Block Of Our Nervous System

The neuron is the basic building block of our nervous system.  The neuron is made up of several parts, the cell body, the dendrites, the axon, and the terminal branches of the axon. The dendrites receive the message from other cells and passes it through the cell body. The message is passed through the axon and to the terminal branches. (Myers 2016). The message passing through the axon is an electrical signal. Some of our axons are covered with a Myelin sheath, this speeds up the signals.

The myelin sheath is laid down up to 25 years of age, if the myelin sheath degenerates then multiple sclerosis can occur. Our nervous system is made up of billions of these cells.

That electrical charge that travels down the axon is called the action potential. The neurons either trigger or they don’t, it’s an all or nothing type of action. The neuron knows when to fire when it hits its threshold, this is the level of stimulation required for a neural impulse.

The billions of neurons communicate through these electric signals. The neurons don’t actually touch each other, these neurons meet at what is called the synapse, axon tip and dendrite. A small space actually exists and that is called the synapse gap. At this gap the end terminals triggers a release of chemical messengers called neurotransmitters, neurotransmitters bind to the receiving neuron and influence whether or not they will generate a neural impulse.

Neurotransmitters can affect our mood, learning, hunger and arousal.

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Dopamine is one that can affect our movement, learning, attention, and emotion. Serotonin is known to affect sleep. It also affects your mood, hunger and arousal, an undersupply has been linked to depress and you can receive drugs to increase serotonin levels. As parents we pass along genes to our unborn child. These genes are in the form of chromosomes, we each give 23 chromosomes to our child for a total of 46. The 23rd pair is what determines the sex of the child, you are XX for female or XY for male. Encompassed in the genes are traits that be active or inactive, there are about 20,000-25,000 gene words. Some of these traits that we pass along will be much more prominent than others. While we receive these genes from our parents, the environment in which we live and grow up in has an effect on the person we will be.

As a male I believe a personality trait I believe that is highly heritable is male pattern baldness (MPB). Androgenetic alopecia or common male pattern baldness accounts for more than 95% of hair loss in men.  MPB has been linked to the X chromosome given to you by your mother. This is not the only factor in play, men who have fathers with MPB have been shown to have a higher chance of going bald, and if there is anyone bald anywhere in your family you are at risk for MPB. A trait that is inheritable but much less so is eye color. If your or your spouse have recessive traits the offspring can have a completely different eye color. Recessive traits such as blue eyes can lay dormant for hundreds of years.  My wife and I both have brown eyes and our daughter has blue eyes. This is one trait I’m glad I didn’t pass along to her.

Designing a standardized test for any subject or developmental area is not going to be an easy task no matter how difficult the course or area to be tested actually is. A musical aptitude test examines the ability of a child to learn music and whether they have the potential to do well composing music. (Myers 2016) According to Edwin E. Gordon, most children have some aptitude in music and about 2/3 of children are average and there is a very small fraction of children that range in the exceptionally good and exceptionally below average. (Gordon 1995) In “The Role of Music Aptitude in Early Childhood Music” Gordon wrote that a child’s aptitude is ever changing until the age of 9. (Gordon 1995) This is where a standardized musical aptitude is difficult to develop or design.

Developing a valid standardized musical aptitude test is harder than designing a reliable one because environment plays a large role on the years after they turn 9. (Gordon 1995) If the child isn’t exposed to a lot of music or the same type of music as the aptitude test is for then it is hard to determine the results. The other issue is that not all students perform well in standardized tests and other means of testing would benefit them. So the parts that will have to be taken into account age group, type of music and notes that environment played a role in their musical aptitude development, and designing it to be understandable to all learning types will be the most difficult with regards to validity versus reliability.

At a very young age we learn by associating one event to another or acting one way gets you snacks, this is called associative learning. There are two forms of associative learning and they are operant conditioning and classical conditioning. Operant conditioning is a way of training, learn to ask for something nicely and you may get it. We use this type of conditioning for animals and even for little children. Operant conditioning is associating their actions with consequences.  The reaction to in the statement given, Ray was learning by classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is learned by associating stimuli to anticipate events. (Myers 2016) In classical conditioning we learn to prepare for significant events such as food or pain. (Myers 2016) In this instance Ray learned that while showering and hearing the toilet flush, you will get scolded due to the water becoming very hot.

The two stimuli in this case is taking the shower and the toilet being flushed. Both of these stimuli are neutral or unconditioned stimulus, meaning they can happen and you don’t exhibit a response. When these two stimuli happen you get an unconditional response, meaning your response is because you got scolded. Now if Ray hears the toilet flush he will jump out of the way. He is anticipating that hot water coming, he knows that in the shower and the toilet being flushed means he will get scolded. These are now called the conditioned response and conditioned stimulus.