Personal Project Speech

Personal Project Talk Speech (First Slide) ​Say that in the unlikely event you see a spider fall and you feel it crawling down your knee, what do you do?. Well, whether you choose to lash out screaming or calmly remove the spider from your body, your nervous system goes through several steps to respond. Your nervous system has 3 principally functions; sensory input, integration and motor output. So go back to imagining that spider on your bare knee, it starts with the sensory receptors on your skin which detect those 8 little legs, this information is your sensory input. From there the nervous system process that input, and decides what should be done about it. This is called integration so like should I be all cool about it and let it walk over me or should freak out and scream and “spider!!”. My hand lashing out to remove the spider with the accompanied scream is the motor output. This is the response that occurs when the nervous system activates a certain part of your body. From this, it is seen that it's a highly integrated system needed to detect, process and act on data like this at all times. Hi everyone, my name is Ankita and today I am here to share with you everything I have learned over the course of my personal project. The personal project is an assignment, or rather an opportunity which allows us as students to do whatever it is we want for about 9 months. Some of us freak out, some of us run wild, and others stay calm. Either way, our reactions are in ties with our behaviour, which leads me to my topic- Behavioural Neuroscience. Yes, this is a long scary word, making my project seem super complex, but that isn’t the point because this topic really interested me and enabled me to pursue biology and psychology, the two things I have always wanted to further explore. Behavioral Neuroscience simply put is the application of principles of biology of neurology, to the study of psychology, genetics and development mechanisms of human behavior. Behavioural Science is a very general term, with many key points I can’t talk about without sending you home at midnight. For the sake of my- I mean, your own sanity, I’ve watered it down to the nervous system and how it is involved in your everyday behaviour and actions. And since we’re talking about sanity, why not throw in a bit of psychological background into it aswell? Okay, let's take my morning routine for example, snoozing the alarm, spend time on my phone and then finally get the energy to roll off my bed and wake up, take a shower, get ready for school and grab something to eat and then running off to in hopes that today, I won’t be late- even though I only live about 4 minutes and 36 seconds away from school, i timed it. All these actions are processed and executed by electrical and chemical signals to and from the nerve cells or neurons. The human nervous system is the most distinctive in comparison to animals and other organisms and its essential. I cannot stress the importance of the nervous system enough it controls absolutely everything. There is NO YOU without the nervous system.

(Slide change) ​The Nervous System has several levels of organization, which is rather ironic since I’m always nervous and always disorganized. The two main parts are; Central: brain and spinal cord which make up the main control center which is what decided to remove the spider and gave the order of the lashing hand. And then there is the peripheral part which is composed of all nerves that branch off from the brain and spine. Allowing the central nervous system to communicate with the rest of the body. As the job is communication, it is set up to work in both directions. Within the peripheral section there is a Sensory Division, picks up sensory stimuli like “hey there is a spider on you” it tells this to the brain then there is the Motor Division which sends directions from the brain to muscles and glands like “hey hand part, how about you do something about that spider? Within this there is a Somatic or voluntary part that rules skeletal muscle movement and a autonomic or involuntary part which keeps your heart beating and, lungs breathing and so on. This then includes 2 complementary forces within it; the sympathetic division which mobilizes body and get it energized/fired up “AH Spider!!” and the parasympathetic division that is in charge of relaxing the body and talking it down “it wasn’t a black widow, just a little spider- your fine breathe”. (Slide Change) ​That’s a lot of information to be digesting, and a lot for me to be feeding, so we’ll move on the other other part of this- the psychological aspect. I talked to a man named Mr. Mark Godwin, who use to work in the UK with behavioral and cognitive testing and now works in Bangkok at schools as a psychologist and therapist to private clients with ADHD and other mental health disorders. ​(Slide Change) ​I asked him what behavioral science mean to him and what his theory on behavior. He started by sharing with me a quote by Mr. William James known as the godfather of psychology who said “Bodily experience, therefore, and more particularly brain-experiences, must take a place amongst those conditions of the mental life of which psycology need take account”. Don’t get me wrong, I was thrown of balance the first time I heard this, and there is still so much to this I haven’t explored. However, I can share with you that when it comes to behavioral neuroscience you need to look at the bigger picture. you cannot disconnect the body from the mind, your body and mind work together and the mind is everything that makes a human being function, including the body and organs. You have to work as one whole system. Behavior is simpler than you think, he told me, you can look at behavior from 2 directions simplistically; wanting more or wanting less and then dressing it up to see the complexity within it. You may argue and contradict this by saying no behavior is defined as the way in which one acts or conduct oneself, especially towards others. Exactly by either wanting more or wanting less be it from yourself or others. We see this in infants all the time. Behavior is the improving the level of survival. Behavior is a interactive learning model depending on the responses you get where you either continue or change the behavior. (Slide Change) ​Following this, I also had a talk with a graduate from RG Kar Medical University and a Neurologist, who works as a clinical research fellow. Their experience and higher education

taught them that there are countless factors in determining one’s behavior. These include; Willpower, knowledge and its application, skills, social motivation, social ability, surrounding environment, attitude, perception, genetics, culture, social norms, ethics of a society, religious inclination and several other factors. Everything in our body is in connection to the brain, it’s so important to understand that the body works as one and you will have heard me say this already and will consistently hear me say this over and. How much control do you have over your behavior? Well, you can never determine for sure but you have significant control over your behavior as does your brain. ​(Slide Change) ​Now there are a lot of parts to your brain with complex names, instead of using my time trying to pronounce them and explain to you their jobs, I will focus on one part, the “Anterior Cingulate Cortex” it’s known as the ‘hub of behavior’ and is primarily responsible for controlling decision making, impulse and emotion. This is located in the cerebrum, the largest part of your brain which is responsible for your perception, imagination, thought, judgment, and decisions.​ So, the cer​ebrum has 4 parts; Frontal, Occipital, Parietal and temporal. See the anterior portion of the frontal lobe, where the limbic system is in place this is responsible for determining the personality and emotional behavior while the medial temporal lobe is in relevance with memory retrieval, acquisition and storage. While the frontal lobe is involved in judgment, planning and motivation and can be where significant changes of behaviors are expressed. (Slide Change) ​Okay, so I presume that the majority of you are familiar with the term IQ, intelligence quotient, but how many of you know about EQ, emotional quotient? Well, EQ repeatedly came up in my research and discussions and I thought I would share a bit about this. Well Emotional intelligence (EI) or emotional quotient (EQ) is the capability of individuals to recognize their own, and other people's emotions, to distinguish between different feelings and label them appropriately. It helps in acquiring emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, and to manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt environments or achieve one's goals. Okay so take a minute to think about this in terms of yourself, and follow along with me to see if you can get an idea of your emotional quotient, so remember Mr.Mark the psychologist/therapist I talked to, well he said the first thing a therapist does to help their client is ask them to explain what they are feeling to them. If you are able to accurately label your emotions and see that in others and that makes your EQ value high. Don’t be fooled, this is considered very hard, believe me I tried repeatedly. It’s not easy to identify exactly what you or others around you are feeling. Happiness, sadness, anger, nerve are all feelings I believe that you all have experienced. What do you do when your happy? It depends really on who you are, but there are commonalities seen within each emotion in all people. For example; why do you smile when you're happy, simply because it's an expression and action used to determine this emotion you’re feeling, ​(Slide Change) ​more scientifically, happiness is located at the centre of the brain in the parietal lobe of the cerebrum. The feeling of Happiness stimulates this region of the brain and thus resulting in a smile or a jump of joy. Similarly with being sad, why do you feel vulnerable or cry?, well crying for one can

occur due to couple of reasons, it’s a biological and emotional response, many experts believe it’s a way to respond to stress. Scientifically it’s the emotion activating the hypothalamus a part in the frontal lobe of your brain and ​communicating this information throughout the body and brain, ​which puts tear production into action. This is how you often get that lump in your throat. Anger on the other hand takes over our emotional control we shout to vent off the anger and try to regain control over our emotional centers that's why we are always told to calm down after getting angry because losing control over our emotion centres can lead to severe consequences. Because you're trying to control a person you increase volume and aggression and want to dominate the person this is what this behavior is all about. Then there is nerves, the ones I experienced shortly before this talk and am currently experiencing internally. With nerves a lot of different things going on, it has a lot to do with adrenaline, and the "flight or fight response" system. Ring a bell year 11’s? came up in science lessons last year. Anyway, it is a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival and helps to determine whether we should "fight", confront the situation or "flight", escape from the situation. When we are nervous or full of anxiety our body activates this fight or flight response system which results in adrenaline being pumped into our body and thus resulting in stuttering or shaking. This response is also a part of what connects and promotes the body and mind to work closely together. It’s all the same theory. Our body works as a single system. Its pretty amazing. So the next time you have an encountering with a spider, go through your morning routine, smile or feel yourself getting the nerves remember this talk, remember that our body works as a single system, remember that body and mind connected, remember that there is no YOU without your nervous system, remember that it’s difficult to identify emotions and remember that behavior is impacted by countless factors and is controlled by both you and your brain and is simply a interactive learning model depending on the responses you get where you either continue or change the way you behave. Thank You