A pig’s breakfast

I have been reading  Future Publishing (2017) “How it Works – Book of the Brain”. It is eye catching and well written. It seems to be a corporate endeavour as there is no named author.

It reinforces my growing feeling that the emerging worldview is ‘true’. The new story is based on facts and evidence.

Brains evolved because living things must locate food and avoid predators. This is true even of single celled organisms and to some extent plants. But it is blatantly obvious in many celled animals which include invertebrates and vertebrates.

There are the classic five senses – sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell – but there are many others reporting to the brain about the position of the limbs, and the concentration of sugar, oxygen, carbon dioxide and a range of other chemicals. The rate of pumping of the heart and lungs has also to be kept in tune with the body’s needs.

Some of the sense organs, for example the eye, are sophisticated while others, for example the pressure sensors in the muscles, are quite simple -  but they all work in the same basic way. When the sense organ is stimulated it generates code which passes along a nerve that takes it to a specialist area in the brain where decoding takes place. But that is a grossly oversimple description. The massive amount of information coming in at a given moment has to be filtered and sorted so that relevant responses can be generated.

It is easy to imagine that the brain sits in the darkness inside the skull and is fed coded, electrical messages which it has to interpret and coordinate. And the system evolved rather than having been designed. So it is a bit of a pig’s breakfast - but it works.