Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Reply to comment

llamprou's picture

I am also in agreement with

I am also in agreement with Zoe and Evan. It was exceedingly difficult for me to view battery as anything more than a metal cylinder used to make fairly trivial devices such alarm clocks, and calculaters work. I also viewed batteries as something extremely temporary, human beings are replacing them all the time, it is very difficult to do that with even the most trivial 'things' found in the human body. It is also fairly more confusing for me because simultaneously to this class I am embarking on a parallel journey through Intro Bio, and although we just finished understanding action potentials, voltage gated channels and concentration gradients, the word 'battery' was not mentioned once. Interestingly enough however as far back as I could remember my father used the word battery in describing my body, for example he would say "...get to bed Lisa if you don't you will not have enough time to recharge the battery before tomorrow", or "...you need to give your battery time to recharge". Is sleep how humans recharge their batteries? Why do batteries stop functioning?

Finally I completely agree with Zoe in the fact that I am beginning to lose sight of the model we began with. I have almost forgotten why we began comparing action potentials to batteries in the first place. I must also say that I do not have a full understanding of the battery metaphore as of yet, but class on Thursday did enhance my understanding a little bit. I wonder if the battery metaphore could be replaced by something that is a little more human, or is the point of the battery model to remind us that we in fact are just a bag of chemicals and the notion of what was human was invented by the most powerful chemicals in the bag, those residing in our brains?

 

Reply

To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
8 + 3 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.