Cerebral cortex

Vocal and singing breathing exercises hold the key to effective sound quality and proper pitching, along with developing the correct singing posture. When we breathe, we tend to take in air and release it in a burst, as quickly as possible. This holds true for 99% people but singing requires you to breathe in a different manner. As you move up the learning curve, you will also begin understanding how important it is to control your breath especially while singing soprano or tenor. Proper…

Our sensorimotor has many parts to function and manipulate what we want our body part to do. We simply must think and react to what are next move and in rapid millisecond either our hand or leg moves. As this occurs, our primary somatosensory cortex that’s located in our central sulcus has a full chart of information lined up for our function to travel all the way to our spinal cord and make a movement. As Agnosia damages the path of any function of either of the temporal lobe or cerebellum, it…

Have you ever wondered how the brain works or how it is connected? Outside the brain there appears to be a handful of pink and gray muscles. However, as you enter the human brain, it reveals an extremely complex circuit, connecting you with the rest of your body. The brain contains almost 100,000 miles of blood vessels and billions of cells. It is the consummate library of information, remembering data and processing it as quickly as 11 million bits per second (The Human Brain). The brain is a…

Electrical and chemical synapses serve different functions in the nervous system, and the use of each type of synapse has advantages and disadvantages for situations requiring signal transmission. One of the advantages of the use of an electrical synapse is speed, as electrical synapses allow action potentials to pass directly from neuron to neuron through the use of gap junctions. This direct passage and resulting speed of transmission isn’t present in chemical synapses. Chemical synapses rely…

My Hemispheres and Me Our brain’s two hemispheres look alike, but they have different function. This specialization of the right and left hemisphere is called lateralization. In the past scientists learned about this functional specialization of our brain by observing people with brain damage or injury and examining they brains after death. Today scientist have other methods. They can monitor brain waves, blood flow, or glucose consumption in the brain to find out which part of the brain is…

Dickinson, who grew up in a Puritan environment, rejected many core tenants of Christianity such as sin and damnation, and her idea of eternity greatly diverged from the typical materialistic view of Heaven. However, she also did not conform to the tenants of Transcendentalism as her emphasis on the incomprehensibility of one’s spirituality and after-life clashed with the traditional belief in the full participation and absolute knowledge of the universe. As witnessed in much of her poetry,…

Parietal Lobe: The parietal lobe is vital for sensory perception and integration, including the management of taste, hearing, sight, touch, and smell. It is home to the primary sensory area, a region where the brain interprets input from other areas of the body. Because of the parietal lobe’s role in sensory integration, spatial reasoning, and language skills, damage to the parietal lobe can have a broad range of consequences. Occipital Lobe: The main functions of the occipital lobe are vision,…

The prefrontal cortex is responsible for the capacity for representational memory, one part of the development of delayed response, and it depends on the maturation of the frontal cortex. Trauma victims, particularly children, usually have difficulty with those functions (van der Kolk, 2003). Excessive subcortical activation with decreased cortical inhibition combines to leave vulnerability in regards to the nature of incoming information. As children must develop ‘object permanence’ to modulate…

Neonatal Developing brain parcellated atlases Gilmore et. al. parcellated the brain of 74 neonates using anatomical expertise into 38 ROIs for the purpose of studying the gray matter growth and the asymmetry in the neonatal brain (131). In this study, the individual parcellation maps are used for comparison between individual brains. Gousias et. al designed a delineation protocol to manually parcellate the brains of 20 preterm and term neonates into 50 ROIs (132) based on macro-anatomical…

The suggestion of emotional perception having a mutual relationship implies that the ventral system is significant in the recognition of emotion of environmental stimuli and their states, while the dorsal system assimilate with the emotional influence and their performance of executive functions. (Ceylan & Saym, 2012) The resulting emotional response from the limbic region transmits to the thalamus by which it defines the incoming information through the sense organs. According to Ceylan and…