This week we got to present the process of out Teen Brain Health project at Festival Del Sol. Since this exhibition is such a big deal at our school it is usually one of the most stressful times of the year. However this year in both my biology and humanities class we were nowhere near finishing our projects and getting them exhibition ready. So this year we presented our process so far and the exhibitions for our final products will be in about a month. I’m glad we are giving ourselves time to create our best work because of something we read in class every week called The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide To Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz. In the fourth agreement Ruiz talks about always doing your best without pushing yourself too much. “Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick.” “Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgement, self-abuse, and regret”. And I feel like that is really what we did. I think reading those agreements was really helpful because I think it really applied to what we are doing in school. I feel like it has really made school and working hard more positive than it was before. Even though we didn’t finish our project we all put in our best work and best efforts to make sure our process was presented well. When our final exhibitions come I think we will all be ready to show all the hard work and effort that we put into both of our projects this semester.
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I think the most important thing about depression that people should know is that everybody has a limit to the amount and severity of things they can handle and no one’s limit is the same. You may look at what someone who is depressed and see what they are dealing with and think “What they are dealing with is not even that bad.” but for them it could be the worst thing they have ever dealt with before. To stop this type of thinking I want to do an activity at my exhibition that will hopefully give people who don’t understand depression well a chance to gain a little understanding of what people with depression deal with on a day to day basis. The activity consists of completing daily tasks while carrying weight in a backpack. I chose to do the activity like this because I’ve heard many people describe depression as a weight they have to lug around wherever they go. We want to give different people different amounts of weight to display different severities of depression.Another thing we would like to do is time it all to make it a little more fun by being a race. I think that the most important thing for people that are suffering from depression should know is that they are not alone. There is always someone to talk to wether it be your family, friends, co-workers, pets, and experts who will know exactly how to help you. So I decided to make my slogan “You don’t have to be alone in the fight against depression.” This week my class went on a field trip to UCSD Hillcrest CARE. They set up a series of workshops for us that were very informational. The first one I went to they showed us a machine called EEG or an electroencephalogram. They hooked it up to one of my peers and showed us how it measures and charts muscle movement. Next we learned more about the CARE program and its purpose along with what they have accomplished. After that they gave us a presentation on neuropsychological testing and a little activity that went with it. The activity they had me do was read off a paper, sounds easy right? Wrong. It started off just reading colors off a paper that were in black ink. The next paper I read the names of the colors and the ink they were printed in were corresponding and that made it really easy. After that they gave me a paper where the names of the colors and the ink they were written in was all scrambled. That was very difficult for me, I kept stuttering and reading the color instead of saying the ink it was printed in. It took me over one minute and I didn’t even finish all the words on the paper. On the other papers that I read it only took me about forty seconds. It really surprised me that just by changing the colors of the words it makes it harder to say the color instead of read the word. During this week my class took a field trip to UCSD in La Jolla and we were given a very long lecture about the adolescent brain by Dr. Jay Geibb. From his lecture I learned that the adolescent brain is able to easily learn new skills and accept the rapid change that is constantly happening all around us. Also I found out that an average American spends 11 hours on a screen a day, that is so much time, it is so hard for me to believe even as I am typing this right now. Another thing that Dr. Geibb mentioned is that at birth the branches of neurons in your brain are minimal then around the age of six your body overproduces these cells then around the age of fourteen the brain has gotten rid of the excess cells but still has more than it did at birth. Next we went to the lab and got to go through three different workshops. The first workshop they had for us was cutting mice brains and putting them on the glass for the microscope. Then we went to the next workshop which was my favorite where we got to look at kisspeptin in the brain of a mouse this one was my favorite because we had to look at two different brains and try to figure out if it was male or female and if it was female had it gone through puberty yet. I liked how they gave us the chance to take in information then apply it to something. The next lab we went to we had to take a sample of food coloring (represented DNA sample) and put it in a gel mold then send electricity through it and after that put it in a box to test the DNA. This week we had guest speakers that came to the class and talk about the brain and how it functions. But I was very sick all week so I missed every day of school that week. It was hard to stay at home while I knew that so much was going on at school and that I was missing all of it. While I was at home I did have to read a book about depression called The Depression Cure for my biology class and I think I learned a lot from that. In the book it talks a lot about the ways to treat depression without taking medication. One of the big things that is mentioned is “Therapeutic Lifestyle Change (TLC)”. They just talk about how it is very important to make sure that you are spending enough time outdoors and getting the fats you need, like omega-3. Another thing they talk about is the way depression in our culture has increased compared to the hunter-gatherer culture. In the hunter-gatherer culture the number of people who are depressed is significantly lower than the number of people in our current culture. That really stood out to me because in the book it also said that the hunter-gatherers should be more depressed due to all the trauma that they deal with compared to the U.S. culture where we have everything that could make our lives easy and happy and yet we still have higher numbers of depression.So far I’m really enjoying the book and I can’t wait to finish it. A memorable moment of the trip was when I was sitting in the back of the bus with two of my closest friends while we were on our way to get dinner. We were playing Headz Up on my friend’s iPad mini and we were laughing and having such a fun time with each other. It was a great genuine moment when we all had nothing stressing us on our minds and we could just focus on each other and the moment. Something that I remember one of the student guides telling us is that studying in natural light helps us retain information better than if we were to study under fluorescent lighting. This is something I’ve remembered because I have been doing a lot of studying lately and it’s nice to hear tips from other students about what helps them. My thoughts on a four-year university have always been the same. I want to go. I need to go. I don’t know why, maybe that’s just how I was raised but, my goal is to get to one and push all the way through it. Although sometimes I find myself wondering Do I want to go to university for me? or for my parents? On our trip we visited four different colleges. UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, CSU Monterey Bay, and Cal Poly SLO. If I had to rank these colleges in order of which I would like to attend from most to least my order would be #1 Cal Poly SLO because both of my parents went to school there, I lived in that town for the first part of my life, and I just love the town and the environment the people there give it. #2 CSU Monterey Bay because I really enjoyed the campus and the things they had to offer, it is located very close to the ocean which I love, and the living spaces there are nicer than a lot of the ones I’ve seen in the past. #3 UC Santa Cruz I really liked the views this campus had to offer as well as all the beautiful scenery but I just felt that the campus was way to spread apart and didn’t feel like a campus but more as a forest with some building scattered in random places throughout it.And finally #4 UC Berkeley I loved the campus and all the views and building but the people and environment in that area I didn’t enjoy. This past week in my biology class we have all made individual presentations about topics surrounding teen brain health and presented them to the whole class. I decided to create a presentation on the topic of drugs on the brain. I chose this because I’ve always thought it was interesting how different substances affect your brain and body in different ways and how constant use will affect you in the long term. When I was researching this topic I watched a documentary called The Truth About Drugs they make it in short ten minute segments one going over a different drug and people who used to be addicted to it would talk about what it did to them and how they got into that situation. Many of them said they were taught from a young age to say no to drugs but they were never taught why. One woman said that if they told her about the permanent record and the multiple times in rehab she wouldn’t have gotten herself into that situation in the first place. So that makes me wonder why we tell the youth say no to drugs without showing them the consequences. Isn’t that how we learn, from seeing what is wrong then going to make the right choice? Something else I learned while researching is that there are more rehab clinics than starbucks coffee joints in the U.S. and most people need to go to rehab more than once to get rid of their addiction. Then I learned that they consider addiction to be a chronic brain disease and that made a lot of sense to me because I have always thought that addiction had something to do with your own personality i.e. having an addictive personality. After reading this I felt that this made a lot more sense than what I thought before. Recently in my biology class my peers have been dissecting fetal pigs. I knew before the dissecting even started that I didn’t want to participate because I strongly dislike seeing dead animals. Whenever I see a dead animal on the side of the road it deeply saddens me to see that some people are so careless that they don’t mind taking the life of another living being that we share the earth with. When I’m driving I know I would do anything to avoid hitting and killing an animal, I know that I would feel so much guilt. So in biology when I found out that pigs get pregnant just for the purpose of us performing a C-Section before the pregnancy is over and taking the babies away from the mother and not even letting the fetal pigs get a chance to live, I was even more against doing the dissection than before. What if you were an expecting mother and they did that to you how would you feel? That’s what I think a lot of people don’t realize how bad the things are that we do to animals until someone will compare it to human life. Why are we willing to do such terrible things to animals? We are not the only living beings on this earth. We have to share the world we live in. Why don’t we act like it. So many people believe in things but they are all bark no bite. If you believe in something don’t hide it, show off what you believe in. This week has gone by surprisingly fast. Throughout this week the class has been doing fetal pig dissections and we also had a guest speaker who was a professor from UCSD come in and teach us a little more about the brain. Professor Kauffmen talked to us about how the young brain and how and why it develops the way it does. When he first came in I didn’t think I would learn anything new. I just thought he would go over what we were already learning in biology. While he was giving his lesson I learned about the release of testosterone in the brains of young males and females. When a male is young there is a release of testosterone in the brain that will help develope into a male brain. When females are young there is no release of testosterone and this causes the brain to develop into a female brain. My question was: What are the affects if a male doesn’t release testosterone while young? In the Image shown the brain on the left is a male’s brain. In the male’s brain there are more connections in neurons going back and forth on each individual side of the brain. On the right is a female’s brain and there are more connections in neurons from side to side. This could be something that is the cause for females and males being more skilled with different tasks like girls ability to focus for longer and guys ability with hand eye coordination. |
AuthorMy name is Sofianna Sanchez and I'm a junior at High Tech High Chula Vista. I'm wrote these blog posts weekly to help me prepare for writing them daily during my month long internship. Archives
June 2017
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