It’s long been common for brain function to be described in terms of the newest technology of the age. These days people are all about computers, so the brain is often described in terms of those. Fair enough. There are similarities.

    Of course, it goes much deeper. What the Bleep Do We Know? is well worth seeing. The more deeply we look into it, the less we seem to know about it. When we get down to the finer levels of brain function, science today is still learning. Short term memory, for instance, wasn’t even discovered till 1960.There are some things that are well established, though, and an understanding of these can only help us to see why a website like this should be necessary.
                                               
    The brain sits at the top of the long and short lines bearing electrical impulses that we know as nerves. It directs operations on both the greater and smaller scales. In the former, it presides over the body-control functions such as the appetites, the temperature and the management of nutrition in and waste out. It also manages the running of operations down to fractions of a second by using sensory input to establish changing conditions and to react appropriately. That’s what makes us smart enough to come in out of the rain.

    Broadly, it’s known that brain cells communicate by both electrical impulse and hormonally-generated chemical neurotransmitters. The synapse is very important in its function, and acts as a kind of gateway to the passage of an impulse. Synapses lie in strings and each of these strings is there to produce not a certain kind of action, but a certain action itself. There isn’t a synapse string for playing tennis, but all the arm strokes and leg movements in tennis have strings that control them. Children learn so quickly because the brain in the young rapidly makes these strings in response to all the stimuli which to the young are so new. In that sense, yes, the brain is a blank page.

    Synapse strings have to get together and work in concert to produce multi-faceted activities. Not only are walking and chewing gum at the same time such multiples. Walking alone is one – we stay balanced, the muscles work in sequence and find a rhythm, the arms swing, the sweat glands might start to operate, our sore toe’s favoured, and so on. It’s no wonder that in looking down on all this, a lot of the activity becomes sublimated. If all of this had to be conscious, we couldn’t function. We live in a constant and changing flood of emotions, conscious and unconscious actions, thoughts, memories, reflexes, all of which engage synapse sequences.

    The synapse process includes encoding. This is a two-way process, brain to body, to make things happen, and then body to brain in a reporting system about how well or badly it all worked out.

    Coding processes are not infallible, because when synapse strings are not fully established or used enough, they may decay, leading to loss of the memory they carry.