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Asked by charleyolivia to Mark on 11 Jun 2011.
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Mark Burnley answered on 11 Jun 2011:
I’m a physiologist, so I’ll give a physiologist’s answer 😛
The brain, which can be defined as that thing in your head or more broadly as the “central nervous system” (including the spinal cord and nerves) is a collection of nerve cells called neurons. These neurons serve all sorts of functions (like sensing things, touch, smell, light etc), or they send out commands (motoneurons which send signals to the muscles from the motor cortex – which is on the top of your brain roughly in line with your ear). There are motoneurons sending commands to my finger and arm muscles right now telling my fingers to press the full stop button right now….
The neurons work by “depolarising” and sending “action potentials” along a long thin structure called an axon. They do this by changing the chemicals inside and outside their membranes so the message gets passed along the axon. If you could see it happening, it would look like a Mexican wave. At the end of an axon there is a thing called a synapse, and chemical messengers cross this synapse to reach other neurons, which respond to this information. Some neurons cause others to get exited (send more action potentials) others send signals to make them less excited (these are called inhibitory neurons). The combination of these neurons is what makes the brain work.
What is very special about the brain is that although everything I’ve said above is true, we still don’t understand how the brain produces thoughts and feelings that make you, well, you! This is the mystery of consciousness and I’ll leave that subject to a psychologist! But there is one last thing to tell you. There are 100 billion neurons in your brain, which as many neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Think about that!!
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Comments
Helen commented on :
There are many areas of psychology: including sport (my field), educational and forensic psychology. There is also a type of psychology called cognitive neuropsychology which studies how the different parts of the brain are used when we think, feel, or do certain things. As this isn’t my own specialist area of psychology, I wouldnt be able to really answer the question.
But we are starting to learn so much more about how the brain works because of new technologies that let us actually look at what parts of the brain become more or less active at certain times, like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). When a part of the brain becomes more active it lights up on an fMRI scan so this technology helps us see which parts of the brain are being used when we listen to music, speak, move our arms or legs, think about the future, feel sad, or do a maths problem etc.
As a sport psychologist, certain brain areas are particularly interesting to me: the cerebellum which helps us coordinate and improve our movements and balance; the limbic system which is important in controlling our emotions and moods; and the cerebral cortex which contains the motor cortex, responsible for motor skills
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A lot of what we know about how the brain works is taken from looking at people who have suffered damage to certain parts of the brain, and how this affects, for example, their speech or their movements. This research has also shown us how the brain “grows” new neural pathways to go around areas that are damaged. It is this “plasticity” of the brain (its ability to keep on building new neural pathways throughout our lifetime) that makes it such a fascinating and complex subject.