ARS390
Ieok Cheng Chang
Reflection to the presentation – Neuroscience
9/21/2020

I was amazed by neuroscience in particular with the spatial memory section as I watched the demonstration of rats. Because the hippocampus is important to spatial learning, the rats with lesions would have a difficult time learning to find the platform in the water maze. Since The place cell in the hippocampus allows rats to find and locate accurately without guides or hints as the neurons fire in specific locations; I imagine if an animal that is so tiny were to lose the ability of spatial memory, it would have a devastating impact on their living.

The fact that a bigger hippocampus is found in taxi drivers in London also amazed me (London road is more complex than those in New York); so it also means that the human brain can adapt and develop the ability of spatial learning (by driving and finding their way, taxi drivers are more adapt to spatial learning). On the other hand, because the hippocampus has the ability to store recent memories; and the amygdala is important for emotional memories. It comes to my mind that I might be more of an amygdala person; the hippocampus in my brian must be somehow undeveloped, because I am particularly bad at recognizing or finding my way in the traffic or mazes and I do not have any memory of my childhood, or even during my youth period; but I do have really good memories of emotional related events thorough my life.

That also explains my fear memory is one of the reasons for my fear of frogs. The emotional memory in my childhood was blurry; however, the frog image has always been my nightmare since a very young age after I watched the Discovery and learned that the fertilized egg is placed on a female frog in their somewhat enlarged, and moist holes on the frog’s back. The image has been related to my debilitating fear of frogs; the brain activity starts to enhance once I am in contact with frogs; the fear does not go away because of certain mechanisms in the brain memory.