Brain and Behavior

   
       Isn't the brain amazing? Our brain is constantly taking in and processing new information. Have you ever though about how often you blink or breath during a twenty-four hour span of time? Or how your tongue knows exactly what to do in order to produce the words that you would like to say? Your brain is the one that is responsible for this so that you do not have to constantly think about all that your body has to do in order to produce these functions. Just thinking about all that our brains do through out our everyday life, without us even acknowledging it, is quite astonishing.

       One of the TED Talks that I watched and was quite intrigued by what I learned was conducted by Carl Schoonover, in which he explored how neuroscience has advanced and how we get see the wiring of the brain works through chemical staining. He compared our brains complexity to that of a computer, but we are able to see how the computer works by looking into the computer, deeper than just the screen.Chemical staining,  called the Golgi stain, is the way in which neuroscientists are able to see the certain neurons and cells in the tissue that they need to see. The Golgi stain is one of the things that has given us such an advancement of data on our brain's nerve cell's, the neuron. When they want to learn more about neurons they use this stain to light them up by using green fluorescent protein that comes from a bio-luminescent jellyfish. This amazes me that we are able to use the protein from a jellyfish to learn more about our brains.
       Another TED Talk that I watched was by Rebecca Saxe, who deals with the field of cognitive neuroscience and how we, as humans, put together simple messages over time. She tells us about a region of our brains called the
Right Temporo-Parietal Junction, who's job, as she says, is to think about other people's thoughts. She focused on this region and its job in children to discover that the Right TPJ and the cognitive system are slowly developing as we mature into adults. Meaning that children's ability to think about others are not fully developed and will not be until later. She then asks if we had the ability to change an adults moral judgement, which in fact we can using a tool called the Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). It sends a magnetic pulse through someone's skull, into a small region of their brain, and temporarily disorganizes the function of the neurons in that region. Saxe actually demonstrated the effects of the TMS on herself. The fact that we have a man made machine that can change the way we think and our moral judgement is a great discovery. Our brains have so much power and ability that we have not yet even uncovered.




Sources:
https://listverse.com/2016/07/08/10-things-our-brain-does-without-us-thinking-about-it/
https://www.ted.com/talks/carl_schoonover_how_to_look_inside_the_brain/up-next
https://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments/transcript#t-995185