I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Pollock’s presentation, as it was both extremely detailed and highly informative. Still, I must admit that many of the deep dives into the more precise explanations went a bit over my head, even as someone familiar with biology. I have never taken a class on neurobiology specifically, so some of the details did lose me, but my background helped significantly. Still, I learned many new facts and information about the inner workings of the human brain that I did not previously know.
Firstly, the many facts about the early earth and how our planet and environment has changed were all very interesting. I was somewhat familiar with many of these, but the way that Dr. Pollock explained the various processes were interesting. I also thought his explanation of the pathway of our sight was fascinating. The way that information travels throughout the ocular/cerebral system is truly amazing, and how our brains make sense of the raw data observed by different types of retinal cells. I had no idea that there were three separate types of retinal cells, each responsible for different facets of vision: shape outlines, color, and movement. These three stimuli become combined and interpreted by our brains. Another amazing piece of knowledge that Dr. Pollock shared with us was the ancient origins of some of our alphabet’s letters. He chose to specifically showcase the four egyption hieroglyphs for “ox”(aleph), “kaph”(palm/hand), “mem”(water), and “nun”(snake). He the unexplained that these glyph characters were changed over time and adapted, as the phoenetian alphabet features characters resembling the glyphs and representing sounds similar to the words the glyphs represent (“A”, “K”, “M”, and “N” respectively.)
I also enjoyed Dr. Pollock’s explanation of Dr. Matt Wilson’s rat “place cell” study, as we had touched on this particular study as a class beforehand. I was familiar with the general outline of this experiment, but I enjoyed having someone in the field give their own take on it and add to the context. In his discussion he spoke about how quickly the rat’s dream memories of the maze played out in their brains, and how that is similar to how we as humans can dream vast extensive scenarios in just a few minutes when we sleep. It was also interesting to see the rat’s neurons firing off in split seconds as it thought about where it was and which direction to go in. The physicality of thought is amazing. The importance of sleep was discussed at the conclusion of the lecture, and I now feel better about all the nights I decided to get some sleep instead of burning myself out studying. All in all, I thought that Dr. Pollock did a great job.