The Brain

The Brain

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August 10, 2014

The brain is a fascinating arrangement and is the most rigid, as well as the most interesting part of the human body. It is often compared to operating like that of a computer, by controlling every part of the body. According to Pinel (2011), when living in an unfamiliar city, it is helpful for one to learn the names and locations of its major neighborhoods or districts and by doing so, one is able to utilize this information, so as to easily communicate the general location of any destination within the city. The brain is much like this analogy and composed of five divisions or “neighborhoods”, which are the myelencephalon, metencephalon, mesencephalon, diencephalon, and telencephalon.

The myelencephalon, also known as the medulla, is “the most posterior division of the brain” and “is composed largely of tracts carrying signals between the rest of the brain and the body” (Pinel, 2011). The reticular formation is a complex network of about 100 small nuclei that occupies the central core of the brain stem from the posterior boundary of the myelencephalon to the anterior boundary of the midbrain. The reticular formation name is due to its net-like appearance and reticulum stands for “little net”. It play a role in arousal and is often referred to as the reticular activating system. With the variety of nuclei in the reticular formation, they involve an arrange of functions, such as sleep, attention, movement, the maintenance of muscle tone, and a variety of cardiac, circulatory, and respiratory reflexes (Pinel, 2011).

The metencephalon “houses many ascending and descending tracts and part of the reticular formation” and these “structures create a bulge, called the pons, on the brain stem’s ventral surface” (Pinel, 2011). With the pons, they are considered as the one major division of the metencephalon, while the other is the cerebellum, which is known as the “little brain”. The cerebellum is the large,...