Brain scans from the virtual hospital

THE BRAIN

Animate creatures that meet their needs largely through moving have the issue of deciding where to move. At the most fundamental level one finds chemotaxis in which the detection of chemical signals is followed by a response:

from cells alive

Us larger organisms gather more data and do more sophisticated processing of this data with our brains.

memory and NMDA

a smarter mouse

Brain Injury Said to Affect Moral Choices

Explore the Brain a simple yet thorough site you should visit.

brain scans from the virtual hospital

Brain scans from the virtual hospital

NYU Natural Science II - Brain and Behavior

EEG of Epileptic Attack

Exploratorium disection of the brain
realvideo of the disection 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
scans of brain activity and responses

cerebellum

The cortex can be divided into 52 areas
Should we think of the brain as being multiple organs ?

here is an opinion

The brain really does contain organs. The subcortical regions contain the hippocampus (involved with memory storage and retrieval), the amygdala (involved anger), the hypothalamus (involved with the body's vegetative functions), the globus pallidus and the caudate nucleus (involved with movement facilitation), the cerebellum (involved with movement trajectories), the nucleus accumbens (involved with emotions), etc. The brain stem also contains many discrete nuclei of neurons involved in very specific functions, like the particular movements and sensations associated with the cranial nerves. All of these organs have structures and functions programmed in the DNA of the genes. So why not thecortex too?

The cortex is a convoluted surface, and because it is a kind of two dimensional array, rather than a group of globs, seeing it as composed of a group of organs is more difficult. But clearly it has organ like structure too. The occipital cortex is involved with vision, the temporal with language, the parietal with sensation, the frontal with movement, and the prefrontal with higher abstract functions. None of these distinctions are clear cut, there are no sharp dividing lines between these regions or functions, but these distinctions do exist in the brain.

Perception

Einstein's brain