The Wonders of Neurology

     
             Hi, everybody! My name is Anjala and I’m in 6th grade. In January and February 2015, I attended the Junior Scientists’ Saturday School program at the Georgia State University. When I grow up, I want to be either a medical scientist or a neuroscientist. This program really helped me learn more about my dream (future) job, as well as amazing things I would've never known.

           I was really interested when my class learned about the human brain, so interested I decided to do a little research on my own. We had dissected a sheep’s brain, and learned the different parts of it. It really caught me when I found out about certain brain diseases, such as prosopagnosia, and the phantom limb disease. Prosopagnosia is a brain disease in which the brain cannot recognize faces. In class, we watched a video about a woman with prosopagnosia who couldn’t recognize her mom, or even herself! It was first thought that this was caused by head injury, but recently scientists have discovered that people without ANY brain damage have developed prosopagnosia. Scientists have not yet discovered how to cure this, but I hope I will.

              The Phantom Limb Syndrome is the name for a pain in a body part that’s no longer there (see the phantom part?). It can be extremely painful, but there is no cure for it. For some people, it goes away after a while, but for others, the Phantom Limb is always there. The first case of this was back in 1522, but, however, it wasn’t until the 90’s that scientists realized that the brain didn’t register that the body part was gone. When I'm an adult, if it hasn't been done already, I hope I can cure the Phantom Limb Syndrome, for good.

I really liked the dissections, even though it smelled awful. We dissected a frog, starfish, earthworm, crayfish, grasshopper, and a sheep brain. Ms. Seyda showed us how the frog had two major muscles in its leg, one for flexing and one for extension. We learned a song about the water vascular system and all the parts of it because it was the starfish's vascular system. The earthworm is valuable to scientists because it has sections that can help it move through dirt and scientists study why. The crayfish has a really cool exoskeleton, or shell, that protects it and keeps it safe. It has no veins! Blood pumps from the heart and travels through tissues to the rest of the body. Grasshoppers, despite their sometimes unappealing look, they have a thin, beautiful red layer of their wing under the main wing. They also have an exoskeleton to protect them. The sheep brain, similar to ours, has a cerebellum and cerebrum. It also has two layers of tissue protecting it and keeping everything in place. Over all, I had a great time, I learned a lot, and our teacher is really smart and nice. I would definitely recommend this course.

Brain Dissection

             My favorite experiment conducted at Saturday School was dissecting the sheep's brain, It was my favorite because it resembled a human brain. The most interesting part was the cerebellum because it fit inside the brain like a smaller brain. My least favorite part about the brain was the spinal cord because it was horizontal instead of  vertical. I would have preferred an animal that walks on two legs. I enjoyed dissecting the sheep's brain the most.

Welcome To Our Blog !

Junior Scientists' Discovery Lab is a class at Georgia State University Saturday School. I am Seydanur Tikir, the teacher of this class and a Graduate Research Assistant at Georgia State University Neuroscience Department. 

The class aims to develop scientific skills by performing fun experiments and interactive games. The class is offered for 6th, 7th and 8th grade students and covers a wide range of topics such as neuroscience, chemistry, anatomy, animal behaviour, forensic science and genetics.

There are 9 students in our class: Akhanaton, Amerash, Anjala, Carrington, Janalle, Julia, Morgan, Sarah and Trinity. They all are highly intelligent, proactive and passionate junior scientists. Here they will share their experiences with you. Enjoy!