Brain And Hunger Research Paper

I never really understood, or even attempted to research, how our body and brain are connected. By now, I have a much more greater understanding of exactly how hard our body and brain work together in order to keep us at the highest functioning, and healthiest level possible. One important aspect of this is called homeostasis, which regulates many body functions to maintain a level of balance. For example, when a person is outside waiting for the bus, and forgot to wear a jacket, homeostatis may kick in and the person will start to shiver. Shivering will help the bodys temperature to return back to its set point. One also may wonder how our bodys continue to function when external factors interfere with our bodys set point, well that is called …show more content…
Dr. Lachman shared with us how our brain effects our hunger. In essense, when our stomach is grouling, its actually brain sending signals that our body needs food. Again, our hypothalumus is the part of the brain which controls hunger. Our lateral hypothalumus is what turns on hunger as oppose to our ventral medial hypothalumus which turns off hunger. Unfortunatley, there are also eating disorders which effects the amount of food eating, and can create extremely unhealthy eating habits that can lead to death. The first one of this tragic eating disorders, which happens to be the deadliest, is anerexia nervosa. Here a person will starve in order to keep their figure at a certain, and usually unhealthy, weight. If food is consumed, it is highly likely be thrown up. Second, we have bulimia nervosa. This is characterized by a period of eating large amounts of high calorie food, followed by purging to prevent weight gain. Then we have binge-eating disorder where a person regularly binge eats with out trying to implement a program to stop the disorder. Causes as to why people develope these disorders range from child abuse, sexual assualt, rape, and molestation. Moving further along, our brain also notifies us when we are thirsty. There are two types of thirst, the first is osmotic thirst, and the second is hypovolemic thirst. They both differ in that osmotic thirst occurs when a person eats to much salty food. This is …show more content…
One other aspect it controls on top of body temperature regulation and hunger, is sleep. Two parts of the hypothalumus control when we wake up and fall asleep. The anterior hypothalumus initiates sleepiness while the posterior hypothalumus intiates wakefulness. But what intiates sleep? Well it starts by the loss of light, which our pineal gland recognizes and releases melatonine. This will reach the hypothalumus, which then releases seretonine and causes us to fall asleep. When falling asleep, we will go through four stages of sleep about five times a night, each lasting about ninety minutes. The fist two stages are spent lowering muscle activity, calming the breath, and slowing down the heart rate, and sleep slowy deepens until we reach the last stage which is the rapid-eye movement stage. The rem sleep stage is when people are at their deepest sleep and are dreaming. Like hunger, there are three different disorders associated with sleep which include, sleep onset insomnia, sleep maintnance insomnia, and combined insomnia. Sleep onset insomnia refers to people who have difficulty falling asleep and/or getting sleepy. Next we have sleep maintnance insomnia and here people are able to fall alseep, but they cannot maintain their sleep throughout the night. Finally we have combined type of insomnia, and people diagnosed with this disorder have trouble falling and staying alseep. A great way to