Neurological Disorders: Unit 4

How do our neurons work together to control behaviors?

This unit expands what students now understand about how neurons talk to each other, to take a look at more complex behaviors. Carrying on with the theme of using examples that students will find personally relevant, the unit begins by exploring the sleep-wake cycle. Students keep a sleep journal and use it to directly analyze how their brains are controlling their behaviors. Armed with their knowledge of how neurons in a circuit excite and inhibit each other, students finish the unit with an understanding of how the sleep wake cycle works, and how the quality of their sleep can influence their performance. The unit concludes with an investigation of what can happen when signaling between neurons is short-circuited during epilepsy.

Lesson 1

What is sleep?

This lesson is intended to engage students with the concept of the neural circuit. The lesson and unit as a whole uses sleep, a behavior everyone is familiar with, to further explore neural circuits and how they control behaviors. In this lesson students are introduced to the sleep stages and how they are visualized and studied using EEGs. The lesson sets the students up to begin to learn about sleep in the context of neuronal control, a logical progression from the previous unit that focused on simple pathways.

Objectives – Students will be able to describe sleep and what happens to the activity of our brain, muscles and eyes as we progress through the dif-ferent sleeps stages.
– Students will be able to determine what stage of sleep someone is in by their EEG.
Activities – Self-assessment quiz.
– Socratic discussion of sleep.
– Analysis of an EEG.
Materials Printed Materials:
– EEG worksheet
– Homework worksheet
Homework Bring sleep journal to class tomorrow.

Worksheet: Effects of sleep deprivation.

Lesson 2

Lesson 3

Lesson 4

Lesson 5

Lesson 6

Teacher Prep: Unit 4 Lesson Overview Videos

In the YouTube embed below, click the order listing in the upper right to toggle the display for the full playlist.