Summer SAVY, Session 5 Day 1, Intro to Neurobiology (5th-6th)
Dear SAVY families,
Greetings! This is Wen, instructor of Intro to Neurobiology for this week. It was very lovely meeting our students for the first time today. We had an official introduction in which we talked about where we are from, our hobbies, our past experience with neurobiology, and what our students hope to walk away with after this week. It was nice to know that some students took courses in neurobiology before or have family members with a background in neurobiology, and some other students were excited to explore neurobiology as a whole new area. It was a great moment for me to share with our students that we all have our own time zone, and we do things at different paces at different stages of life. Starting late doesn’t mean you will not do as well as others. A human baby is born very dependent on caregivers, unlike calves or lambs that can walk almost as soon as they are born, but a human can achieve intellectual heights that no animals parallel. So it’s important to think about the long term and look at the bigger picture. We also talked about the idea that learning is not a zero-sum game. When we come together with our own knowledge, we each walk away with more, and new knowledge can be discovered in this interaction. People have different talents so we can help each other. So if others seem to be doing better (perhaps temporarily), it’s a great thing because their talents can benefit society. We also talked about the degrees in a university (bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD).
We then moved on to the four key functions of the human nervous system. Our students were really insightful when asked about what is it that makes a human “alive” and “thriving”. Their answers included our senses like hearing, tasting, and seeing, the ability to feel, volition, dance, playing sports, breathing, heart beating, digestion, problem-solving, thinking, learning, etc., which spoke right to the four key functions of the nervous system: sensation and perception, movement, homeostasis, and abstract functions.
Then we learned about the structure of a neuron, checked out a big neuron model, and made our own neuron models with Play-Doh. We talked about why neurons are so special. We also discussed how neurons can talk to each other in such a complicated and ubiquitous system. We played a telephone game to show how message is relayed across multiple neurons (which was a very enjoyable game). Different modes of communication were shown in videos, such as visual, audio, tactile, chemical, (to the more abstract) Morse code, and binary system so that our students can start thinking about communication in an abstract way.
Last but not least, we were getting closer to understanding how neurons actually communicate, i.e., action potential and synapse. But before that, we need to learn or review 8 concepts to be able to understand action potential and synapse: ions, electricity, electrical gradient, potential energy, concentration, Brownian motion and diffusion, chemical gradient, and cell membrane structure. We went through about half of the concepts and will pick up the rest tomorrow. It was a very fulfilling day!
Thanks!
Best,
Wen