Reference no: EM131082421

Assume you are a medical student specializing in neurology.

Now imagine that at the hospital where you are getting your training, a patient scheduled for brain surgery has volunteered to permit you, under supervision of the senior neurosurgeon, to explore her brain while she is awake under local anesthesia (the standard procedure used in human brain surgery since brain tissue itself has no pain receptors, so deadening the scalp and skull is sufficient).

In fact, the use of local anesthesia, so the patient can stay awake, is a real standard practice during brain surgery so the patient can report to the surgeon what he or she is experiencing while various brain areas are electrically stimulated by the surgeon using a pencil-size electrode.

Here's your task:

Using last week's lecture, Imagine that you are starting at the top of the spinal cord of this female patient and working your way up into her brain. Report, as your response to this main topic in this conference, major brain structures you encounter, in order, as you proceed up and forward. Your report should include 7-12 main structures. For each structure also report a sentence or two about its function. You might like to also tell what would happen if you borrowed the pencil-size electrode and stimulated the brain structure in question in this conscious woman patient. SEE MY LECTURE LAST WEEK, as well as the text for help finding your way.

For example, flying in flies involves a very complex, and precisely coordinated set of movements. How do flies organize these movements? How do they know what to do? Why don't they fly upside down, or crash headfirst into the ground?

Spiders building a web, or bees constructing a hive, also engage in complex, precisely organized sets of movements. The web building behavior of spiders is so precisely organized that people who know about spiders can tell the species of spider from the construction of its web alone, even if the spider isn't present. How do spiders and bees know what to do and precisely how to do it?

Desert ants leave their nests zigzagging in search of food. When they find some, they navigate nearly in a straight line back to their nests. How do they know how to perform this precise navigation? In fact, how do they even know that they should return to their nest at all? What makes them do so?

Attachment:- lecture_on_biological_foundations.rar