especially the acetylcholine. My mom has worked with Alzheimer's patients for quite a few years now. It was nice to know a little bit about what is going on with the ACh and how they deteriorate with Alzheimer's. There isn't much information about it, so any little bit that is know is intriguing to me.

Finally, I probably found the split brains and hemispherectomy the most fascinating. It's amazing how intricate and wonderful the brain is and how it can adjust the the most bizarre situations. I never knew that it could do that.