my book progress

For this book project the book I have chosen is “The Compass of Pleasure” by David J. Linden. This book covers many subjects but its main goal is to show the reader how pleasure is processed through the brain and how we react to feeling things that are pleasurable. This book gives you many things that a lot of people do because they like how it feels and talks about why we like them from a neurological standpoint. The subjects it covers that make people happy are fatty foods, sex, exercise, marijuana, generosity, alcohol, learning, and gambling. So far I’m about halfway through my book, and I find it extremely interesting. The book talks a lot about how there have been studies on rats and other animals, then it relates it back to us to explain how our brains work. For instance it explains how the brain of a drug addict becomes addict and once you are, how hard it is to stop, they studied rats that they made become addicted on a drug, to see which parts of the brain is active when they get a dose of a drug. It talks about how some drugs increase or decrease dopamine, which has been linked to feeling the emotion happiness. This book also talks about how society has a big influence on people doing drugs. It gives examples from the Romans to the Inca tribe in South American to present day America, to show that societies have always used drugs to alter their brain function, and how sometimes it’s for religious practice or used for medicine, and a drug can become a normal part of a culture. Sometimes this book can become hard to read because the author goes deep into the neuro-science of how the brain works, but I think the author does a good job dumbing it down for the average person to the point where you may not know exactly how the brain works but you get the big picture and you don’t feel like you have to stop reading because it’s to scientific for you.

senior project 2

My senior project is starting off kinda of slow, but recently I've done some work on it. I got my mentor a couple weeks ago, and luckily its one of my friends dads so it makes it a little bit easier to coordinate getting together and things like that. although i still need to do my mentor interview. My mentor is the fire chief of American Canyon, but he also works with a search and rescue team and he has been backpacking many times, which is helpful sense my senior project is on backpacking. My mentor has said that he has some ideas about where we are going to go backpacking and i have also been looking on my own about possible places that could work for us. My plan for our trip is that we go backpacking for around a week at least maybe more, because i want to get the full feeling of being on your own in the wilderness. The only problem with that is that we are still in school so i might have to miss a couple days of school. It is possible to go during winter break, but then we would have to go snow backpacking, which is a higher degree of difficulty and sense this is my first time going backpacking my mentor isn't sure if we should do that. However i would be happy to give it a shot. Another time that we could go is on spring break, but we kind of run into the same problem but not as severe, because there are still some places with snow. I think our best opportunity would be to go during spring break, because there is less snow and its a lot warmer

humans & animals

      

Dear Mr. Rifkin

         Humans and animals have a long history together. For a long time we have taking animals for granted and treated them poorly. With today's sciences we know that animals are very similar to us in a lot of ways. I agree with Rifkin that animals are very similar to us, even more than we thought, but not to the extent that Rifkin implies in his article.
        Mr.Rifkin uses a lot of studies that have been done to help prove his point and indeed their are a lot of studies to support that animals are very close to us. These studies have shown that animals can share the same feelings and emotions as humans, even ones like grief and happiness. For example pigs like and need attention. if they do not get enough attention or playtime then it "can result in deterioration of health." This is a fact of kids when they are growing up. It is mentally unhealthy for a kid to not get enough attention, and it is physical unhealthy for a growing kid to not have any play time, he'll become fat. It has been long believed that humans are the only one who have the ability to make tools, but this might not be so. A New Caledonia crow was given a straight and a hooked wire to get food out of a small tube. the crow choose the hooked one. Even more impressive is when they took away the hooked wire the crow bent the straight wire so it would hook into the food, so the crow could eat. Their are other traits that humans and animals share.
       I think these things prove that animals are very similar to humans and we should treat them better because of it.