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To understand how the brain works let us take a short tour of various part of the brain. You can take a video tour on our Video Page.
Until recently, conventional wisdom held that our brains were intractable, hard-wired computers. It was believed that what we were born with was all we got and that age wore down memory and the ability to understand, and few inter-ventions could reverse this process. But increasingly, evidence suggests that physical and mental exercise can alter specific brain regions, making radical improvements in cognitive function and that when you challenge the brain with new skills and new ways of doing things, it increases connections in the brain. Within the brain, the pathways and regions that are most utilized generally grow and become stronger while other parts shrink. By challenging the brain and forcing the use of different pathways, brain maps can be altered.
The cerebrum or cortex is the largest part of the human brain, asso-ciated with higher brain function such as thought and action. The cerebral cor-tex is divided into four sections, called "lobes": the frontal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, and temporal lobe. The brain is like a tree with information entering from the roots (the spinal cord, eyes, ears, mouth, and nose) and meeting in the brain stem in the “centre for consciousness”. The information then passes up the middle of the brain to the two frontal lobes which lie directly behind the forehead. Here, it is organized,
and then sent out through the branches to the other parts of the brain which again process the information and send it back to the frontal lobes.
We have a left frontal lobe and a right frontal lobe. Each is involved in planning activities, getting things in the right sequence, and evaluating possible errors. The left frontal lobe helps us with language. This is important because the majority of things that we do in our day-to-day life are language-related.
The right frontal lobe generally involves visual organization. Together their primary job is to allow us to think things through and determine how to use information that is located elsewhere in the brain. They are involved in problem solving, spon-taneity, memory, language, initiation, judgment, impulse control, and social and sexual behavior.
The frontal lobes are closely linked to the centers for memory and emotion in the Temporal lobes and the two together are consi-dered to be our emotional control center and home to our personality. The Frontal and Parietal lobes are, again, closely linked and are together consi-dered the center for cognition, language and behavior.
The parietal lobes can be divided into two functional regions. The first function integrates sensory information to form a single perception (cognition) in colla-boration with the frontal lobe. The second function constructs a spatial coordi-nate system to represent the world around us. Cognition is a complex process that includes inputs from processes such as
consciousness or awareness, attention, concentration, memory, perception, and language, and sends outputs to processes such reasoning, abstraction
and judgment.
Consciousness is the process of activation of the brain. Attention, the process of filtering out unwanted stimuli. Concentration focuses on certain stimuli let in by attention. All three are controlled by the “centre for consciousness” in the brainstem that receive inputs from all the five senses and give outputs to the
rest of the brain. The structured Masonic rituals stimulate attention and con-centration.
Attention can alter the layout of the brain as powerfully as a sculptor's knife can alter a slab of stone.
That was shown dramatically in an experiment with monkeys in 1993. Scien-tists at the University of California, San Francisco, rigged up a device that tapped monkeys' fingers 100 minutes a day every day. As this bizarre dance was playing on their fingers, the monkeys heard sounds through headphones. Some of the monkeys were taught to ignore the sounds and pay attention to
what they feel on their fingers and were rewarded with a sip of juice when they indicated the change. Other monkeys were taught: to pay attention to the sound, and were rewarded with juice when they indicated change in the sound.
After six weeks, the scientists compared the monkeys' brains. They found that in the monkeys that paid attention to the taps, the somatosensory region that
processes information from the fingers doubled or tripled. But in the monkeys that paid attention to the sounds, there was no such expansion. Instead, the
region of their auditory cortex that processes the frequency they heard in-creased.
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Leading Expert Experienced Neuro Psychiatrist | 5 Star Rated | Top Best Psychiatry Clinic | Chennai, India | Depression / Head ache / Anxiety / Stress / Child Behavior / Dementia | Online / Video/ Telemed Consult / Counselling
ph: +91 95661 33660
info