How our Mind Works

Rijja Aitesam

This is our Brain

• How it works?

Facts about the brain

• Weighs approximately 3 pounds – Mostly water - 78% – Fat - 10% – Protein - 8%

• Soft enough to cut with a butter knife • Grapefruit-sized organ .

The brain performs an incredible number of tasks including the following

• It controls body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate and breathing.

• It accepts a flood of information about the world around you from your various senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching).

• It handles your physical movement when walking, talking, standing or sitting.

• It lets you think, dream, reason and experience emotions.

The Nervous System

• Makes up critical portion of the nervous system • Nerve cells connected by nearly 1 million miles of

nerve fibers • Has the largest area of uncommitted cortex of any

species giving humans flexibility for learning. • Brain consumes about 20% of the body's energy . • The Brain uses about 1/5 of the body's oxygen. • The Brain gets about 8 gallons of blood each hour

(supplying nutrients like glucose, protein, trace elements, and oxygen).

• Brain needs 8-12 glasses of water a day for optimal functioning.

TWO BRAINS--LEFT AND RIGHT HEMISPHERE • The brain is divided in half, a right and left hemisphere.

The right hemisphere does a different job than the left. The right hemisphere deals more with visual activities and plays a role in putting things together.

• For example, it takes visual information, puts it together, and says "I recognize that--that's a chair," or "that's a car" or "that's a house.”

• The left hemisphere tends to be the more analytical part; it analyzes information collected by the right. It takes information from the right hemisphere and applies language to it. The right hemisphere "sees" a house, but the left hemisphere says, "Oh yeah, I know whose house that is--it's Uncle Bob's house."

VISION--HOW WE SEE THINGS

• Information from our eyes goes to areas at the very back of the brain. We've all seen cartoons where the rabbit gets hit on the head and the rabbit sees stars.

HEARING AND LANGUAGE

• In the general population, 95 percent of people are right-handed, which means that the left hemisphere is the dominant hemisphere. (For you left-handers, the right hemisphere is dominant.) With right-handed people, the ability to understand and express language is in this left temporal lobe.

FRONTAL LOBES--Planning, Organizing, Controlling

• The biggest and most advanced part of the brain is the frontal lobe. (It's called the frontal lobe because it's in the front part of brain.) One job of the frontal lobe is planning.

• The frontal lobe is also involved in organizing. For a lot of activities, we need to do step A, then step B, then step C.

• the frontal lobes also play a very important role in controlling emotions. Deep in the middle of the brain are sections that control emotions

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Neuroscience or Neurobiology

• Your brain, spinal cord and peripheral nerves make up a complex, integrated information-processing and control system known as your central nervous system. In tandem, they regulate all the conscious and unconscious facets of your life.