Brain Rules!

For Periods 3, 5, and 6: This is for Wednesday night's homework!

1. Read the introduction to Brain Rules by John Medina that you got in class today.
2. Go to the Brain Rules website and explore a bit.
3. Pick a Brain Rule that sounds interesting or you think might be particularly relevant to your life and click on the link to that specific rule. Watch each segment of the video, assimilate the info provided, and click "next" until you are done with the segment.
4. Go to the CPS Brain Rules blog and post a response to your brain rule!

The increasing power of the sugar pill....

This is an interesting NPR story that combines aspects of the nervous system with the idea of the placebo effect, which I'm sure you're all fundamentally familiar with. It turns out that, for some disorders at least, the placebo effect is real enough to obscure the true results of double-blind clinical experiments that scientifically determine the effectiveness of different drugs. Very interesting!

Safer Ways to Care for Patients

As we begin our unit on the human body, I ran across this article in the NY Times interviewing a physician about patient care. With the health care debate being pushed forward by President Obama, what are your thoughts on health care - how can we lower health care costs and improve care, who should get it, what should it cost, why should you care?