This has been bugging me and spooking me out since someone first asked me
There used to be a “Peanuts” cartoon where Linus says to Lucy he’s aware of his tongue. He tells Lucy, “What would my tongue be doing if I wasn’t thinking about it”
Well someone asked me a similar question. And truthfully it’s got me a bit freaked out. How does your body “know” to do what your brain tells it to do.
I know it must have something to do with nerve responses and such.
But until you think about it, it’s amazing at how much your body does without you knowing about it.
Like if you’re walking, you don’t even have to think about it, you just do it. And if you think about it, it’s a bit freaky. But let’s say you’re talking, carrying a book and chewing gum WHILE you’re walking.
That is like 4 things at once you’re doing all without thinking.
I know it’s kind of a vague question but if I think about typing as I do it, it just kind of prevents me from doing it.
It’s essentially not all that different from an electrical apparatus.
Your brains decides what muscle it wants to move and then fires an electrical impulse along a nerve. When it reaches the muscle, a chemical, called a neurotransmitter, is released by the nerve cell into the muscle cell. The chemical causes the muscle cell to undergo its own chemical process, which causes the cell to contract.
Each individual muscle really don’t “know” how to do anything; complicated actions, like running or smiling, that involve multiple muscles are coordinated by the brain. Your body is essentially a marionette, with the brain and nervous system pulling strings for the desired effect.
Heck, you’;re doing a LOT more than that; you’re also breathing, digesting, your heart is beating, and you’re self-controlling your body temperature, among other things.
The thing is, you’re doing lots of thinking, it’s just not necessarily conscious. Some of what your body is doing is controlled by parts of your brain that are totally outside your consciousness, like your heart beating or your digestive system. Others, like breathing, are a bit of both.
Your brain is complex. Really, really complex, staggeringly complex, so complex it can’t be mechanically comprehended. Just the parts of your brain that control the aspects of sight are quite a bit more complicated and advanced than all the computers you personally have ever seen in your life.
Maybe this is also self-evident, but all these things that you do intentionally, you learned to do. All the voluntary (skeletal) muscles had to be programmed to do these things at some point with varying degrees of input from you. They all require varying degrees of conscious thought and attention, and some are so automatic that attending to them even disturbs the patterns that we’ve developed sometimes. But what you consider to be normal and unintentional and without thought was learned. After all, you didn’t know how to do these things when you were born, right? And if you have a stroke, you’ll have to re-learn a number of them again, perhaps. And hope that you don’t, because you’ll start to realize just how much you really do without thinking about it. Your brain doesn’t DECIDE anything. You learned how to do things, which means that your nervous system and your muscular system established which neuro-muscular connections and pathways need to be activated in which particular order in order for you to perform any particular action. That pattern got established by trial and error as a child and is continually refined as you grow and change. After that, when you desired for that action to occur, you more or less automatically invoked that series of events. And if you don’t use that pathway for a while, it may degrade and not work so well. (If you don’t use it, you lose it.) It’s not brain science. Oh, wait. Yes, it is. If you want to be mind boggled, give some thought to how much a child learns in those first few months and years - how much she learns how do do, how much he learns about how the world works. Talk about astonishing. That’s why Einstein is supposed to have said that he learned all the physics he needed to know by the time he was three.
xo, C.
The rest of the body can get back at the brain’s dictatorial ways by sending impulses of pain, hunger etc. so that the brain has to get busy figuring out ways to keep the peripheral body happy.
I’ve always wondered what part of the brain we employ to get the rest of the brain to shaddup already. In The Shining Stephen King aptly referred to one of the character’s heavy drinking in order to get his brain to leave him alone, a.k.a. Doing The Bad Thing. These days we can take Ambien to get similar results, if we don’t care about the possibility of sleepwalking, eating 8000 calories worth of food out of the refrigerator and driving to Spokane without being aware of it.