Physcology

The Brain

We’ve long known that the brain is an amazing thing, but there are intricate details we overlook. The brain is the most complex “machine” in the universe. According to William Calvin (1997), “it has over 100,000,000,000 nerve cells each with up to one hundred and fifty thousand connections; each cell is connected with twenty-five thousand others”. Each half of the brain controls the other half of the body. The right side of the brain controls our musical talent, fantasy, imagination, and dreams; the left side of the brain controls our math solving ability, logic, and language skills (Calvin 1997). Your brain is the supervisor of your body. It runs the show and controls just about everything you do, even when you're asleep.
      Serendip (2005) acknowledges that the brain is made up of three main parts: the cerebrum, the cerebellum, and the brain stem. It is found that “the cerebrum or cortex is the largest part of the human brain, associated with higher brain function such as thought and action” (2005). The cerebral cortex is divided into four sections, called lobes: the frontal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, and temporal lobe.   Each lobe has a specific function: the frontal lobe is “associated with reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, emotions, and problem solving”; the parietal lobe is “associated with movement, orientation, recognition, perception of stimuli”; the occipital lobe is “associated with visual processing”; and the temporal lobe is “associated with perception and recognition of auditory stimuli, memory, and speech” (Serendip 2005). The cerebral cortex is highly wrinkled; fundamentally this makes the brain more efficient, because it can increase the surface area of the brain and the amount of neurons within it. A deep channel divides the cerebrum into two halves, known as the left and right hemispheres. The two hemispheres look mostly symmetrical, however it has been shown that each side functions slightly different than...