Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!
Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.
These boxes are giving me a headache
It might just be me, but even the question posted for the forum was overwhelming. Like most everyone else, I found the new input-output idea very interesting, but it simply overwhelms me at times. It reminds me of when I was young and would try to imagine the size of the universe, until eventually I would just imagine white space (because that's what you see after all the blackness and stars obviously) and have a big headache. Trying to analyze "inputs generating outputs, outputs generating inputs, and input output boxes inside other input output boxes" distracts me from the greater point; trying to understand how the brain and nervous system works. Even though this idea may be "less wrong" because it is a more accurate depiction of reality, is it really "less wrong" when the idea itself is confusing? I always thought scientific theory was supposed to make the universe look more simple [even though it is not]. Having said so, it's much easier for my brain to understand brains when simply imagining a loop with three components, input--brain--output; that way I imagine the brain as a computer/processing center of which input and outputs are dependent on to create more inputs and outputs. I know this model doesn't describe how the brain itself works, but the model given in class of millions of little boxes just didn't work for me.