The Automatic Nervous System is divided into two parts, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic part allows you to use up the energy you have saved within, whereas the parasympathetic is just relaxed and stores your energy to regulate it. I am going to be talking about the sympathetic nervous system and am about to share with you a story of a good example of this “flight or fight” situation. I woke up in the middle of the night because I heard something downstairs. At first I thought it was my dog so I let it go. I heard the noise again and decided to go downstairs to take a look. I started to get scared because most of the lights were off and I couldn’t see much, but I kept on hearing footsteps. I do not know why I didn’t think it would be anyone in my family. I guess I was too tired to even think at that point, but I kept walking down the stairs and I finally got to the bottom. I heard another noise and at this point I was very scared. My heart was racing, my palms were sweating, and I could feel the nervousness all the way up to my head, and I wasn’t thinking straight. Then I don’t know what happened to me but I sprinted into the kitchen, screaming, to find the “stranger” in my house. When I got in there me and my sister were standing face to face both screaming and began yelling at each other. We scared each other for no reason. In that moment, I do not know what happened to me and how my adrenaline popped into my body so quick, but after hearing about the sympathetic nervous system, I knew exactly that that’s what kicked in. The sympathetic nervous system arouses the body and that is when your flight or fight response comes into play. When you’re in a scary or rough situation and you don’t know what is going to happen next and your heart starts to race and you start to sweat, that’s how you know you are going through the sympathetic nervous system. And if it wasn’t for that, I would have never caught my sister!
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Illusory Correlation and Correlation does not equal Causation Blog
For this blog, I am going to discuss the Illusory Correlation, which is the perception of a relationship where none exists. This can include superstitions, stereotypes, or prejudices. For example, Jimmy could get an A on his paper two times where he wore his Star Wars t-shirt, and he now concludes that the shirt correlates to him getting better grades. However, the shirt has nothing to do with his performance and it is all mental. Also, with Illusory Correlation, a big concept of statistics is revealed, which is correlation does not equal causation. This shows that just because two events correlate does not mean that one event caused the other. My experience with these two concepts was wearing lucky socks for every Cowboy game at the end of the season last year because they didn’t lose for 7 games when I wore them. So, after the first game they won, I continued to wear the socks and believe that they were winning because of them. Another example was my brother always making my mom watch the game in her room because he thought she was bad luck and they didn’t do well whenever she came into the living room. The connection between my experiences and the concept of Illusory Correlation is I convinced myself that wearing the socks was the reason the Cowboys were winning but it had nothing to do with the outcome in the end. Also, after I established this correlation I went around and told everyone that me wearing the socks caused the cowboys to win, which shows causation equals correlation when it doesn’t. These two concepts are seen often in daily life and were interesting to learn about.
The Somatic Nervous System
The nervous system is the body system concerned with transmitting signals to and from the brain through cells called neurons. This system can be divided into two main subsystems called the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. Within the peripheral nervous system, another division can be made into the autonomic and somatic systems. The somatic system is the system responsible for voluntary skeletal movements. This allows us to be able to control how we move our skeletal muscles whenever we decide to move them. The sensory neurons within this system are responsible for carrying information from sensory receptors located mainly in the tissues of the body back to the central nervous system. The motor neurons are the cells that take information from the central nervous system back to the skeletal muscles, which is what enables us to voluntarily move in one way or another.
The somatic nervous system differs from the autonomic nervous system in the way that it is voluntary, versus the autonomic system which functions involuntarily and controls the internal organs and glands in the body as opposed to the skeletal muscles. These differences are further shown in the following illustration:
A time where I definitely feel the somatic system in action is during dance rehearsal. While we are rehearsing, we are expected to be able to quickly learn and repeat steps and movements that are taught to us at a fast pace. Our muscles have to move quickly, precisely, and at the right timing. While many different parts of the brain and nervous system are all working together at the same time to make this happen, the somatic system is the system responsible for sending signals from the brain to the skeletal muscles through motor neurons, creating these desired quick and precise movements. There are many times where some of the movements involve something as small as a head tilt or hand placement that have to be identical between a team of 20 individuals. Without the somatic system, we would not only lack the ability to make these fine tuned movements, but we would not have the ability to move at all whether that includes dancing, walking, or even opening your mouth to speak. This is why the somatic system is extremely necessary for human survival.
Staff, E. (2017, December 3). Difference between the Somatic and the Autonomic Nervous System. Retrieved from https://difference.guru/difference-between-the-somatic-and-the-autonomic-nervous-system/
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