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Understanding The Brain 's Physical Operation

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Understanding the brain’s physical operation is essential to frame the relationship between brain and mind. The brain functions as a result of many complex processes; however, Jeeves and Brown narrow the brain’s activity into eight critical principles. These principles provide a background necessary to deduce insightful information from neuroscience’s current research of the correlation between our mental lives and brain systems.
The first principle describes the PNS and CNS as action loops. An action loop is equivalent to what physiologists describe as a regulatory feedback loop. A feedback loop is composed of two nerve branches, an afferent (incoming) arm and an efferent (outgoing) arm. Monitoring the two arms of the feedback loop is an integrating center, which in most cases is the brain. Sensory information travels via the afferent arm to the integrating center (brain), where the stimulus is evaluated. After evaluation, the integrating center (brain) sends appropriate motor stimuli to specific tissues within the body. Thus, an organism is always sensing and responding to its local environment. From this principle, Jeeves and Brown suggest, “Subjective thought and cognition are derived from this action processing, including all the complex levels involved in modulating ongoing action” (Jeeves and Brown, 2009, p. 42). Hence, the first principle describes how humans constantly interact with the environment around them. The second principle describes a nested hierarchy of

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