The Woman with a hole in her brain

A woman had trouble walking and felt nauseous. When she entered a hospital, it was discovered that she was missing cerebellum. The cerebellum controls voluntary movement as well as balance. It made sense that the woman felt these symptoms throughout her life, but it was miraculous that how minor they were. Her case shows how the brain how the brain can adapt and compensate for missing functions.

If the brain's Brocca's area is responsible for language and speech production. If someone were missing this area, they would not be able to produce speech. They could still survive without it and still be able to understand speech. The Wernicke's area can partially compensate by helping the person understand and process speech.

Unit 7 Reflection

In this unit we learned about the different movements of the body and specific vocabulary to describe them. These movements happen at synovial joints. There are angular movements such as flexion and extension and special movements such as elevation and depression. We also learned about how muscles are organized and classified. Muscles are in charge of the movements of bones or fluids and help maintain posture and body posture. They have certain properties that help them with these functions i.e. contractility, extensibility, and elasticity. There are many terms that classify the size, shape, number of origins, and location of the muscles. These are used to identify specific types of muscles. To deepen our understanding we dissected a chicken carcass and identified the different muscles and tendons while relating them to human muscles. In this unit we also discussed how how muscles contract and how an impulse translates though to movement that is driven by the release of calcium and ATP. To illustrate this process, we made a muscle contraction video. To end the unit we went over how muscles develop ,and how specific types of exercises can help muscle health and growth. Muscles have slow twitch and fast twitch fibers. Long duration uses slow twitch while shorter duration exercises use fast twitch. Exercises such as weight lifting can benefit muscles while certain shortcuts can actually cause more harm such as steroids as shown by our satirical advertisement.

Chicken dissection 

Advertisement that shows how the benefits of steroids do not outweigh the health problems that come with it

I enjoyed the different activities and labs in this unit because they helped simplify the complex system of muscles and how they worked. This unit made me more curious about how muscles develop ,and I want to learn more about how muscles are able to carry such large amounts of weight.

My New Year's goals are still in progress and I am currently doing well in staying more organized and being healthy. I feel that my lifestyle has changed ,and I am still working to make it better.

Performance Enhancements Advertisement

Steroids seem to appeal to people because they think that whatever they are currently doing is not enough for them to get the ideal body or meet their own standards. Anabolic steroids may increase muscle gain, but its costs are not worth it. It can cause an increase in blood pressure, heart disease, liver damage, stroke, and many other health problems. It can also affect gender specific qualities such as sperm count and breast size. Steroids are definitely not a safe performance enhancement.  
Other enhancements such as high protein diets (if paired with the proper amount of exercise and done properly) and strength training are safe ways to increase performance and gain muscle. They might require more time the other ways, but have little to no risk if done properly as apposed to steroids and androstenedione which can cause an imbalance in hormones.

Chicken Muscle Dissection Analysis

1. In this lab we first obtained a chicken carcass and began identifying any muscles that we saw. To see more of the chest, we cut through the mid line and got a better look at the pectoralis major and pectoralis minor. After looking for any tendons and clumps of fat, we then opened up the back to locate the trapezius and latissmus dorsi. We then opened up the two different segments of the chicken wing to reveal the deltoid, biceps brachii, tricpes humeralis, flexor carpi ulnaris, and brachioradialis. In the last parts of the dissection we opened up the chicken's thigh and calf and located the various muscles in each part.
In relation to motion muscles play the role of producing motion by contracting and stabilizing body positions. Tendons attach muscle to bone and helps to move bone. The bone stabilizes the movement, so the limb stays in place. The biceps brachii contracts and bends the arm/ wing, causing movement. The humerus stabilizes the arm/wing and gives a platform for the muscle to move on.
The tendon at the origin stabilize the muscle and do not let it move while the tendon at the insertion allow the muscle to contract and move. At the origin it is broader while at the insertion it is narrower.
Muscles in chickens are similar in humans in that they both have similar functions. For example, they both have biceps brachii and triceps humeralis that help move the limb in a similar fashion. The bones also have similar structure with the chicken wing having a humerus, ulna, and radius. There also differences in that the muscles have different proportions than the human's muscles because the chicken's bodily structure is different.

2.

Sartorius-flexes thigh and runs across front of the thigh

Latissimus dorsi- extend or pull wing/arm

Trapezius- run perpendicular from backbone to shoulders

Iliotibialis- extends the thigh and flexes the leg

Deltoid- helps raise arm/wing

Biceps brachii-flexes arm/wing

Quadriceps- group of four muscles,extends lower leg

Gastrocnemius-primary muscle of the dorsal and medial sides of drumstick

Brachioradialis- largest muscle on the superior side of the lower wing

Pectoralis major- pull wings ventrally

Latissimus dorsi- extend or pull wing/arm

Peroneus longus-

Triceps humeralis- extends and straightens wing/arm

Peroneus longus- extends foot

Flexor carpi ulnaris- flexes hand, runs from back to elbow to side of hand

Pectoralis minor- pulls shoulder down and forward

Tibialis anterior- flexes the foot

What happens when you stretch?

Relate and Review
When you stretch, you stretch certain fibers in your muscles. Proprioceptors perceive the movements of the muscles fibers  and relay that information to the central nervous system. Muscle spindles record how far a muscle stretches, which results in stretch reflex that causes muscles to contract. There is an initial response called the static component and the dynamic component that only occurs moments after the stretch begins. Holding a stretch longer helps with muscle lengthening which occurs after the muscle relaxes after initially contracting. Reciprocal inhibition is when a muscle contracts and antagonist muscle is forced to relax. These factors that go into how muscles relax and contract when stretching can be applied to different exercises and gives me a new perspective as to why it is important to stretch for longer periods of time before working out.


"The dynamic component of the stretch reflex (which can be very powerful) lasts for only a moment and is in response to the initial sudden increase in muscle length."
This response is something I felt in class when I was first doing the stretch with my leg. At first I did not think my leg could go any further because of this response, but it was only the initial response

"Another reason for holding a stretch for a prolonged period of time is to allow this lengthening reaction to occur, thus helping the stretched muscles to relax. It is easier to stretch, or lengthen, a muscle when it is not trying to contract."
After multiple times contracting and relaxing my leg when it was being stretched I could feel it begin to relax more and more. It also became easier to stretch because the initial contraction faded away. 

"You also want to relax any muscles used as synergists by the muscle you are trying to stretch. For example, when you stretch your calf, you want to contract the shin muscles (the antagonists of the calf) by flexing your foot."
This is an interesting idea that I never thought of before. By contracting certain muscles, other muscles relax and actually help you while stretching.  I wonder what synergists are in play in different types of stretches.

Unit 6 Reflection

This unit focused primarily on the components of the skeletal system. This unit included topics such as the different functions of the bones as well as how the cells within the bones help with those functions as well as how bones repair themselves. The different cells, osteocytes, osteoblasts, and osteoclasts, work together to break bones and reform them in a process that is called bone remodeling. We also learned about the different types of bones and how their form fit their function in the skeletal system such as short bones, flat bones, and irregular bones. The disorders of the skeletal system taught us how bones can lose their density or shape and cause complications for our health.  We also learned about the different classifications of bone fractures like complete fractures, fissure fractures, and comminuted fractures. After learning how bones can break in different ways, we learned how the bone repaired itself as well to show how the body responded to this type of damage by learning about each step in the process.
This unit made me more curious about how people can get hip or knee replacements and I wonder how that works in the body.
During this unit, I found that the more hands on labs were very helpful in understanding what the skeleton looked like. The owl pellet lab was especially helpful because it gave a sense of what the different skeleton parts looked like and it was a unique experience to relate the skeleton of the animal to that of a human. This unit I also kept toward my goals of being healthier in general by exercising more and sleeping more as well as staying more organized. I feel like I am making more progress with my lower stress.

Constructed Rat Skeleton

Sorting out the bones

Owl Pellet Lab

In this lab we dissected an owl pellet by locating bones and attempting to reconstruct the skeleton of the animal in the pellet. First we separated the fur from the bones and sorted them into similar piles. After finding as many bones as possible we then tried to reconstruct the skeleton using diagrams that were provided to us and at the same time attempting to identify the animal.
With the bones that we found we identified the animal as a rat. Our first source of evidence was the fur in the pellet which meant that the animal could not have been a bird. The shape of the front teeth, which were long,that were found on the skull also gave us clues that it was a rat. We used more identifiers from the packet given to us and saw even more evidence that the animal was a rat because of the shape and size of the skull, which was 3.0 cm long and 2.1 cm wide, as well as the more rounded shape of the molars. The skull was elongated and fit the size description. With all of these details and using process of elimination, we concluded that the animal was a rat.
The skeleton that we constructed had a few similarities to a human skeleton as you can see from the picture at the bottom. The skull like the human skull consisted of different plates and had the same basic features. There is also a similarity in the spine where the vertebrates are very similar in shape and make the spine in a similar way as the human spine with multiple vertebrate connecting to each other. There are also similarities between the rat's paws and the human's feet and hands. They have the same basic structure of the carpals, metacarpals, and carpals.
There are differences as well. The limbs of the rat have different proportions with the humerus being longer than the radius and the femur being longer than the tibia while the reverse is true in humans. The rat skeleton has a longer chain of vertebrate because of the tail while human vertebrates do not continue past the pelvis.  A final difference is that even though the skull of the rat has the same basic features it is more elongated shape with the eye sockets being larger compared the eye sockets of the human skull.