Brain And Behavior

From watching some of the ted talks and some 

extra research I have found out many interesting things about the brain and its behavior. The brain's main function is to control our movement the ability to keep our balance and send information all throughout our body to do everyday things we don't even think about. For example sending information to our eyes giving us the ability to see,  sending information to our ears allowing us to hear and sending information to all of our other sensory organs allowing them to do what they were made to do to keep us alive. The brain connects to the muscles using motor neurons and goes through what I think is a complicated process. When the motor neurons inside the spinal cord fire an impulse goes down the axon, a very thin long extension of that single cell and It releases a chemical causing our muscles to contract and stretch allowing us to be able to move. Like I said this seems like a very complicated process but our brain is so powerful and fast that this process happens at about 268 miles an hour. I really like the story of the first TED talk that I watched about the guy that became paralyzed due to a car accident, but was able to deliver the opening kick at the Fifa World Cup in Brazil. He was able to do this because a group of neuroscientist created a robot skeleton suit that could receive commands from the brain of the person wearing the skeleton suit and take those commands from the brain and put them into actual movement. In the TED talk the guy gives a ton of information of how this is possible through a machine created by humans and many other elements of what it took to build this skeletal brain suit. I understood a good amount of it but my knowledge in neuroscience is not very developed so some of his points just went right over my head, but in saying that I like how he explained why a paralyzed person can't move. He tells us that the brain is still sending demands to the body, but that there is no connection because the spinal cord has been damaged and is out of order. For example lets say I go to class on the second floor of Abilene hall everyday and the door is always open, but one day I go to class and Dr.Pris locked herself out and no one has an extra key I am not going to be able to get inside the class room because the door is locked. Just like the demands the brain sends, they are still being sent but they cannot get into the spinal cord because it is damaged (the door is locked).

Sources:

http://www.ccmr.cornell.edu/faqs/how-does-your-body-move-does-the-brain-send-it-messages/

http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=1950

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0072574/

https://www.ted.com/talks/miguel_nicolelis_brain_to_brain_communication_has_arrived_how_we_did_it#t-558461