Serendip Activities

I found the Serendip website activities very interesting and even FUN! The four I chose were Prisoner's Dilemma, Find Serendip, Blind Spots, and Ant Colonies.

I learned in Blind Spots about, you guessed it, blind spots! I wasn't really buying the fact that we had small blind spots or "white space" in our eyes, connecting to our brains, but when I did the activity, I was extremely surprised that it worked! I was able to "see' my blind spot! I had a friend try as well because I was so surprised. I learned from this activity that the brain is making up what it can't see (white space) since the eye isn't transmitting any info or visuals to the brain.

I can't really apply blind spots to every day life, so I went on to the ant colony activity. I didn't really understand the activity part of it, but the information it gave was extremely thought-provoking. It talked about how with some animal groups, such as fish or geese, there appears to be a leader. The same goes for people, governemnt officials, etc. But with ant colonies, every ant is independant; there is no director. Society is maintained through positive interactions. This really made me think, if our world could ever be this way, everyone would be so much better off. We are only stopping ourselves from letting this happen! So yes, this activity did effect my perception of the world and our interactions in today's society.

There were many things that I learned in this week's chapter, some of which changed my perception of the brain and how it works. I really actually enjoyed this chapter, because I'm extremely interested in the brain. I learned that seizures can be stopped by separating the brain's hemispheres along the corpus colossum. This was interesting to me because I HAVE seizures, and never knew this was even an option for people who have them much more frequently than me. I also learned that, through split brain research (as seen on "The Man with Two Brains") scientists have discovered that the left hemisphere is the more verbal side, while the right excels in perception and the recognition of emotion. Finally, I found it interesting that almost all right-handers process speech in the left hemisphere, which is expected, but more than half of left-handers do as well! This was interesting to me because you would think that, naturally, the left-handers would use their right hemisphere!

Obviously, there are many ways and things to learn about how we process information, but I feel that the activities really put a fun spin on this week's studies!