Blog #3

The first activity I did was "Seeing More than Your Eye Does." It says that the brain "makes up" a lot of what we see. There is a hole in photoreceptors where neurons pass a bundle through it making up the optic nerve. This makes a blind spot in the middle of what we see. We have a blind spot for each eye. When both of your eyes are open you can't see it, but if you close one of your eyes you are able to. This is because each eye sees what the other is unable to. There was an activity where there was a cross and a dot. If you close your left eye and stare at the cross, as you move your head closer to the screen, the dot will disappear because it moves into your blind spot. The second activity I did was Contrast/Color "Illusions." It said your brain makes "informed guesses" about the intensity and wavelengths the eye sees. The color of an object may change as they are moved around. It proved this with two pictures. One was a checkerboard with a cylinder casting a shadow on part of it. If you move the squares of the board around they change color when under the shadow and not under the shadow. The second picture was a rubik's cube. The center color was brown on the top but on the side when under a shadow it appeared orange.

From the activities I learned that the brain makes up a lot of what we see. It has a lot more to do with our vision than what I originally thought. Everyone has a blind spot which was suprising. I was suprised on how much the eyes depend on each other and the brain to put together what we see into the full image. It's also interesting that the brain makes informed guesses on colors and as an object is moved around its color varies. You can use this in your life when buying clothing or furniture. If you buy a shirt to go with a sweater it may look different in the store than when its actually up to the sweater. The same with furniture. It may look different when you get it home because the colors contrast when moved around because of the informed guesses the brain makes. What I learned didn't really change the way I think about how we perceive or interact with the world. It was really informative though and now I can relate the things I learned to different parts of my life, like when I'm shopping.

I learned about the different parts of neurons and how they function. Now I know that sensory neurons carry messages from the body's tissues and sensory organs inward to the brain and spinal cord for processing. Motor neurons cary instructions from the brain and spinal cord to the body's tissues. The dendrites receive information and the message goes to the cell body and through the axon to other dendrites of different neurons. I didn't really have any idea about how the brain processes and perceives information so my thoughts didn't really change, but I now understand a little of how the brain communicates and controls our body parts. I also learned about phrenology. It's th early theory that claimed bumps on the skull could reveal our mental abilities and our character traits. It doesn't impact the way I think about how we process information because it wasn't true. It does make me realize how far researchers have come in studying the brain and how it affects behavior.

I thought "The Man With Two Brains" was interesting. I didn't know a person could live with their brain cut in half or how it would affect what the person sees and perceives. The man could draw to objects at the same time because the two sides of his brains functioned as completely different brains. It was also interesting on how if he saw the object on the left side he couldn't name the object because his right brain would process it, and the left brain deals with speech. The left brain is the more dominant brain and I think that has to deal with why most people are right handed. The movie was interesting and I learned a lot from the experiment that they did.