Sam Abukhadra 1/6/15
Current Event Chemistry
Gorman, James. "Learning How Little We Know About the Brain." The New York Times. The New York Times, 10 Nov. 2014. Web. 06 Jan. 2015.
I read, “Learning How Little We Know About the Brain” by James Gorman. I thought this was an excellently written article with great facts and wonderful details. This article taught me so much about many different areas of the brain, what we know about them, and how we research them. This article focused on many areas. The first area it focused now was on the research projects going on all around the world trying to discover new information about the brain. It talked about specific projects and how the government spends upwards of $4.5 billion dollars on brain research each year. The article also talked about what we still want to know about the brain. Some of the questions posed were, How is information encoded and transferred from cell to cell or from network to network of cells? Is information encoded differently in different parts of the brain? The article then moved into specific people and their specific research. For example, Evard Moser was discussed. He was a nobel prize winner and brought the mathematical skills of a physicist to the field, and is able to plunge into the difficulties of dealing with actual brain experiments. Many different significant scientists and their work in various areas of the field had been discussed in the Article.
The article and the research being discussed within in is so important to society. The brain is the controlling part of our body. The brain is the most important and most intelligent piece of our body. It controls everything that we do and how we interact. We know so little about our brain. Learning new things and gaining a better understanding of it is so important. Our brain is the very thing that controls us and obtaining a better understanding of it would be incredible. We are going through and age where we continue to discover information so often. Since so little as been discovered, our generation is going to for major and incredible new discoveries about the brain and how it works, which will benefit society immensely.
I thought this article was very well written, although there are areas for improvement. I thought the way the author presented the information throughout the article was very intelligent and well structured. I also liked the way the author used so many specifics. Many different facts and statistics were used as well as specific questions on specific areas of the brain. For example, how larger groups, thousands of neurons, work together to produce an action? Th article also focused on specific people which really provided great information. The vast use of specifics allowed the article to discuss such a variety of information on different areas of the brain. Although there were some areas were the article could improve. For example the article could be confusing sometimes. It would be so detailed and very in depth and quite confusing. This would make the article very hard to understand at times. If some areas of the article weren’t as confusing and in depth the article would have been a lot easier to process and understand. Overall, this article was extremely well written and contained so much valuable information.
I read Sam’s review of “Learning How Little We Know About the Brain”. I thought that overall Sam did a really good job reviewing this article. One thing I liked was how he talked about the main points of the article and went into detail about them. I also liked how he talked about this article can affect people’s lives. Another thing I liked about Sam’s review was how Sam talked about both the good and bad things about the article.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I think Sam did a good job with his review, there were a few things he could have done better. For example, he could have included information about what we do know about the brain. Also, I think Sam should have included quotes from experts about the ways that we are working to learn more about the brain.
I thought that overall this article and Sam’s review were well written. One thing I found amazing about this article was learning just how little we actually know about the human brain. Scientists have found that there is no brain wide neural code, but they still don’t know if the information is just encoded differently throughout the brain. In conclusion, I thought the article and Sam’s review were written well overall.