Sunny Youth Journal

The spirit of tragedy

Misery, and terror 

Leaves a mark or scrape

A dent in your mind, an error

Is it a fight with a friend? 

Or school’s stress?

Or the loss of a close one?

Or loneliness?

At times like this

You must further endure

Think of happy memories

For your thoughts to become pure

No negativity tolerated

That is not a good style

Be joyous and jovial

Try out a smile

You shall overcome the pain

Instead there shall be cheering and ovation

The wrath of strain and struggle is no longer there

This is true motivation

The story begins with Mama, waiting for the arrival of Dee, her eldest daughter. She stands next to Maggie, her younger daughter, who is shy and has burn marks on her body. She got them when their house was burned down. Mama carried Maggie out of the fire while Dee did nothing and watched the house burn. Dee was driven and wanted to get more out of life than Mama, and her ancestry had to offer. All of it came at the expense of Maggie and Mama.

Dee arrives with Hakim, a barber, who is her boyfriend. Dee also goes by a new name, Wangero, and wants her family to use it. Dee is more interested in taking artifacts from her family than synthesizing with them. Therefore, they go through the possessions of Mama in their search for some special items of her African American descent, which she has intents at using them to spice up her house. Dee is somewhat rude when talking to Mama and Maggie and insults all in the name of some chit chat.

She tries to take quilts that were meant for her younger sister, and Dee wants them for herself. This results in Dee debating with Mama, claiming that she deserves the quilts more. Mama give Dee two different quilts and asks her to leave. After she is done, she gets into the car with Hakim, and they drive off, leaving a cloud of dust.

The article talks about how people managed to map out a mouse brain layer by layer to create the most detailed diagram of a mouse brain ever. I personally think that it is astounding that people managed to have science sophisticated enough to be able to trace every neuron in a mouse.

People didn’t even used to be able to take pictures in color. They could only take them in black and white. Now, we can do all this. It’s amazing to see science evolve and new machines being invented and breakthroughs in medicine. It makes you wonder what people will create in 200 years.

If someone showed this picture to anyone in the 1800’s and said that was the image of a mouse brain, unless they were very gullible, they would think that they were lying. If then the person could prove they were telling the truth, they would probably think that it was magic or something. If we saw someone from the 23rd century, we would probably think that that was magic.

If this is what people can do now, I’m interested to see what they event next.

In the article, “Gigantic new 3D map traces every neuron in a tiny mouse brain,” it talks about seeing every brain cell in mice. Over the years, researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science have been recording every brain cell and connections between the neurons in mice. There has been a lot of progress since the map they released back in 2016. The complete map that was published on May 7, 2020 includes about 100 million brain cells. The project is mostly aiming to create a mouse brain that all researchers working on mice can use as a reference.

In the older days, people used to define different parts of the brain by using their eyes. Now, because we have way more data than in the past, we don’t do that anymore. Nowadays, researchers typically trace connections between brain cells using this slices of tissues that can be seen layer by layer. To build a 3D map, the team broke broke the mouse brain into voxels, or 3D pixels, and then mapped the cells and connections with every voxel. They then made a 3D map and published it.

Mice are common model organisms in neuroscience. Their brains have similar structures to humans’, they can be trained, they breed easily, and researchers have already gotten good understanding of how their brains work. In doing so, neuroscientists will have a tool to develop new research programs and accelerate research that is already underway.

I think that Dee is a character who is selfish because she thinks highly of herself and kinda looks down on her mother and sister.

I think that even though she’s educated and her family members are not, doesn’t mean she can think that she’s better than them.

I think she should be sorry that she thought lowly of her family because who brought her up? Who took care of her? And now she was standing there and thinking that her mother and sister were two random people who didn’t get an education.

In my opinion, Dee’s traits are, selfishness and unsatisfied, because here it says: “And Dee, I see her standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig gum out of; a look of concentration on her face as she
watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red, hot brick chimney. Why don’t you do a
dance around the ashes? I’d wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much.”

I think that Dee still wasn’t satisfied even after they moved to a new house.

Overall I think Dee, on a scale from one to ten, she would be a five because she is kind of a in-between person, because even though she looks down on her mom and sister, at least she is still kind to them, like what a daughter and sister should do.

Even though she’s not perfect.

Everyone probably has some behavior issues that they want to change. In the Ted Talk, it states three things you can do to change your behavior;These are progress monitoring, immediate reward, and competition.

Progress monitoring means that you monitor your progress of the behavior you want to change, whether doing it more or less. This is important because it helps you know how you are doing and lets you ease into a new behavioral routine. If you don’t know your progress, you might be confused about whether you are improving or not. This lack of knowledge can lead to you giving up on changing your behavior all together.

Immediate reward means that after you have succeeded, you get a reward. This is important because everyone likes getting rewards. The prospect of getting a reward can even motivate you to change your behavior as quickly as possible. If changing this will improve you, and you get a reward, then why not?

The final thing is competition. In a competition, everyone wants to win. If you make yourself a friendly competition with some friends who are changing the same behavior as you, then naturally you will want to “beat” them. This is important because if you compare you to other people, it will help you push yourself to be better.

In short, if you do all these three things, you can efficiently change your behavior. For example, if you want to eat less candy, progress monitoring can show you how much less candy, or sugar free candy, you eat each day, so you can bring it down to a short number. Immediate reward can let you say, treat yourself to a milkshake once you’ve reached your goal. Finally, competition between you and your friends to see who eats less candy can make it feel less like a chore, and more like a fun game.

I hope we can all use these tips to help us change our behaviors for the better.

There are reasons why people don’t listen to others and there are reasons why people do. It is all from the brain because of the positive effect and the negative effect on the brain.

Many people do not listen to others even when there are consequences and punishments in the future. They do not listen because people tell them that if one does something bad, then that one person will get punishment. Even when they say something like that, they still don’t listen.

Other people say that one will get rewards if they stop one thing or do something. Once that person says that, then that one will want to do it because of the positive thought that gets sent through the brain.

Do you know why the brain rejects negative thoughts? It is because the human brain rejects the negative thought and keep doing terrible things. When one says that there is a 60% chance that one will get a disease and there is a 40% chance that one will not. The human brain does not want 60% for bad things and wants 40% because they do not want any negative thought.

When one hears a positive thought about something, then one would like to do it because one does not want any negativity through one’s mind. Whenever one says that one will punish another unless if they start or stop something, then they probably will not listen because of the negativity (unless if it is physically making others suffer).

When one says to do something to get a reward, then they will do it. If one says to do something or else they will be punished, they will not. Age matters in the brain of a human because when time comes, you will have doubt that the positive thought will come true because of the probability and seeing the proof or denial.

Positive thoughts are one of the better ways of getting someone to do something and when they get into the habit, they will start doing what they are told because of the reward.

Mapping a mice’s brain isn’t much right? Just find a mouse, kill it, and map out the brain! But it’s much harder than it sounds: “‘In the old days, people would define different regions of the brain by eye. As we get more and more data, that manual curation doesn’t scale anymore,’ Lydia Ng, an Allen Institute researcher and senior author of the Cell paper, said.” Allen Institute is a Seattle nonprofit dedicated to neuroscience. Mice are incredibly small, and they do carry diseases. Why can it be such a big discovery, though – I mean, what makes it significant? Well, the brain of a mouse is very similar to the brain of a human: “Their brains have fairly similar structures to humans, they can be trained, they breed easily, and researchers have already developed robust understandings of how their brains work.”

The article outlining the development of new robots to combat the coronavirus was very interesting to me. They showed some interesting facts on the robots’ development, and I was not only informed, but also entertained.

The article starts off about how that the need for robots will help disinfect and can check on patients has grown since the outbreak. They go over that people are hard at work on creating new robots that can accomplish such tasks. This all started with Stevie, a robot created to entertain and combat loneliness. People began wondering if a robot like Stevie could help with stopping the spread of the virus. They added a UV-C device to it that will help disinfect patients. They call this new robot Violet. Other companies have also taken the initiative and have started to design their own, like a Danish company who has created a robot that will disinfect door handles.

After reading this, I felt happy that more and more people are coming in to help stop the virus, and that we are benefiting public heath and engineering.

Kimber Lybbert gave a talk on Tedx titled “Dear Grown-ups… Sincerely, Gen Z”, in which she talks about what it’s like to be a part of this generation in relation to the adults in our lives with stories both from her own perspective as an adult and from her students’ perspectives as members of Gen Z.

Kimber Lybbert spent a good portion of her talk speaking about how adults should believe in children their abilities rather than thinking that they just can’t, because they’re children. I have experienced this, and I very much agree, but I think that part of the time dedicated to that particular topic should have gone to how adults sometimes invalidate our mental/emotional states and our identities simply because we are young. One thing she mentions is that in recent years children have shown amazing increase in capacity and capability, while also showing a heart-stopping decrease in self-esteem- which, in my opinion, can often come from invalidation. When you are told that because you are young, you don’t know well enough, you’re just following the trend because it’s “cool” and everyone else is “stupid”, your confidence in yourself, your opinions, and your identity will decrease- and the invalidation doesn’t even have to come from an adult you’re close to.

For example: the student who gave the student address at our socially distanced graduation made a brief mention of highlights of the year, one of which was when this student came out as a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Of course, all the students and their families were listening to the speech- and later on, an adult made exactly the remark I mentioned earlier: that we, thirteen and fourteen year olds, are too young to know what we want, who we are and are simply following a “trend” because it’s “cool” and everyone else is “stupid”. But, as Ms Lybbert said as an example of how adults shouldn’t blame Gen Z for all our problems- “Alex didn’t ask for gender confusion”. And then keep in mind that there is plenty of homophobia and xenophobia still abound around the world. To that adult, and all of similar thoughts, I say: it’s cool that we are feared, hated, shunned, invalidated by even our own families because of our gender and sexual identities, is it? It’s the popular thing these days, the trend, to be part of a minority that is still so discriminated against, that is sometimes so unaccepted, is it?

In addition, identity isn’t something we take so lightly. You adults teach us to be respectful; would we disrespect so many people like that?

Another thing to think about is that what I talked about in the paragraphs above is the example that some adults are setting for the children around them, and sometimes teach worse lessons than that. Adults tell us, be empathetic, put yourself in someone else’s shoes, but do they ever do that for us? They seem to forget what it’s like to be a teenager, and forget that their childhoods, how they were raised, how they thought and lived and felt are very, very different from ours, how we do.

This started out as some thoughts on Kimber Lybbert’s Tedx Talk, and evolved into something else entirely (and is also very, very incomplete), but I do think that what I said is still something quite important and something we should all be thinking about.