Book of the Brain and How it Works

This is the summary of the “Book of the Brain and How it Works”, which I read recently.

Think of the brain as a province. And that province has five cities, each with a role to keep the province working, which helps the country. Now, in your body, the country is your main body and the brain is the province. The cities are the different compartments of the brain.

Now, the first part is your hearing compartment. It takes in all the sounds you hear and makes sense out of them. For example, your mom tells you to clean your room. It goes through your ears and into the hearing compartment. Then the compartment makes sense out of it.

The second part is the decision making compartment. As you already may know, the decision making compartment helps you make decisions. For example, say you are in an ice cream shop, and you had mango, chocolate, strawberry, watermelon, lemon, vanilla and layers. The decision making decides which one to choose. Personally, mine would choose layers.

Time for number three. This is the touching and feeling compartment. Say you just won a video game like Minecraft with your friend. You high-fived. When you do that, the touching and feeling compartment is activated. When you touched your friend, you felt it, right?

Number four is the seeing compartment. Obviously you know what it does, it makes sense out of what you are seeing. Let’s take the ice cream example. When you saw the flavors, you also saw colors. That’s where your seeing compartment comes in. You see the colors, the seeing compartment identifies the color. Simple, right?

Last but not least, it’s the Learning skills compartment. This one stores learning skills that you have learnt and keeps it in your memory. Say you just learnt how to ride a bike, ok? When you practice, it goes into the learning skills compartment and becomes a skill that you can do without thinking about it. That applies with every learning skill.

Brain Cells!

Ever heard your friends say you lost brain cells? It might sound ridiculous, but you don’t. It’s just an expression. So let me explain.

The first type is Neurons. They are the mail carriers of the body. Say you got hurt. The brain senses it and sends a message to the part that got hurt and tells it to emmit pain. this alerts your body that you got hurt.

Electricity

Ok, I know what you’re thinking. How on earth is electricity related to THE BODY? Well, this is a different type of electricity. This type is the one that carries messages along neurons, and also what takes messages from your senses to your brain. Cool, right?

Seeing

Ok, say you see an owl. You know when you see it, you get the motion, color, lines, shapes, depth and position of the bird? Well, the whole image is split up into six parts. Let’s dive in!

The first part is the lines. If that was not there, the image would probably be as big as infinity. So the lines pretty much make the boundaries of each part.

The second part is the shapes. This one shows simple shapes that make up the image. Let’s take the owl again. The wings are triangles, the body is an oval, the tail feathers are a trapezoid, the eyes are circles and the horns are small triangles. It seems hard, but once you know it, it’s pretty straightforward.

The third is the one with the golden chest. Just kidding! The third is motion. Say the owl is flying. This section captures the motion that the wings make. Without it, it would look like the bird is hovering, frozen.

The fourth is position. This determines where the object goes. Let’s take the wings. Without the position, the wings might be on the head! Or on the rear end! Who knows?

The fifth is the color. This one, well, it determines the color. In our case, the owl is red. If we did not have it, the owl might be gold. Or blue!

The sixth, last but not least, is the depth. This is the MOST important. Otherwise, everything will be 2-d and there won’t be cubes and cones and cylinders and all that stuff. Plus there would be no shadows, and no spooky stories. Who wants that?

Memory

Let’s get to it; your memory store. The memory store, well, it stores memories! Let’s say you had an epic birthday. That would be stored in your long term memory. The people that came to your birthday; that would be stored in your short term memory. There is also unconscious memories, like how to ride a bike.

More About the different types of memories

Ok, in the last chapter #Memory, it didn’t really say what they do. So this chapter will explain

The long term memories, they store memories for almost your entire life. Like the previous chapter, I’ll use the birthday example. When you had your epic birthday, you would remember it for your whole life.

The short term memories, they store memories for a short time that could be one minute! Say you made a bad sketch. You wouldn’t want to remember it, so it would go in your short term memory.

The unconscious memories store memories you can access without thinking about it. It’s really straightforward.

Emotions

You know when you’re happy, or angry, or sad? Those are your emotions. Or your main emotions, should I say.

Emotions are like a language. Say you’re angry, and somebody sees your face. They usually start walking faster, or walking away. That’s because your face tells them that you want to be left alone.

Here is another thing. Say you see someone with a smile on their face. That sometimes makes you smile too. Why? That’s because your brain likes copying other people. But not all the time. Why? I absolutely have NO idea.

Sleepy?

Have you ever wondered what feeling sleepy actually means? I bet that you thought is was an emotion. Well, you’re wrong.

When you feel sleepy, that’s your brain telling you that you need to rest. And by the way, your brain never rests. Here are some things it does…

Sleep Cycling

The sleep cycle is like the brain’s alarm. You know that feeling when you want to sleep but you don’t want to sleep? That’s because you are at the end of the sleep cycle.

Muscle Shutdown

When you dream, it’s like real life, right? Muscle shutdown is a stage when the brain shuts down the muscles so that you don’t move in real life while you’re dreaming.

Tiding up

Throughout the day (And even I didn’t know this), the spaces between the neurons become cluttered with… something, I have no idea.

Dreaming

The classic activity of sleeping, dreaming is basically like a movie inside your brain, but it feels like real life.

Learning

Whether you’re in school or at work, you always learn something new. And you’re always tired after that, right? So when you go to sleep, the brain puts everything you learned into your long term memory, then organizes it.