The Brain/Discoveries&Discoverers of modernday brain discoveries on howthe brain operates&can change
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luke1733
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The brain has certain parts that focus on different levels such as movement, taste, depression, thought and so on. This focuses on stories about brain surgeries and discoveries as to why some people have nightmares, to why some people can taste numbers, as to what drugs effect which parts of the brain, to how seizures can enhance musical gifts. It's the way these stories are told through listing people's names and their lives and what was going on in that day along with actually making this science talk seem an interesting read that got me. So, to keep this biosphere on diverse I'm sharing it.
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I'm not about to type up everything that struck me out of interest, so instead I am posting the PDF complete page for every page that I felt was Cliff Notes worthy. My dots signify the point of interest. One dot means where the point of interest starts. Two dots means that's where the point of interest stops. The dot at the bottom of the page signifies this page has dots. If I can't upload the PDF files then this post should be deleted.
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The Name of the book: The tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons by Sam Kean. Ain't nothing from this point on written by me.
p. 11 Deep inside the human reptile brain sits the pons, a ? in the brainstem an inch long. When we fall asleep, the pons initiates dreaming by sending signals through the mammal brain to the primate brain, where dreams stir to life. During dreams, the pons also dispatches a message to the spinal cord beneath it, which produces chemicals to make your muscles flaccid. This temporary paralysis prevents you from acting out nightmares by fleeing the bedroom or taking swings at werewolves.
While mostly protective, this immobility sometimes backfires. Sleeping on your back can collapse the airways in your throat and deprive the lungs of oxygen This isn’t a huge deal during nonparalyzed, nondream sleep: the parts of the brain that monitor oxygen levels will rouse your body a little, halfway to waking, and you’ll snort, shift your head, or roll over. To get oxygen during dream sleep, though, the brain has to order the pons to stop paralyzing your muscles. And for whatever reason- a chemical imbalance, a frayed neural wire-the pons do not always obey. So while the brain succeeds in rousing the mind a little, it can’t turn off the spigot for the paralysis chemicals, and the muscles remain limp.
Things go south from there. If this limbo persists, the mind wakes up fully and, sensing something amiss, trips a circuit that includes the amygdala, a structure in the mammal brain that amplifies fear. A fight-or-flight response wells up-which exacerbates the problem, since you can’t do either. This is when the panic starts. And again, some people have it much worse. At least with me, the actual dream I’m having stops as soon as my mind wakes up. Not so in some people: they never quite escape the dream state. They’re semialert to their surroundings, they’re paralyzed, and their brains keep conjuring up dream nonsense. Because the human mind is quite good at making spurious connections, they then ink the characters in these hallucinations to their paralysis, as if one caused the other. It’s no wonder some people believe in demons and aliens: they actually see and feel them.
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scientists recently found that by stimulating the claustrum with a tiny electric shock, they could knock a person unconscious.
http://www.cracked.com/article_22180_5-insane-things-we-recently-discovered-in-human-body_p2.html