How dose our brains work ?

Question: How dose our brains work ?
- Keywords:
  brain
Asked by nadona2001 to Anil, Blanka, Cees, Emma, Mike on 26 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by jacob983, edward321.
- Michael Cook answered on 26 Jun 2012:
  
  We’re not really sure exactly how the brain works exactly – lots of people are trying to find out. But we do know some things – for instance, the brain is made up of billons of tiny cells called neurons. These cells are all connected together in a very specific way, a bit like an circuit board in a computer (but much more complicated!).
  
  Neurons can send and receive tiny bursts of energy from other neurons. They’re kind of like messengers – they receive something from one neuron and they pass it on to their neighbours. Just like I’m passing on a message to you now, and you might go and tell you friend all about neurons!
  
  Of course, because there are BILLIONS of neurons, and because they’re all connected in very complicated ways, we don’t really know how our brains really work. For instance, when you touch something, your fingers send messages to the neurons in your brain telling it what happened. But we don’t know how all that works very well! We just know that something is going on.
  
  Did you know that computer scientists use the idea of neurons to make computers cleverer? We can build things called ‘neural networks’ that are like very very tiny brains, and they can do things like recognise faces and read handwriting. It’s pretty cool!
- Blanka Sengerova answered on 26 Jun 2012:
  
  The brain is basically a bunch of nerve cells (many of them) which are linked in a network. They can receive and transmit messages about the environment from receptors connected to it via the nervous system, which the brain is a part of. Given that there are so many of the nerve cells (neurones) there are zillions of different ways in which they can combine so that pretty much any event (stimulus) can have its own set of neuronal connections.
  
  It is also thought that new neurones are forming all the time (at least in the early part of life), which is what enables learning and memory formation. But as Mike says, the brain is so complex that it still is and will long be a work in progress for neuroscientists in many years to come.
- Emma Trantham answered on 29 Jun 2012:
  
  Hmm I could have sworn I answered this question but apparently I haven’t…
  
  Mike and Blanka are right in that we don’t really know how our brains work at a cellular level. But we do know that different bits of the brain do different things. To give you a few examples
  
  -the olfactory bulb: this part receives and handles messages from the smell receptors in our nose. It is much bigger in other animals that use smell a lot (like dogs) than it is in us.
  
  -the hypothalamus: this part regulates how much we eat and sleep as well as producing lots of important hormones
  
  -the cerebellum: this part controls the fine detail of how we move. So it doesn’t tell us to raise our arm, but if another part of the brain has told our arm to raise up the cerebellum would control how much it raises. If our cerebellum is underdeveloped or damaged then we would be really really clumsy.

Question: How dose our brains work ?

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