Sheep Eye Dissection

This is the eye when we first got it,
 it is covered in a lot of
fatty tissue

The yellow ball shaped thing in the
picture is the lens, and it is
surrounded in the vitreous humor.

In this dissection, we took a sheep eye and cut it up to locate and learn about the different parts of the eye.  When we first got the eye, we  noticed it was very squished and oddly shaped, also there was a lot of fatty tissue.  First we found the cornea, which functions like a window that controls light entry. Next we found the sclera, optic nerve, external eye muscle and fatty tissue.  The sclera protects the eye and connects to the muscle that moves the eye. The optic nerve transfers information from the retina to the vision centers of the brain.  The external eye muscles move the eye, and the fatty tissue protects the eye and holds it in place. After finding these, we found the vitreous humor, retina, blind spot, choroid, and the peel layers of the retina and choroid. The vitreous humor is a jelly like substance behind the lens and it helps the eye maintain its shape. The retina is a think layer of tissue in the back of the eye on the inside, it receives light and converts it to signals to send to the brain.  The blind spot is a small section of the visual field that you can't see, there are no photoreceptors in this part. The choroid is between the sclera and the retina, it provides nourishment for the back of the eye. After this we found the ciliary body, lens, suspensory ligaments, iris pupil and the aqueous humor. The ciliary body connects the iris to the choroid, it releases a clear liquid called the aqueous humor, which maintains pressure in the eye.  The lens changes shape to help the eye focus on things from different distances. Suspensory ligaments help the lens curve to increase or decrease the refraction of light. The iris is the colored part of the eye which helps light levels inside the eye and the opening in the middle of the iris is the pupil, which also controls how much light gets to the back of the eye.

we cut the cornea off, and you
can see the pupil opening, on the side
you can see the bright colored tissue on
the side or the tapetum lucidum. 

"The Woman with a hole in her brain"

In this article it talks about a woman who was unaware of the fact that she is missing her cerebellum until she was 24.  She went to the hospital because she was nauseous and dizzy and they did a CAT scan and it showed that where her cerebellum should be it was filled with cerebrospinal fluid. She had trouble walking most of her life and she also wasn't able to speak that well until she was 7.  The cerebellum is 10% of the brains volume but 50% of the brains neurons. The cerebellum's function is it controls your voluntary movements and balance.
The Parietal Lobe
The parietal lobe controls sensations, it deals with and reacts to environment and it processes sensory information.  If your parietal lobe is damaged, the person will have trouble reading, recognizing things and people. It will be harder for them to be aware of their bodies.  People with damaged parietal lobes have trouble multitasking, issues with telling right and left apart and the mathematic skills they have is often reduced.  You can't live without the parietal lobe.

The Clay Brain

We studied the brain and made a model of the left hemisphere along the sagittal plane and the right cerebral hemisphere using clay on cardboard.  We traced an outline of the brain with pencil and filled in the spots with different colored clay, then labeled the parts in a key.