Something, Something, Virtual Leeches, Something Something.

Today in my anatomy class, we did a lab with virtual leeches to test neurophysiologic connections.  It was, by far, the strangest lab (if it could be called that) to do thus far.  Basically cutting open a fake leech, zooming in on it's brain stem through a "microscope" and poking at it's brain-stem cells to see how it reacts to stimuli (i.e. hard, rough, or soft stimuli, or all three) to determine which kinds of cells detected which kinds of stimuli.  Stimuli never produced the same responses because the different kinds of cells pick up different types of stimuli in different ways.  I can only assume this is because of the way that each cell is built to react to whichever kinds of stimuli to feed to the organism to help it determine it's surroundings, whether it's in danger, etc. etc.  I believe the point of this lab was to see how neurological pathways detect a stimulus and to help us understand that there are different pathways for different amounts/types of external stimulus.