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.
No comments:
Post a Comment