The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons summary

A human brain might seem like nothing more than a gray lump to the untrained eye, but it’s highly organized – down to microscopic level. Let’s look at it in detail.

The lower brain sits at the brain’s base and controls basic body functions like breathing, sleeping and circulation. It stretches from the top of the spinal cord up to the brainstem and cerebellum.

Just like the rest of your body, your brain is made up of cells. Brain cells are called neurons and they build a sensory network that spans your entire body. Neurons collect information to send back to the brain for processing and send orders from your brain out into your body.

Neurons pick up and transmit information with electrical signals. They consist of a cell body, an axon and dendrites. The dendrites extend out of the top of the cell body like branches, collecting information directly from your sensory organs or other neurons.

Neurons translate information from the outside world into electrical signals so that our brains can process them. That’s how we have sensory experiences like taste, vision and smell.

Neurons aren’t directly connected to each other, however. There are gaps called synapses between them.

What would life be like if you couldn’t tell your mother from the supermarket cashier? People who suffer from face blindness experience that problem every day. They can see perfectly well but they can’t distinguish between faces. That’s because they have a problem in their fusiform face area (or FFA), the region of the brain located in the visual cortex of the occipital lobe that discerns between faces.

Brain disorders like face blindness can have highly specific symptoms because most neuron clusters have highly distinct specializations, like the FFA.

Have you ever started crying before you realized what was wrong? That happens because the brain sometimes generates feelings before it processes a rational thought. Feelings are highly useful: they allow you to immediately label incoming information as pleasant, unpleasant, harmless, threatening, important or unimportant.

Emotions and memories are formed in the limbic system, which is made up of other parts like the thalamus, hippocampus and amygdala.

The brain structures that make up the limbic system are special because they don’t communicate exclusively with neurotransmitters. They also use hormones, a class of biochemical molecules that act less quickly than neurotransmitters but are more far reaching. Hormones travel through the bloodstream rather than across neurons, and they can interact with all kinds of cells.

Hormones are released by glands in the brain and body like the thalamus, pituitary gland or amygdala. They help regulate your body functions and behavior.

The human brain is so delicate that even a healthy one doesn’t always function properly. Any tiny neurological shift in the process of recording, storing, relaying or producing information can have a huge ripple effect, causing something significant like sleep paralysis, which many otherwise healthy people experience.

Ordinarily, when you sleep, many of your muscles are effectively paralyzed by your brain to stop you acting out your dreams physically. When you wake, the paralysis is lifted. During sleep paralysis, however, the brain stem – which is responsible for regulating sleep patterns – brings your dreaming brain into consciousness but fails to unfreeze the muscles. This causes a few frightening seconds or minutes in which you feel like you’re locked inside your own body.

Can you remember your first day of school? How to tie a shoe? What about the thirteenth president of the United States? The last word of the previous blink?

The process of forming, storing and retrieving memories involves many areas of the brain, but the hippocampus is the most important one. However, we have different types of memory, and they use distinct neural networks to function.

You’ve probably heard the folk knowledge that certain people are “left-brained” while others are “right-brained”. “Left-brained” people are supposedly better at mathematics and problem-solving whereas “right-brained” people are more artistic.

There’s no such thing as a “right-brained” or “left-brained” personality, but it’s true that the right and left hemispheres of your brain specialize in different tasks.

The ancient Egyptians believed the heart was the seat of consciousness. That’s why they carefully preserved it during the embalming process – while tossing out the brains.

Two-thousand five hundred years later, we now know that consciousness is seated in the brain, but we still don’t fully understand how it emerges there.