- 3081 - BRAIN - Understanding Yourself - 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
--------------- 3081 - BRAIN - Understanding Yourself
- 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 drivits 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 es and emotions rule, when you become an obsessive- compulsive, your serotonin is not doing 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.
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- 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 since 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.
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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.
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- 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 “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 lovbe 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.
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- 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.
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- 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. The top part of this brain stem controls swallowing, hiccups, yawns, eye movement, deliberate and reflexed. 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 “ selfs” 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.
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“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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- Seeing with ½ a Brain. You may think thinking is hard, but seeing is harder. Visualization uses more than ½ your brain. While you are sitting down reading this review your brain is using 33% of the oxygen that you breath. When you are sitting and reading you are burning 33% of the calories your body has consumed. A total of 1/6 of what you eat gets used by your brain. And, if you worry a lot the ratio goes up.
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- Speech uses a tiny area on one side of your brain. In other words, it does not take much of your brain to be talking. Somehow, I knew that already. Hearing uses 10% of the size of the brain that seeing uses. “ Listening” has got to require a lot more brain than that 10%.
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- The conclusion is certain that seeing areas in the brain are bigger than thinking areas of the brain. Which goes on to say that you can not learn a lot more with your eyes closed.
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- Even moving arms and legs uses a surprisingly small part of the brain. Interviewing most boxers and football players will allow you to draw this conclusion as well.
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- Computers work differently than the brain works. Computers can do a lot of things better than the brain can. One thing computers have not yet learned to do better is to see. A computer has a central processing unit to control all its programming.
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- The brain has trillions of central processing units. Each can be working on whatever you are doing. So, you can walk, talk listen, smell, and think all at the same time. Computers are trying to do the same think using many CPU’s and parallel processing. When it comes to seeing, computers have a long way to go to catch up.
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- Your eyes take the pictures but you brain does the seeing. The brain first picks out patterns of light. It looks at edges and sudden changes in patterns. Your brain can act on this information before it has an image. Later the image reaches the visual part of the brain.
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- The positions and angles of edges are picked out first. Color and things moving are picked out next. The brain sees the same way you create a cartoon. Once the carton is created in the brain it starts working on recognizing and understanding the different features it sees.
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- Facial expressions are recognized in a special area of the brain called the inferior temporal cortex. It is just above the bony lump behind your ear. Women are especially developed in this area. Ha! Ha!
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- Scientists think that recognition and memory are coded as patterns in a large group of brain cells. Each brain cell is effectively a CPU. It is only when a bunch of brain cells work together that recognition happens.
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- You brain gets a 2 dimensional pictures from the back of your retina but it works out a 3-dimensional image from the clues it gets in the light patterns. You see in 2-D but you think in 3-D. It helps that each eye gets a little different picture of the same image. The brain creates a single 3-D image from the two 2-D images it receives. It is called “stereopsis“.
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- Your brain can judge depth with one eye closed by moving your head from side to side. This is why pigeons nod their heads when they walk or want depth perception. Pigeons have eyes on the sides of their heads and get no stereopsis. They need to do the head moving to see in 3-D.
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- Astronomers us stereopsis to measure distances to the stars. They usually have to wait 6 months for the Earth to move to the other side of the Sun. In this way their eyes, (telescopes), are getting images 186,000,000 miles apart. By doing this they can use stereopsis to measure distance to stars out to 300 million lightyears.
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- A lot of what we see is recognized because the image is already in memory. Reading is taking patterns of light and dark and transferring them into ideas, thoughts, and memories. No wonder the brain is using so many calories.
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- Sperm whales have brains 5 times bigger than ours. But, they are not smarter. Maybe a better indicator would be brain size as a percentage of weight. In that case, the mouse would be 50% smarter.
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- In conclusion, it is not the size of the brain it is how you use that makes you smart. My hope is that you just learned something. ------------------------------------ More reviews for brain to read:
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- 2755 - BRAIN - be thankful for your brain? It took 1.5 million years of evolution. How did it get to be as good as it gets. You may be surprised at the answer.
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- 2423 - BRAIN - how the Brain Works? Research on Huntington’s, Parkinson’s , Alzheimer’s and Epilepsy has shown that throughout life the brain does try to repair itself through the production of new brain cells. If the brain cells stopped growing in adults, you have what you got. So truth be told the brain is trying to understand itself. Here is a little more to learn about what your brain is doing.
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- 2355 - The Brain - it is what makes you you. - What was your memory just before you became conscious of it? What is consciousness anyway? Is consciousness something that resides at the molecular level, at the cellular level, at the neural circuit level, or at some higher organizational level in our brain? It still remains unbelievable that consciousness can be created from mindless little neurons.
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- 2199 - The human brain, is a challenge for physics to explain down to the level of quantum mechanics. At the same time into meta physics and deep into philosophy. (Metaphysics = abstract theory with no basis in reality.) We are navigating the narrow path between solid ground and the edge of a swamp.
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- 1999 - Success in life is a mindset. So is raising or teaching kids. . The mindset is believing you can improve with practice and hard work rather than thinking that talent is something fixed. The growth mindset is what makes a difference in a kid’s education. Learn about the Pygmalion Effect. Everyone is a teacher whether they realize it or not.
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- 1403 - How to become an athlete? To become a good athlete use your brain. First you better understand how your brain works. The trick is to practice to where your brain is doing the thinking for you and you hit the ball without even realizing what you are doing.
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- 1405 - How does the brain become a mind and create consciousness? Human brains have figured out how the Sun shines, how life evolved from a single cell, why apples fall. Our brains have built telescopes that see the galaxies as far back as the beginning of time. We have built microscopes that see the contours of a single atom. but, we have not figured our how the brain can possible do these things. How are we even conscious that we are doing them
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- 1024 - Brainology Mindset. Dr. Carol Dweck is a psychologist who maintains that success in life is a mindset. It is not luck. It is not genius. It is believing you can improve with practice and hard work rather than thinking that talent in something fixed. The growth mindset is what makes a difference in a kid’s education
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March 7, 2021 BRAIN - Understanding Yourself 922 868 3081
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--------------------- --- Sunday, March 7, 2021 ---------------------------
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