----------------- 1998 - Understanding Yourself - The Remarkable Brain
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- If the brain were simple enough to understand we would all be too simple to figure it out. The brain gets it complexity from having many parts, each having a specialized function. It gets its complexity from the communications network that coordinates all of the parts through biochemical means. It gets its complexity through evolving throughout a lifetime and over many lifetimes. This review will help you understand not only yourself but your kids. This is your 2018 New Year’s present from today’s science.
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- Two of the critical neurotransmitters in the brain are serotonin and noradrenalin. Both of these need to be in the right balance for the brain to operate properly, unless the brain compensates. Nurtured brains can compensate.
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- Serotonin is the brain’s “ don’t worry“, happy chemical. It is the brain’s Prozac. That is how Prozac works. Serotonin’s other job is to control sex, hunger, fear, and aggression drives. It is not absolute control it is just the moderator, the brakes on the drivers themselves. When drives and emotions rule, when you become an obsessive- compulsive, your serotonin is not doing its job.
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- Noradrenalin is a biochemical providing the opposite effect of serotonin. If serotonin says, “slow down”, noradrenalin says, “ go fast”. Noradrenalin focuses the mind when danger occurs. It is the flight or fight response. It is the biochemical in the brain that triggers the adrenaline to flow throughout the body. If you become a high-strung hot-head your noradrenalin is overacting. If you are a daredevil and you need extreme thrills to bet a rush noradrenalin is under acting.
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- Science has found low-serotonin in violent people. Cold blooded killers have low noradrenalin, they are sociopaths without emotions. However, other people with normal lives may have the same biochemical conditions but have nurtured a brain into dealing with it. They compensate. The brain is amazingly pliable, and this is recent science.
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- You can not be born with enough genes to build an adult brain. It is far too complex. Your brain interacts with the world and builds itself. Experiences constantly shape the brain starting the day you are born and feel you Mother’s touch and hear her voice.
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- Moral lessons from Mom and Dad infuse morality into your brain. Good experiences add wisdom to your impulses. Your frontal lobes will process your incoming information but you nurtured experiences cause you to weigh consequences and outcomes correctly.
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- Just a few decades ago most science believed the brain changed after childhood only as a long process of decline. Science now knows , not true, the architecture of the brain differs from one person to the next, and it is constantly changing over the course of our lives. Children are not always stuck with the mental abilities they are born with. Damaged brains can reorganize themselves. There is documented evidence of those blind s-ince birth beginning to see. Deaf to hear, learning disorder to be cured. IQ’s are raised. 80 year olds sharpen their minds to equivalence of when they were 55. I am working on my 77 year old brain. Red wine helps.
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- It is not just through our lives that our brains change. Think of generation of lives and evolution itself. Over millions of years our brains have evolved to help us survive as small, naked, vulnerable mammals in a dangerous world. We outsmarted the other animals. However, our brains are not nearly as smart as other animals for what they do. Bird brains have remarkable sophistication in flight control systems. Shark brains are amazingly smart when it comes to processing smells in the ocean. The shark’s sensitivity allows it to react to the minutest of changes in its environment. The hearing of dolphins allows them to survive in the same environment using a different mechanism ( See Review about The Dog Nose Knows.)
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- The brain is much , much more complicate then I can describe in a couple of pages. But, after a century of studying ourselves we have learned a lot and busted several myths. The brain has two hemispheres with the right half controlling the left half of the body and vise versa. If your right eye is twitching it’s you left brain that is doing it.
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- Your brain is a rosy pink color looking like pudding in texture. Its surface is soft, fat folds and fissures. It actually pulsates in rhythm with your heart beat. It is consuming a lot of your oxygen and your sugar energy (glucose) in order to operate. The fissures divide up the brain in left half, right half and in to other lobes that have specific duties.
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- The frontal lobes are the main directors of voluntary movements. They are responsible for our ambition, drive, planning, and emotional expressions.
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- The side lobes process sound and contain memory information. They gather ideas and integrate massive amounts of sensory data. The left side lobe transforms ideas into words. It is the side lobe that creates hallucinations of smells, sounds, sights, and states of personality disorder.
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- The lobes in the back of the brain process our visual data coming from our retinas. It processes these cone impulses and sends then forward to other parts of the brain to be converted into recognizable images. The back lobes can produce hallucinations of misperception and illusion.
- The center lobes map out all the body sensations integrating all these inputs. This part is very complex with a variety of sensory and cognitive functions. It is the least understood part.
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- In general, the left half of the brain is in charge of speech and left or right handedness The right half is in charge of visual and spatial thinking. The bridge of nerve fibers that connect the two halves are also a least understood part of the brain. Somehow this interaction controls our emotions, our memory formation, and sense of smell, the reaction of fight or flight, our hunger, thirst and the temperature of our body. Our laughter, rage, crying and pleasure. It is border between our big evolved brain and our little old brain that we share with other animals.
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- In back and below all the lobes is the brain stem where all the nerve fibers connect with the spinal cord. Damage here and you are paralyzed , unable to communicate with the rest of your body. ( I know the feeling. ) The top part of this brain stem controls swallowing, hiccups, yawns, eye movement, deliberate and reflexes. It contains the on-off switch for our consciousness. It controls breathing, heart rate and digestion.
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The top of the brain stem controls motor skills, the rate, force and timing of all movements. It is this part that is so well developed in birds.
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- Ok, those are all the parts, but , where are “you” in all of this? Somehow “ self” resides inside the brain. All “ self’s” are different, even though the brains appear to be the same. Albert Einstein’s brain was studied extensively and doctors could find not differences with any other brain. “Self” seems to evolve from birth. With genetics playing a large part and environment playing a large part. I would maintain that even conscious choice plays a large part. And , that is the part we can control. Regardless of our environment, or our situation, our human brain can always choose how to respond to it. Think about it and give choice a chance.
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Human brain as an adult ------------------------- 1,400 grams ( 3 pounds)
Newborn brain -------------------------------------- 400
Whale ------------------------------------------------ 7,800
Elephant ---------------------------------------------4,783
Gorilla ---------------------------------------------- 540
Dog ------------------------------------------------ 72
Shark ------------------------------------------------ 32
Opossum -------------------------------------------- 6
Rat --------------------------------------------------- 2
Bull Frog -------------------------------------------- 0.24
Lizard ----------------------------------------------- 0.08
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