Ok, i was having this reallllyyy deep conversation with my mate. You know the ones, "why are we here", "are their aliens", "what happens when you die".. and we got talking about brains.. How do they work? You decide you want to move your arm up and your brain sends you electrical nerves to do this? So its electricity and muscle working which get people speaking and moving? Wheres the information stored that lets you remmeber words and calculate sums..
How did something evolve to have a brain? and if they are electric nerves then couldnt we make one seeing as we can harnace the power of electricity?
Im confused... and I appreciate you all arent brain surgeons, im just curious if you could shed some light.
In short, they really are unfathomably complicated, at least in their higher mammal form.
Brains and similar processing centres, in layman's terms, allow individual animals to react to their environment and to subsequently change their behaviour and physiology accordingly. At their most simple form, such as in crustaceans, they are little more than clusters of nerve ganglion, a far cry to the phenomenal processing abilities you see in humans. As a layman's analogy, think of the evolution of the brain over time as similar as to how we upgrade our PC hardware to run more advanced software
In terms of electricity, it is better to use the phrase 'electrical impulses'. Nerves work by having a balance of chemicals inside and outside of them - as you might know from basic chemistry, different chemicals can be charged positively of negatively (these are called 'ions'). When we are poked, pressure causes the nerves to open up channels at one end, causing the ions to fly in and out. The change in electrical potential causes essentially a microscopic 'Mexican wave' along the length of the nerve, which is passed on to the next nerve. This is called an action potential, and all nerves operate this way, although they may be stimulated differently. For example, the cells in your eye cause action potentials by absorbing different frequencies of light.
As a bit of food for thought, if you touch something very hot or sharp, you will have a reflex response to move your hand away from the harmful stimuli. This message shoots from your hand to your spine via nerves, but it doesn't actually go to the brain - the spine sends back the appropriate response to minimise any time delay.
So, yes, it is an incredible piece of machinery that continues to mystify and amaze. Hot it allows me to remember information from many years ago, I cannot say - but it will be interesting to learn more as our understanding develops
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