UNDERSTANDING HOW THE BRAIN WORKS Its important to understand the complexity of the human brain. The human brain weighs only three pounds but is estimated to have about 100 billion cells. It is hard -to get a handle on a number that large (or connections that small). Lets try to get an understanding of this complexity by comparing it with something humans have created the entire phone system for the planet. If we took all the phones in the world and all the wires (there are over four billion people on the planet), the number of connections and the trillions of messages per day would NOT equal the complexity or activity of a single human brain. Now lets take a small problem break every phone in Mic-higan and cut every wire in the state. How long would it take for the entire state (about 15 million people) to get phone service back? A week, a month, or several years? If you guessed several years, you are now beginning to see the complexity of recoveri ng from a head injury. In the example I used, Michigan residents would be without phone service while the rest of the world had phone service that worked fine. This is also true with people who have a head injury. Some parts of the brain will work fine whi le others are in need of repair or are slowly being reconnected. AN ELECTRICAL AND CHEMICAL MACHINE Lets start looking at the building blocks of the brain. As previously stated, the brain consists of about 100 billion cells. Most of these cells are cal led neurons. A neuron is basically an on/off switch just like the one you use to control the lights in your home. It is either in a resting state (off) or it is shooting an electrical impulse down a wire (on). It has a cell body, a long little wire (the w ire is called an axon), and at the very end it has a little part that shoots out a chemical. This chemical goes across a gap (synapse) where it triggers another neuron to send a message. There are a lot of these neurons sending messages down a wire (axon) . By the way, each of these billions of axons is generating a small amount of electrical charge; this total power has been estimated to equal a 60 watt bulb. Doctors have learned that measuring this electrical activity can tell how the brain is working. A device that measures electrical activity in the brain is called an EEG (electroencephalograph). Each of the billions of neurons spit out chemicals that trigger other neurons. Different neurons use different types of chemicals. These chemicals are called transmitters and are given names like epinephrine, norepinephrine, or dopamine. Pretty simple, right? Well, no. Even in the simplified model that Im presenting, it gets more complex
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 05:11:08 +0000
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