Neurons and Action Potential

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Neurons and Action Potential

There are three parts to this assignment.

Part I: Neurons and Action Potential

Write a letter to your five-year-old cousin that describes in detail the electrical and chemical communication within and between neurons.

Use your textbook as a reference, but your letter must be understandable to a five-year-old (500 words)

Part II: Case studies of brain damage

Watch: https://www.ted.com/talks/siddharthan_chandran_can_the_damaged_brain_repair_itself

Watch: https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_kanwisher_the_brain_is_a_swiss_army_knife

Write a 500-word essay that describes:

  1. What can be learned by studying patients who have had a part of the brain damaged because of disease or injury?
  2. Include in your essay an evaluation of the case studies of Phineas Gage and split-brain patients
  3. Reference at least one specific example mentioned in the videos above that applies

Part III: Explore

Read: One of the articles described on this website that summarizes a research study (no need to read the full reach study, just the article): http://neurosciencenews.com/top-2016-neuroscience-articles-5842/

Write an informal blog entry (~250 words) that:

  1. Summarizes the main idea of the article and describes the link between this article and a key idea from your textbook.
  2. Identifies one question that remains unanswered
  3. After you submit your blog entry here, please post your blog entry on the discussion board so others can read it.

I am attaching the textbook pages as references for part 1 of the assignment.