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Originally posted by ANTHONYT:
Hello,

This is a question for you science types out there with brains bigger than mine.

Just how many of the body functions are controlled by the brain?

What I mean is, if you replaced the human brain with a theoretical 100,000 man control center, what could they do to the human body on their control consoles?

Could they constrict blood vessels? Dissolve or build body tissues? Adjust heart rate? Eliminate pain signals? Change body temperature? Alter metabolism? Create a porn-worthy hour-long erection? Release adrenaline? Increase apparent strength?

What is the limit to which the human brain can control the human body? Is it really all in the head, or is the body mostly responsible for taking care of its own business?

--Anthony

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however much of that is controlled by some part of you central nervious system.

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Originally posted by ANTHONYT:I know we can choose not to breathe (for a while.) But what part of the body does most of the behind-the-scenes regulating and bookkeeping?

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Originally posted by m52nickerson:

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Originally posted by ANTHONYT:I know we can choose not to breathe (for a while.) But what part of the body does most of the behind-the-scenes regulating and bookkeeping?

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I think you are looking for the Autonomic Nervous System.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system


Oh, and a bit of trivia since you have brought up erections twice now. Your erection is cause by muscles relaxing, not tensing. That is why nervous men can not achieve full salute but are already doing so when we wake up.

I do not fear God, I fear the ignorance of man.
A warning to everyone, AURaptor is a known liar.
...and now a Fundie!
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=53359]

Hello,

According to this information, the Autonomic Nervous System is located in the brain, too. And it controls a lot!

--Anthony


Note to Self:
Raptor - woman testifying about birth control is a slut (the term applies.)
Context: http://tinyurl.com/d6ozfej
Six - Wow, isn't Niki quite the CUNT? And, yes, I spell that in all caps....
http://tinyurl.com/bdjgbpe
Wulf - Niki is a stupid fucking bitch who should hurry up and die.
Context: http://tinyurl.com/afve3r9

“The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.” -T. S. Szasz

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Originally posted by ANTHONYT:
According to this information, the Autonomic Nervous System is located in the brain, too. And it controls a lot!

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I have spent a fair amount of time writing computer software that will recognize patterns in a page full of squiggly lines.

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So, what about cell growth and things like that? Does the brain/spine have any input into that kind of behavior?

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If I get a cut, or break a bone, what makes it heal? Do the cells just get shaking on their own without any input? If I put a broken bone in a nutrient vat, would the cells heal themselves?

What about muscles and fat? How does your body decide when to grow muscle and fat cells? And does the brain get any input? Or is it just a mechanical reaction?

Also, for those things that are controlled by chemicals/hormones, are these just carriers for the brains will aka endocrine system is the email of the body, while the nervous system is Skype live chat?

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And when you get an arm cut off or blown off, sometimes the vessels seem to constrict and keep a person from bleeding out. Other times the person bleeds out of open arteries and such in seconds. What makes the difference? How does the body decide what to do in this kind of trauma? Does the brain/stem/spine have any input?

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It appears adrenaline and nopinephrine neurotransmitters are a part of this.

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Originally posted by ANTHONYT:
Oh no! Soon spamware will be able to figure out forum registration protocols.

(Usually when registering on a forum, I am presented with a box containing weird patterns, and then some letters or numbers superimposed that must be typed in. The idea being that software can not be made to correctly read this image and come up with the correct response. Hence only a human can register.)

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I hate those! Though I do understand their purpose. I'll support anything that kills bots.

But I mean more of this kind of thing:

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I am trying to imagine what a person could do if they could exert conscious control over all brain functions- conscious and subconscious. (That is assuming that they could simultaneously pay attention to all this minutiae. Hence the control room example. The control room could be a billion people for argument's sake.)

I'm trying to discover what you could control if you could absolutely and positively control every aspect of the brain/stem/spine. Just how far does our brain/nervous system provide input over the minute details of our body's operation... and how much is uncontrolled by the brain, and hence not accessible via a central operating system/control center.

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It's a great analogy. The difficulty is in the scale. You would have so so many little workers and so many control rooms - like billions - taking part on a completely different time scale.

In the one second it takes for your brain to do something, signals have flashed through the brain maybe millions of times (I don't really know millions or billions, but I'm figuring a LOT). So it's like your little human workers go to the office, do their thing, go home, deal with their other issues, while contributing to a task like evolving a galaxy. They don't experience life on a long enough time scale to see the larger pattern of what they are doing.

Similarly, the evolving galaxy can never be aware of the 11-year cycles of sunspots on our sun. It's way way too short a time to matter in any way to the Milky Way.

We can't control our neurons because our conscious thought can't function on that scale of space and time.

It really blows my mind. Sorry to go back to this, I'm not trying to hammer anyone, just returning to something that oddly makes me very happy - the complexity of the natural world. I love it.

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Originally posted by ANTHONYT:
Hello,

So what's with the squiggly lines, Mal? Cryptography?

--Anthony

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Originally posted by ANTHONYT:
Hello,

So it's like sonar that can tell you what's in the ground?

Here's an oil pocket. There's a dead body. Some water now. Underground bunker. Etc.

The only trick is interpreting the wave patterns?

--Anthony

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Captchas have always felt like a cop-out. As a business, you're passing your own business problem onto users. Moreover, the way in which the problem is passed onto users is half-assed and can cause loads of confusion.

Fundamentally, that's just wrong.

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Let me tell you a short story by way of introduction. Yesterday, I was trying to register on a website. The website in question employed one of the worst CAPTCHA codes that I had ever seen. It looked like a child had written something with an ink-starved pen and then left the piece of paper out in the rain. In a way, it was quite artistic, but unfortunately it was also totally illegible.

I had a go at deciphering it, made my submission, and I wasn’t surprised to be thrown back with an “incorrect code entered” message. “Oh well”, I thought, “the next CAPTCHA they give me can’t be as bad as that one was.”
It wasn’t. It was worse.

This one resembled the stains left on my carpet when my cat has engaged in a midnight feast on an unsuspecting rodent. Not only was it also illegible, but I also couldn’t give it any credit for being artistic this time. I really wanted to register on this site though, so I screwed up my face, got my eyes as close to the screen as possible before my focus started to distort, and tapped the letters and numbers into my keyboard.

“Incorrect code entered. Please try again.”

Now, as someone who works in the web design industry, I have a fairly decent attention span on the Internet; probably more so than most of Joe Public. But by this time, I was getting frustrated. I didn’t have time for this.

So I left the site open and opened a new tab, just to curiously check to see if I’d missed an alternative service provider in the same sector. As it happens, I had.

A few clicks later, and no CAPTCHA code to be seen, I was registered on the alternative site, and my business was winging its way into the hands of this other website’s proprietor.

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