DESMA 9

For my second event of the quarter, I visited UCLA’s Meteorite Galley located in the Geology building. I had never visited the gallery before, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much information it had to offer. The first thing that caught my eye when I entered the gallery was a 357 pound iron meteorite pictured here: While I was initially impressed by the size of this meteorite, which was found in Arizona, I soon began to ponder about the complexity behind how it was created. Luckily, information on how these meteorites are formed and classified is provided in the gallery, as seen here: I soon found out that extraterrestrial rocks come in immense sizes, for example, Itokawa: a 535x294x209 meter asteroid. In addition, in 2011, NASA's dawn spacecraft arrived at Vesta: the second largest asteroid with an average diameter of approximately 525 kilometers.  What really intrigued me while visiting the gallery was the wide variety of extraterrestri...

This week Professor Vesna provided insights on how neuroscience has influenced art. A question that intrigued me from lecture was: how did consciousness come to be? I learned that Aristotle, Ancient Greek philosopher, thought that the brain was a cooling mechanism for the body and that actual human thinking occurred in the heart. Franz Joseph Gall, a German scientist, later debunked this idea and founded phrenology: the determination of an individual's  potential by feeling bumps on the head. This ultimately led people to believe that the size of a person's head was correlated to their intellect. Gall was convinced that mental functions were localized in specific regions of the brain and that human behavior was dependent upon these functions.  While phrenology was eventually disproven, Gall's concept of localized function In the brain was proven correct by Pierre Paul Broca, a French physician. Gall was also the first to identify the gray matter of th...