First off, this was a fun lecture to listen to purely because the turtles are absolutely adorable. Also I’d never thought about how we are related to turtles so it was almost like taking a trip through the old family album when we were discussing the phylogenetic tree. This was all to explain why the turtles were being studied in the first place. Since they are our closest non-mammalian relatives (pre-embryo) then hopefully studying them will give us a glimpse into what our common ancestor’s brain looked like. I did find it interesting that the turtles mostly seemed to rely on vision over hearing or smell given that they spend quite a lot of time underwater in places like ponds, which can be murky and can make it difficult to see. Then again, smell and hearing wouldn’t be any better off in those environments.

We learned a bit about the structure of the turtle brains and how they differ from the human brain, though to be honest a lot of the terms are still too similar for my brain to remember the differences. It was good to learn that turtles can repair damage that was done to their brains as they get older. This was found to be especially prevalent in situations where the turtles were exposed to a variety of stimuli because it got their brain working and therefore they needed more neurons in  order to process all the stimuli. This also ties into the idea of a learning turtle having more brain cells because as the turtle learns more about its environment and processes all the data, it has to grow more cells in order to be able to deal with all that information. Hopefully this would also correlate to humans, where the more stimuli that a human is exposed to the more brain activity and therefore the more the brain will generate cells and neural connections. This is likely why a lot of pediatricians recommend lots of stimulating toys for younger children so that their brain can develop well and set them up for success later in life.