Mentor Log 5

Hours: 2 Hours
Total: 16 Hours

I met up with my mentor today and this time I read about the nervous system, which is one of the four important systems in massage. I read two chapters and some of the material was very familiar to what I've learned in my Advanced Biology class last year and in my psychology class last semester. I remembered learning about the axons and dendrites from Adv. Bio. The second chapter contained more structural information. I read about the structures of the brain such as the hypothalamus, the lobes, and what each part of the brain is in control of. A small section of it was like review from psychology class, but most of the information was new and related to the five senses such as sight, taste, sound, smell, and feeling. Each section had a detailed description of what the body part used for the senses what composed up, also what the cells or nerves do. Going back to the first chapter I learned that the brain has ventricles, just like the heart, in which a cerebral fluid runs throughand that there's a fifth lobe called the Insula. I have also learned that the Peripheral Nervous System(PNS) is divided into two catefories: the somatic and autonomic nervous systems. The somatic system controls movement and uses our sensory and motor neurons, while the autnomic is then broken down into two more categories: the Sympathetic Nervous System and the Parasympathetic Nervous System. The sympathetic nervous system increases heart rate and breathing due to the body undergoing stress and that parathetic nervous system's job is to balance that by returning the body back to normal when not under stress. There were many names of nerves that have different functions, but I couldn't rmember them all. They were all called the 12 cranial nerves. The spine also has fibers attached to the sides to receive info from the peripheral nervous system or to send out info to the body. The next time I meet up with my mentor I will be probably be reading the 3rd important system of the human body.