Human Brain

One of the chapters tested for my psychology midterms was the human brain.




The human brain is so intricated designed,
each region has a differentiated role and processes,
but these diff processes have to intergrate harmoniously in order for us

to make good sense of the world.




There might be billions of neurons in our brain,
and the damage of any one of them could potentially devastating...


Dr P, a very talented musician, suffered a stroke and damaged a part of his primary visual cortex(part that helps us to make sense of what we see).
He was diagnosed with visual agnosia, which is the inability to recognise objects and persons.

He patted the heads of water hydrants thinking these to be the heads of children and even mistook his wife for a hat.

Although his reasoning skills were intact, his messed up perception of the world often inhibited his problem-solving abilities. He could be lost in “a world of lifeless abstractions” (Sacks, 1970, p.11). displaying poor judgement and a lack of discretion.

But even so, our brain has this amazing power to adapt,
Dr P cant perceive things with his eyes,
but he can perceive things once he touched them/ or smell them.
Amazingly, his ability to play music is unscathed and he could still engage in someth he loved so much.

When a toddler runs towards his mother,
his mother doesnt perceive her son as a whole,
her eyes first detects familiar shapes, surfaces, contours, boundaries, colours, etc.
all these stimuli are then put together in the primary visual cortex.
Now mama has a visual representation of her son,
BUT that is not all,
this visual representation of her son is routed to other cortical areas
where memories and knowledge of her son are attached to his visual representation.
and ta da!
Mama recognises her baby boy, her precious child that she carried in her wombs for 9 months and all the sweet memories of his first tears, first smile, first tooth and first steps.

I never knew recognising an object is such a complicated process,
and our brain is so efficient in its processing that recognition seems almost effortless!

and and our brain has this special feature detectors that can detect familiar objects faster because of the strengthening of the neural circuits in our brain which correspond to this familiar object.

this is why in a crowded place, like that control station of an mrt station, you can always immediately notice someone you care about smiling at you from the corner of your eye. He just stands out from the crowd.

As I was studying about our brain, I cannot help feeling amazed at the complexity of our brain..
And even more, i cannot stop thinking about how amazing our God is to be able to design our complicated brain. And its so intricately designed (not a random mass of cells surrounded by fluid-->refering to amoebas and bacteria) , it just shows how how much he cares for us.

whoever said science separates us from God... <3