The Effects of Stress on the Brain - Mission SOS - 5/13/18

Weekly Blog : Victor N. 8B

Summary

Stress has a lot of effects on the brain and can be both good and bad for you. Stress can be good for you because it increases your performance level. For example, let’s say you're playing a basketball game and you are the person to hit the last shot to win the game. The stress in your body builds up and when you do play, the adrenaline is let out and you play better. Stress can be bad for you because it can have you think about either small things that don’t matter or big things that you worry about consistently. When this stress is constantly happening for a long period time, it’s called chronic stress. Chronic stress can really affect your emotions and can even make you lonely, overwhelmed, or depressed. High stress can affect the size of your brain, which can change how you remember, learn, and control your stress. Stress can affect your mental health, but you can reduce it. One way is to seek mental clarity, such as going to a professional therapist, meditating to yourself, having a connection to your faith, and/or having a stronger connection with loved ones.

SP8 - Communicating Information

This week, using our understanding of stress and its effects on the brain, my partner and I created a poster, using Google Draw to give to families. These posters will help them deal with their mental health. On our poster, we gave them 4 examples of how they can ease their mind off the disaster. They can talk to a therapist, meditate in silence, have a connection with their faith, and get closer to loved ones. These will all help ease their pain and get their mind off the disaster. As you can see, we communicated information by created a poster to give to families.

XCC - Cause and Effect

While learning about stress and its effects on the brain, I noticed some cause and effects of stress, hence I was learning about the effects of stress. Small stress has minimal effect and can cause you forget things here and there. But chronic stress is worse. Chronic stress can deteriorate you hippocampus which can affect your memory, learning abilities, and stress controls. This is when you are exposed to cortisol for a long time, which can shrink your brain and reduce connections between neurons. Not only can natural disasters injury you and lose your belongings, but it can cause survivors to have PTSD which can make them feel overwhelmed or have anxiety. There are ways to reduce the PTSD level and get better, but it takes time. One example that does help is to seek mental clarity. This can get things off the survivors' mind and focus on themselves or something else.

Popular posts from this blog

Should We Bring Back Extinct Species? - 12/14/17

Should We Bring Back Extinct Species? by: Victor N. 8B Heard of de-extinction? De-extinction is the process of resurrecting dead species. Now, why are we even thinking of bringing back extinct species? Isn't it humanity the reason why some species are extinct? Isn't over-population the reason for global warming? So if you bring extinct species back, aren't you populating the Earth even more? We shouldn't bring back extinct species, because the risk of hurting the environment is much higher than improving it. Scientists are working together to bring back extinct species through DNA, cloning, breeding, and genome editing. In the Reawakening Extinct Species article (source 4), scientists used the cloning method to bring create a bucardo kid. They transferred the nucleus of cells into different cells and used electricity to grow embryos. Unfortunately, the bucardo kid died few minutes after its birth. Using this method, the chances of the bucardo kids surviving
Read more

The Pipe-a-Phone Project Blog - Sound V - 4/22/18

The Pipe-a-Phone Project Blog : Victor N. 8B Summary Frequency is the rate at which waves pass in a given time. Pitch, however, is the highness or lowness of a note. The relationship between the two is that frequency influences pitch. If there is a low frequency, there will be a low pitch. The appearance of the wave changes with a change in the pitch because of the higher the pitch the shorter the wavelength. The appearance of the wave changes with a change in the volume because the louder the sound, the larger the amplitude. When you play higher notes, the waves are closer together. Yet, when you play louder, the waves are taller. 'Musical instruments create sounds that can be varied in pitch and volume.' Some instruments give pure tones while some produce a mix of frequencies. Musical sounds are created from vibrations from the device in the instruments. Our task is to use what we know about musical waves and sound and to create an instrument that could play 8 tuned
Read more

WAC #1: Is it More Important to Reduce, Reuse, or Recycle - 9/22/17

WAC #1 - Is It More Important to Reduce, Reuse or Recycle: Victor N. 8B Now, is it really important to reduce? Reuse? or Recycle? But, which one is more important. For the short answer, it's important to do all of them. However, there is always one that shines out and is the most important of all, and that is reduce. To summarize, reducing saves you less work than reusing and recycling. I like to think of that's why they put reducing in front of the three R's. Reducing is the best thing to do, you don't even have to anything [to hurt the environment]. For every time you go to the store or restaurants, you come back with packaging materials such as plastic bags and containers. That right there ends up in landfills. According to Bethany Wieman of SFGate in her article of What is Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle? Today each person creates 4.3 pounds of trash, a day. By reducing, you are cutting back on anything, like getting containers, saving water and energy, etc... Again
Read more

EOY Project Blog - 5/21/17

Image
End of Year Project Blog: Victor N. 7A this is our project build/prototype.  Summary This project was quite interesting. Instead of writing about the whole project, I will be focusing on the science portion of this project. In this project, we are to look a different environmental accords, chose one and research different clean cities to look for that accord. We chose the accord, transportation and the city, San Francisco. We learned that San Francisco wasn't always a clean city, because from the all the vehicles driving around which causes pollution to the earth. But then they decided to resolve that. They did by having people drive more eco-friendly vehicles, like electric vehicles. They also suggest people to ride their bikes more. As you can see, San Francisco wasn't always clean city, but they decided to resolve that problem. Backward Looking I didn't really know much about this project, before we started. But I did know that urban village needed somethin
Read more

Musical Instruments - Sound V - 4/15/18

Image
Weekly Blog : Victor N 8B Image Location Summary 'Musical instruments create sounds that can be varied in pitch and volume.' Some instruments give pure tones while some produce a mix of frequencies. Musical sounds are created from vibrations from the device in the instruments. Those devices are wires in string instruments like guitars, drums, and/or reeds in woodwind instruments such as clarinets, oboes, and saxophones. Wires in instruments can affect the tune and frequency of the sounds. They create music when you tap or pluck the string, which vibrates and create compression waves in the air. The sounds of drums are created when striking the head, which vibrates and create sounds. Finally, reeds create sounds when you use your tongue and blow on it, which vibrates and create music. In conclusion, musical instruments create sounds from vibrations and can have different pitches and volume. SP2 - Using Models This week, I used models to demonstrate my understandin
Read more