What is Neuronlogy ? How does work? Compare with Buddhism

 

Neurology is not only a brain-related specialty. As well as migraines, epilepsy and headaches, behavioral and cognitive disorders, brain cancer and traumatic brain injury, neurological disorders include progressive diseases such as Huntington’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease, and demyelinating diseases such as multiple sclerosis.

Being top in the hierarchy of any system is not an easy job always. The organizational abilities at this level will be highly demanding, challenging, and daunting to say the least. Our nervous system, especially the central nervous system (brain & spinal cod) occupying such a position is expected to deliver in this line.

Good news! In fact they do deliver very well what is expected from them. We human beings are fortunate that our nervous system is gigantically advanced as compared to other animals on this planet. Multi-task abilities, executive level of thinking, very high-level organization etc are the norms of human brain. The spinal cord also ably supports the brain in many fronts.

The functional units of the nervous system are called as neurons (nerve cells). There is additional glial tissue (astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, microglia etc) that has supporting, nourishing and protecting roles.The question is; how all these unfathomable depth of sophistication and preciseness is endowed to human nervous system?The credit goes to billions of neurons, the most important functioning units of the nervous system. Human brain is estimated to possess nearly 100 billions of neurons!

The neurons dispatch nerve impulses (electric signals) through elongated fibrous structures called as axons and receive input signal via shorter fibrous structures called as dendrites. Certain highly organized ionic movements (sodium, potassium, calcium etc) taking place across the cell membrane of neurons and its fibers produce & propagate nerve impulses which are used for communication within the nervous system (brain & spinal cord) as well as between the nervous system and other parts of the body.

As mentioned above, the brain and the spinal cord possess all or most of the higher organizational properties of the nervous system. Various sensory inputs from the body & environment reach them, they process these inputs meticulously & methodically in a manner befitting to highly intelligent animals of the caliber of human beings, and then generate appropriate new nerve signals and dispatch these signals back to the body so that the body responds properly & promptly to the external stimulus. Some of these neural inputs and out puts are also stored in the brain as what we call ‘memory’ which will be used for future purposes.

The neurons within the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) are also interconnected through a rich and monumentally sophisticated network of axons and dendrites and this catapults the organizational abilities of human brain to an altogether unbelievable level!

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