With approximately 100 billion neurons, each holds around 10,000 connections to other neurons, our brain is a complex, congested, highway of thoughts.
Neurologists and cognitive psychologists nowadays are probing how the human mind is hosting thoughts, actions, emotions and our own personalities.
The ongoing investigation and continual study of this complex organ isn’t easy nor short. But the payoff for achievements in this field is far beyond measure.
“If we understand the brain, we will understand both its capacities and its limits for thought, emotions, reasoning, love and every other aspect of human life,”– said Norman Weinberger, a neuroscientist at the University of Irvine, California.
Credit: Graham Johnson, Graham Johnson Medical Media, Boulder, Colorado.
So why is the brain so difficult to explore?
According to Scott Huettel of Duke University, even if we put aside the fact that the brain is superbly complex, it’s research can never be sufficiently objective.
That’s because neuroscientists must study the brain while using one. – “our own subjective experience is a very poor tool to comprehand how our brain works,” Huettel said in an interview to LiveScience.
Even so, scientists have made somewhat of a progress trying to observe objectively at the human brain: Relatively new brain-imaging methods, such as the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have made it possible for scientists to watch the brain in action and examine how neuronal networks function.
They have pointed locations in the brain responsible for specific functions, such as “fight or flight”, visual information processing, dreaming and memorizing. Still, the more profound explanation of how neuronal networks form cognitive activities remains undiscovered.
Overall, the most important goal of most neuroscientists is to discover a well argued explanation to the idea of human consciousness, some of them consider it to be the delineation between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.
To be continued…