SevenSlideSeries: The Human Brain

welcome everybody this is dr. Bruce Barry this is the first session of the child trauma Catanese seven slide series the seven slide series is a set of presentations intended to be brief but helpful in your work this first session is on the human brain there are of course many things I can say about the human brain not the least of which is that it is the most remarkable problem-solving machine known in the universe it is astoundingly complex comprised of between 80 and 100 billion neurons with 10 times as many glial cells all of these cells are constructed in ways that create a variety of components as you can see from this image the brain actually has multiple parts there are lower areas and there's higher areas and this image gives you a little bit of a representation of some of the internal structures of the brain bottom line is this remarkable organ in all of its complexity allows human beings to do things that are unlike any other species one of the most remarkable things about the human brain is that it is capable of absorbing and storing more bits of information than any other species brain this allows us to essentially absorb the accumulated experiences from previous generations the other wonderful quality about the human brain is and it's fundamentally a social organ it allows human beings to create relationships and these relationships allow us to essentially unify and connect our brains in ways that allow us to solve problems to invent create and be productive in ways that are magnified beyond the individual and are essentially reflection of the group human beings are fundamentally social creatures in that brain is the organ that allows us to be social now let's talk a little bit about some of the micro architecture of the brain as I said before neurons and glial cells are present in the brain there's way many more glial cells than the neurons but neurons are particularly important because of their capacity for communication the typical neuron then again this is just a drawing they're much more complex than this but a typical neuron has a receptive area and the receptive areas include dendrites on the dendrites are receptors that are responsive to chemicals or neurotransmitters neuromodulators released by other neurons and when there's sufficient some'd activity and stimulation in the dendrites there will be the transmission of a signal down the neuron down the axon to the presynaptic terminal where a signal will result in the release of this neurons neurotransmitter that will then go out and stimulate another neuron and the result is a chain of interconnected neurons that work together to allow complex functions to occur now the majority of neurons in your brain are what we would call intrinsic neurons they have a receptive projection and a cell body all within the same little area so if you took a little part of the cortex and looked at it under a microscope you see thousands and thousands of cells neurons that have dendritic trees cell bodies and then synaptic terminals but all within the same little area now the interesting thing is that because of the complexity of the brain and all of the moving parts of the brain there have to be some ways to organize and orchestrate functioning across all these different brain regions and throughout these different interconnected networks and so there are certain neural networks some of which you've heard of serotonergic noradrenergic dopaminergic these these networks have cell bodies and receptive areas that are in lower areas of the brain and they send projections both upstream into multiple parts of the brain and downstream out into the body or actually influence the outflow into the from the brain into the body so that these cells these neural networks down here have disproportionate power in influencing and orchestrating function across multiple parts of the brain and as we'll talk about later on this unique microarchitecture gives them a particularly important role in the stress response in this slide what we're trying to illustrate is the fact that the brain is continually getting input from the outside world and from the inside way and we all know about our five senses sight smell touch taste hearing all of these sensory apparatus translate physical energy into patterned neuronal activity that goes into lower parts of the brain and essentially helps tell the brain what's going on in the outside world similarly you have sensory apparatus in your body that are continually sending signals up into the lower parts of the brain telling you where you are in space telling you how much oxygen you have telling you things about your heart and your muscles and your loans and collectively this input from the outside world and the inside world is continually monitored stored and acted on by the brain all of this is to keep you in equilibrium to keep you healthy and safe and ensure that you have the capacity to be a healthy and productive member of your living group one of the unique properties of the brain that we'll talk about quite a bit in this series is the capacity for the brain to process information and act on that information at multiple levels now as we'll talk a lot the brain is simpler in the lower areas and it gets more complex in the top areas and the top areas mediate these complex human functions like thinking and speech and language the middle areas of the brain like limbic areas mediate more emotional content the diencephalic parts the brain and the cerebellum are involved in modulating and regulating a variety of functions including some motor activities and maybe in the lower parts of the brain are involved in these fundamental physiological activities so what can happen is as information comes in from the outside world about a given experience let's say that it's an interaction with the colleague at work and it's a hostile interaction your brain basically will tell your body to increase your heart rate it will tell parts of your brain to basically change your body posture it will tell parts of your brain that you are feeling frustrated and irritated and maybe even angry and then it will tell parts of your brain what kinds of words you should use and sometimes the problem is because there's a sequential processing sometimes you act on information before you actually have time to process it in this really smart human part of our brains pre cortical multi-level processing is one of the most important aspects of understanding human behavior and we will return to this concept many times in future series but keep in mind this fundamental architecture about how the brain is organized and how it processes information sequentially and that every experience has the potential to elicit a variety of responses from the person mediated by a variety of parts of the brain you can get tense you can get angry and you can have a thought and all of these are brain mediated but mediated by different networks in the brain the final point I want to make is that the brain is remarkably complex and it's malleable the brain is plastic the brain has a capacity to change and as you go from the simpler and lower parts of the brain up into the more complex parts of the brain plasticity is e is more if you will powerful the top parts of the brain are easier to change and more responsive to experience than the lower parts of the brain and again when we talk about development we talked a little bit about the process of organizing the brain in a use dependent way and how pattern repetitive experiences influence neural networks and make them change how they work but always keep in mind that the more moving parts there are the more cells the more dynamically active any part of the brain is the easier it will be to modify and influence and change that part of the brain in other words neural plasticity tracks with dynamic activity and the cortex is the most dynamically active part of your brain it has more moving parts and it's therefore easier to change and influence final point about how the brain is organized is is that our cortex are the most powerful part of our brain plays a major role in modulating and regulating our impulsivity and all of the functions mediated by these lower parts that way now it's somewhat inaccurate but the fact is the lower parts of the brain are a little bit more primitive they're more regulatory you know that the concept of time many many many of the more complex and abstract capabilities that are mediated by the top part of our brain are not possible and cannot be mediated by these lower parts degree so as the brain is organizing from the bottom to the top you overtime during development become more capable of modulating your impulsivity your frustration and so forth and we all see this in normal child event anything that compromises the development or the functioning of the cortex is going to result in compromised cortical modulation and so that could be anything from a head injury to drinking alcohol to having developmental neglect where there's under development of parts of the cortex all of those things will lead to a higher probability that a person will have challenges regulating themselves and later on when we talk about executive functioning one of the major mechanisms of executive functioning is the balance between how strong your cortex is how well-developed it is and how functional it is relative to how disorganized the lower part of the brain is so that's the end of this seventh slide series presentation for future topics stay tuned to the child from Academy website we will be talking about a variety of things including the stress response state dependent function sensitization and tolerance and a whole range of other brief topics that will hopefully be helpful to you you

Channel: The ChildTrauma Academy Channel

Views: 169,436

Keywords: human brain, childtrauma, child development, brain development, childtrauma academy

Id: uOsgDkeH52o

Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 06 2013