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HEADACHES ( THE BRAIN’S EQUILIBRIUM )

7th Nov 2022 A1FINDMAN Leave a comment

HEADACHES ( THE BRAIN’S EQUILIBRIUM )

HEADACHES In the waning days of the Civil War, Union general Ulysses S. Grant was suffering from a terrible headache. He stopped at a farmhouse in the rear of his army, which had been pressing the forces of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. “I spent the night in bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning,” Grant wrote in his journal on April 9, 1865.

Shortly afterward, Grant was visited by a messenger who carried a note saying Lee, who had refused to surrender the previous day, had changed his mind and would be willing to meet to discuss a formal end of hostilities. “When the officer reached me,” Grant said, “I was still suffering from the sick headache; but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.”

**Red indicates pain in a map of common headache sites, none of which is in the brain itself**

Grant probably suffered from a muscle-contraction, or “tension,” headache. Typically, a tension headache begins when the neck, scalp, and face muscles are tensely held stiff for a long time. The most usual source is prolonged anxiety, a debilitating form of stress. Grant needed Lee to surrender; Lee’s announcement of his plans took the worries, and the agony, away. “The pain in my head seemed to leave me the moment I got Lee’s letter,” Grant reportedly told an aide as he rode off to end the war.

HEADACHES CATEGORIES

Even as it serves as an indicator that homeostasis is being disrupted, a headache is not a disease per se. Instead, it maya symptom of some other problem. It can manifest itself in response to irritation of blood vessels in the head, or to an injury or imbalance, or to inflammation of bodily tissues, to disorders related to stress-or to a host of other possible triggers. While it may feel as if the brain screams in pain, a headache can only occur outside the brain itself, which contains no pain receptors.

Headaches come in dozens of varieties. An easy way to categorize them is by the ways they cause pain. Muscle contractions such as Grant’s are one of the most common sources, especially among those living with high levels of stress. Dilation of blood vessels is a second typical cause. When arteries expand in the head, they squeeze against surrounding tissues, producing viselike pressure and pain. Fever, migraines, drug reactions, changes in blood pressure, and carbon dioxide poisoning can provoke dilation. Internal traction an abnormal growth in the head, for example is a third trigger. When a tumor presses against other tissues, or the brain itself begins to swell, the pressure causes pain. Inflammation is a fourth common source. Allergic reactions and infections such as meningitis can irritate pain-sensitive receptors in the head. Finally, headaches can occur without an obvious physical cause. These headaches are called psychogenic, meaning they arise in the psyche. They may spring from an emotional problem, as the sufferer converts emotional pain into real, physical symptoms.

The word migraine evolved from the Greek word hemikrania, meaning “half-skull.”

Many of these disorders strike not next to the brain, but in the eyes, sinuses, and other facial organs and tissues. Cranial nerves intimately connect the face and neck muscles to the brain, so it is no wonder pain sensations can spread until they feel as if they overwhelm the entire head.

Treating chronic headaches requires a proper diagnosis. Given the wide range of headaches and their causes, as well as the possibility of triggers working in combination, medical treatment often relies on detective work. At least, however, the efficacy of treatment has advanced since humanity first tried to cure a headache. A thousand years ago, Arabs recommended applying hot irons to the head, while a French medical treatise written in Latin urged sufferers to mix the brain of a vulture with oil and shove it up the nose. Today, modern pharmaceuticals, relax- ation techniques, and proper diet target dilation, tension, and other causes. One of the most effective pain relievers is common aspirin.

Pharmacological Management of Headaches

A GOOD CATCH, Books, GOOD FEELINGS / PLEASURE CENTERS [ NERVOUS SYSTEM ], HUMANITYUAPD, Nerve Cells, Science, THE BRAIN, THE NERVOUS SYSTEM

A GOOD CATCH [ THE NERVOUS SYSTEM ]

4th Nov 2022 A1FINDMAN Leave a comment

A GOOD CATCH [ THE NERVOUS SYSTEM ]

When the ball hits the glove, mechanoreceptors in the hand register the arrival as pressure. Those in the ear, attuned to the vibrations of sound waves, record the thwack of ball hitting leather. (And if the leather in the palm is too thin, cell damage in the hand may release noxious chemicals such as prostaglandins, which set off a chemical chain reaction ending with nociceptors initiating pain signals to the brain.) The cortex processes the new sensory stimuli, perceives that the ball has arrived, and sets in motion, with the cerebellum’s help, the voluntary muscle contractions that squeeze the gloved fingers.

Another way to think of the integration of brain functions, in a metaphor of psychiatry professor John J. Ratey’s, is to picture a house. Some functions exist on only one floor-the furnace kicks on automatically in the basement when the thermostat tells it to but others require communication among all the floors. The basement has the brain stem and spinal cord, which automatically oversee reflexes and respiration. The first floor houses basal ganglia and the cerebellum, which oversee the basement and communicate information to the upper floors. The second floor has centers of increasing control over the nervous system such as the motor and premotor cortex. The top floor is home to the prefrontal cortex, decision-maker of the brain. The top floor’s decisions get communicated downward, receiving feedback as they are carried out.

MANUAL DEXTERITY

EVOLUTION HAS selected for the development of eye hand coordination in human beings. As humanity’s ancestors swung from branches, they refined their performance by figuring out how to grasp one limb after another. Later, as they stood on two feet, they freed their hands for manipulating objects. Manual dexterity improved through brain hand feedback, leading to the creation of tools and other developments that aided survival. Today, the hand is so closely integrated to the neural circuitry of the brain that neurologist Richard Restak suggests it is best thought of as an extension of the brain.

His disease was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Such was the sudden drama of his situation that the illness claiming his life is sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease. This devastating disease gradually destroys motor neurons. As motor nerves lose their ability to send signals that move muscles, the muscles atrophy. Those afflicted lose their ability to speak and swallow, and eventually even to breathe. Researchers hypothesize that the motor neurons are killed by an attack of the sufferer’s own immune system, the production of too much of the neurotransmitter glutamate, or both. In making his farewell to 62,000 fans at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, GEHRIG called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.” For his performance on the field, as well as his demeanor while faCing a final opponent he could not defeat, GEHRIG is remembered as a “Gibraltar in cleats.”

The Functions of the Human Nervous System Biology Books for Kids Children’s Biology Book

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THE NERVOUS SYSTEM [ WORKING TOGETHER/SEEING THE BALL ( WHAT IS PLEASURE? ) ]

2nd Nov 2022 A1FINDMAN Leave a comment

THE NERVOUS SYSTEM [ WORKING TOGETHER/SEEING THE BALL ( WHAT IS PLEASURE? )]

WORKING TOGETHER

How do all of these systems central and peripheral, somatic and autonomic and receptors work together in the symphony of the brain? From simple actions to complex ones, these systems must work in concert.

Consider the “simple” act of catching a ball. It’s an amazingly complex process that requires some basic anatomical structures and neural circuitry before it can be attempted. Obviously, most animals cannot toss an object. Nearly all lack hands with fingers and opposable thumbs, as well as the dexterity that has developed in human beings, across millennia of evolution, through the growth of increasingly complex neural circuits in the cerebellum and cerebral cortex. Thanks to evolution providing the basic tools of manual dexterity and the expansion of specialized brain functions such as those children develop when learning how to throw a ball, adults have basic skills ready to be activated when a ball comes their way.

SEEING THE BALL

The simplified version goes like this. When someone throws you a ball, photoreceptors in your eyes register the action and send it along afferent nerve fibers to specific portions of the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex. Parallel processing of various sensations including the motion of the pitching arm, the path of the ball as it travels through the air, and its speed occurs within milliseconds. The cortex registers the perception “The ball has been thrown” and works with the cerebellum to calculate its likely point of arrival.

WHAT IS PLEASURE?

“OUR ENTIRE psychical activity is bent upon procuring pleasure and avoiding pain,” Sigmund Freud said in 1920. More than a CenturyLink earlier, British philosopher Jeremy Bentham had a similar idea: What humans seek to do is maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

But what is pleasure? Bentham equated it with happiness. Freud named things (especially sex) that make us feel good. It’s not an abstract argument for neurochemists . So called recreational drugs affect the centers of the brain that register pleasure. How ironic that Freud championed cocaine as a treatment for neural disorders.

**Catching a baseball requires a complex chain of actions in the sensory and skeletal muscle nerves, cerebrum, cerebellum, and basal ganglia.**

If it’s thrown particularly hard, say, and right at your head, the autonomic nervous system registers the action as a possible threat, sends out efferent signals that release a chemical soup of neurotransmitters, and may prompt you to duck. But if the ball arrives as an ordinary pitch you’ve experienced a thousand times, the motor areas of the cortex, which control voluntary movement, work with the cerebellum and basal ganglia to move your gloved hand to the right place for the catch.

ANCHORED : HOW TO BEFRIEND YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM USING POLYVAGAL THEORY

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GOOD FEELINGS / PLEASURE CENTERS [ THE NERVOUS SYSTEM ]

1st Nov 2022 A1FINDMAN Leave a comment

GOOD FEELINGS / PLEASURE CENTERS [ NERVOUS SYSTEM ]

GOOD FEELINGS

Pleasure also has its centers In the brain. A Tulane University neurologist stumbled across one such center in the 1950s when he tried to electrically stimulate the brains of schizophrenics to break them out of their passivity. His patients told him their implanted electrodes created pleasant sensations. The neurologist, Robert G. Heath, seized upon the results, focused his attention on the brain’s pleasure centers, and published the 1964 book The Role of Pleasure in Behavior.

Together with the discovery of pain centers in the brain, research on the physical causes of the sense of pleasure seemed to prove the ancient wisdom that humans seek to act in ways that bring them pleasure and reduce or avoid pain. New paths of investigation have led to innovative treatments for addiction, which is a form of behavior based on compulsive forms of pleasure seeking. PET scans reveal how drugs such as cocaine and heroin activate the brain’s pleasure centers. Cocaine, for example, blocks a neuron’s reuptake mechanism, which causes dopamine to linger in the synaptic cleft.

PLEASURE CENTERS

Joy, happiness, pleasure-what-ever you want to call the positive feelings that bring rewarding sensations and make life worth living-arise from the sensations of security, warmth, and social well-being combined with an awareness of the rightness of such feelings. A healthy brain recognizes the conditions that give rise to pleasure and responds to them appropriately. An unhealthy brain, or one that has learned negative behaviors such as addiction, can miss out on experiencing life’s joys. Both are primarily a matter of chemistry.

The sensation of pleasure registers in several brain regions, including significant centers in the hypothalamus and nucleus accumbens , which lies below a portion of the basal ganglia linked to movement. All such pleasure centers rely on the chemical work performed by endorphins and neurotransmitters, particularly dopamine, to create and sustain a happy mood. Experiments with rats have demonstrated the key role of dopamine. In the 1950s, scientists wired rats’ brains so that when they pressed a bar, they received a mild electric shock to the hypothalamus. This stimulation registered as pleasure; the rats would rather press the bar than eat. However, in later experiments, rats wired for self-stimulation first received injections of drugs that block the receptors where dopamine normally binds, denying its pleasure-giving action. The rats no longer felt a pleasant reward from pressing a lever to stimulate their brain, and they stopped doing so. When humans take a similar dopamine-lowering medication, often in order to ward off hallucinations and other psychotic behavior, the drug’s success comes at a price. Delusions may leave, but so do joy and motivation. Conversely, drugs like amphetamines that increase the activity of dopamine in the brain lower the threshold for the perception of pleasure. Too much of a drug-induced pleasant sensation, however, can lead to addiction and manic moods.

When the skin warms, the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system dilates blood vessels near the surface and activates the sweat glands. When body temperature cools, the autonomic nervous system narrows surface vessels to send blood to deeper, more vital organs.

“The greatest pleasure of life is love,” said the Greek playwright Euripides nearly 2,500 years ago. Like other forms of pleasure, love is processed by brain chemistry, specifically by heightened levels of neurotransmitters in the pleasure centers. MRI scans of the brain relate the feeling of lust to estrogen and androgens; attraction-more emotional than physical-appears to be associated with serotonin and dopamine. The brain chemistry that supports long-term relationships such as lifelong commitment has been harder to pin down.

Playing key roles in the sensation of pleasure are oxytocin, endorphins, and phenylethylamine , or PEA, sometimes called the love drug. These chemicals help foster the “high” felt in the first stages of love, as well as the euphoria some-times reported by long-distance runners. Even a small pleasure, such as finding your lost car keys, begins with a tiny rise of these and similar neurotransmitters in the brain’s pleasure centers.

DAEDALUS