A brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It is located in the head, usually close to the sensory organs for senses such as vision. It is the most complex organ in a vertebrate's body. In a human, the cerebral cortex contains approximately 14–16 billion neurons, and the estimated number of neurons in the cerebellum is 55–70 billion. Each neuron is connected by synapses to several thousand other neurons. These neurons typically communicate with one another by means of long fibers called axons, which carry trains of signal pulses called action potentials to distant parts of the brain or body targeting specific recipient cells.
Physiologically, brains exert centralized control over a body's other organs. They act on the rest of the body both by generating patterns of muscle activity and by driving the secretion of chemicals called hormones. This centralized control allows rapid and coordinated responses to changes in the environment. Some basic types of responsiveness such as reflexes can be mediated by the spinal cord or peripheral ganglia, but sophisticated purposeful control of behavior based on complex sensory input requires the information integrating capabilities of a centralized brain.
The operations of individual brain cells are now understood in considerable detail but the way they cooperate in ensembles of millions is yet to be solved. Recent models in modern neuroscience treat the brain as a biological computer, very different in mechanism from an electronic computer, but similar in the sense that it acquires information from the surrounding world, stores it, and processes it in a variety of ways.
This article compares the properties of brains across the entire range of animal species, with the greatest attention to vertebrates. It deals with the human brain insofar as it shares the properties of other brains. The ways in which the human brain differs from other brains are covered in the human brain article. Several topics that might be covered here are instead covered there because much more can be said about them in a human context. The most important is brain disease and the effects of brain damage, that are covered in the human brain article.
Have our brains come to the point in evolution where we could soon utilize them as mathematical matrices, noncommutative networks, and quantum logicians? Such reasoning may bestow the statistical benefits for predicting and understanding otherwise paradoxical or convoluted outcomes.
If so...
1. A new high school has just been completed. There are 1,000 lockers in the long hall of the school and they have been numbered from 1 to 1,000. During lunch, the 1,000 students decide to try an experiment.
- The first student, student 1, runs down the row of lockers and opens every door...
http://www.carlzimmer.com/blog/C1015037710/E1377996308/index.html on exciting work being done with tMRI. A careful analysis of research that shows that being a racist slows you down on cognitive tasks - or does it?
Hurkyl,
I've been wondering, is there an analytic solution to this, or did you just write a loop with something like
if((i*37)%109==1) printf("%d",i);
?
The brain is the oldest computer known, developed through a process still
undetermined in millions of years. As I see it now the brain is developing
a computer to the level of A.I. (interesting). The brain needs information
to function such as eyes,smell,taste,touch,hearing as forerunners...
Is it possible for us to make a functional model of the human brain?
I'm not interested in the phylosophical implications, but more in the resources, techonolgies we can use (that's why I posted here... )
Just read it all the way through.
Acocdrnig to an elgnsih unviesitry sutdy the oredr of letetrs in a wrod
> > dosen't mttaer, the olny thnig thta's iopmrantt is that the frsit and
> lsat
> > ltteer of eevry word is in the crcreot ptoision. The rset can be
jmbueld
> > and one is stlil...
[SOLVED] 3 Questions that have wracked my brain for two weeks
If anyone can help this physics novice out, I have been working on these problems for 2 weeks. I just started looking at an old Physics book, trying to brush up... so if you can help, here are the 4 questions:
1.) When you life a...
I was wandering what area this would be called under Physics, however,The question is this...
Considering that you have the ability to convert a text data or photo data into recognizable information to our brain, what would the possiblity be to transfer a 1,000 page textbook from a...
I am trying to find out some information about the nerves that deliver sensory inputs into the brain. I understand that neurons in the brain itself share thousands of connections to other neurons. The neurons that deliver sensory information into the brain at some point meet the ones in the...
http://content.health.msn.com/content/article/72/81660.htm
i found this quite interesting that anti-depressants help the activity of increasing brain cells...
A D M I T
C A P E R
R O B E S
T A L O N
WORKED EXAMPLE
(1)The choice of the first letter of the mystery word is either a C, R, A or T as these are the first letters of the given words. (Choose C).
(2)The second letter of the mystery word is either and A, O or D (A is...
Brain Teaser #4??
What is the explanation. It seems totally incorrect.
If the son is going to stay 123 weeks - and each week he HAS TO break off new links.
Then he MUST break off something each of the 123 weeks.
Explain the question...
I guess I don't have access to the brain teaser forum. This one kinda confused me:
Using “Only Four” ZEROS (0) and any Mathematical Operations/Symbols, to obtain the number 24.
Answer is (0! + 0! + 0! + 0!)! = 24
I know I am a bit rusty with hex/binary arithmatic but the answer i...
I took this from another board I posted on. Noone could really answer much of it. Please no debate about what intelligence is.
I couldn't find a neuroscience message board, but I have some questions, so I'm hoping someone can answer them here. What exactly makes one intelligent. Is it the...
I don't know if this necessarily belongs in the philosophy section, but we'll try it on for size.
So as you all know, we use maybe 10 percent of our brain's capacity(some use considerably less, but that's another topic:wink:). Einstein purportedly used maybe 20% of his brain(this may be an...
Some years earlier I read a book about brain enhancment, and of the many substances tested, it seemed that intake of nicotine had been the only one that actually IMPROVED test scores. Caffiene, one of the other substances tested, was not useful in this respect nor were many of the things...
When we percieve objects through vision, our visual cortex is involved in processing the information. When we dream, I think it is also working. But what about when we imagine geometric objects that aren't really there? If I were to start thinking about an object from my memory, would the visual...
I've begun taking a herbal dietary supplement that claims increased memory capability and other such enhancements to brain functions.
I read somewhere that they are not effective, however, I have noticed a distinct change, one that I believe may validate some of the supplement's claims: I...
From the Marrium webster online dictionary
brain>
1 a : the portion of the vertebrate central nervous system that constitutes the organ of thought and neural coordination, includes all the higher nervous centers receiving stimuli from the sense organs and interpreting and correlating them to...
Here is a favorite of mine from college that I thought you might enjoy: Consider a closed square loop of wire with two resistors, R1 and R2, each located in-line and symmetric about the center of the loop. Two voltmeters each measure the voltage change, V1 and V2, across R1 and R2 respectively...
"The hyperstructure of the brain"
I found this discussion on the Mkaku.org community. It is very...different and I wanted to know what pf members thought about it. Believe me, its a very interesting idea: http://www.mkaku.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=230
[SOLVED] A discussion about the brain.
If there is no such thing as 'purpose' in the whole universe, then how can we say that the universe has bestowed us with our own sense of purpose?
We have purpose in life. Even if that purpose is just to stay alive and enjoy life. So where does this...
is there any kind of studies done on people who use one half of the brain more then the other and some of the differences in personality characteristics?
for example:
one of the first things i note about people i meet is what hand they dominantly use, and if it is the left hand, it seems...
My Biology teacher had recently said that we actually use only like 4-5% of our brain capacity. Is she correct?[?]
I think that we are using close to or 100% of our brain capacity. Because the brain uses the highest amount of energy in our body, so i doubt that evolution of such a big brain...
The other day i came across [Removed Broken Link], and while reading it i started thinking; "Why don't we human try to compress the things we learn before learning them, and uncompress them when we need to remember them ?".
Then i realized that the human brain finds it easier to memorize a...