The Brain : Part 3

A Handbook of Health
by Woods Hutchinson

(Page 23 of 30)

As soon as the surface of the brain has recognized the pain and where it comes from, it promptly sends a return message back down the same cable, though by different nerve-wires, to the muscles of the foot and leg, saying, "Jerk that foot away!" As a matter of fact, this message will arrive too late, for the centres in the spinal cord will already have attended to this part of the matter, often almost before you know that you are hurt.

However, there is plenty of other work for the brain to do; and its next step, quicker than you can think, is to wake up a dozen muscles all over the body with the order, "Sit down!" And you promptly sit down. At the same time, the brain "central" has ordered the muscles of your arms and hands to reach down and pick up the foot, partly to protect it from any further scratch, and partly to pull the thorn out of it. Next it rushes a hurry call to the muscles controlling your lungs and throat, and says, "Howl!" and you howl accordingly. Another jab at the switchboard, and the eyes are called up and ordered to weep, while at the same time the muscles of the trunk of your body are set in rhythmic movement by another message, and you rock yourself backward and forward.

This weeping and rocking yourself backward and forward and nursing your foot seem rather foolish, - indeed you have perhaps often been told that they are both foolish and babyish, - but, as you say, you "can't help it," and there is a good reason for it. The howl is a call for help; and if the hurt were due to the bite of a wolf or a bear, or the cut had gone deep enough to open an artery, this dreadfully unmusical noise might be the means of saving your life; while the rocking backward and forward and jerking yourself about would also send a message that you needed help, supposing you were so badly hurt that you couldn't call out, to anyone who happened to be within sight of you. So that it isn't entirely babyish and foolish to howl and squirm about when you are hurt - though it is manly to keep both within reasonable limits.

If the message about the thorn had been brought by your eyes, - in other words, if you had seen it before you stepped on it, - then a similar but much simpler and less painful reflex would have been carried out. The image of the thorn would fall on the retina of the eye and through its optic nerve the message would be flashed to the brain: "There is something slim and sharp in the path, - looks like a thorn." When this message reached the brain, and not till then, would you see the thorn, just as in the case of the pain message from the foot. Then the brain would take charge of the situation just as before, flashing a hasty message to the muscles of the legs, saying, "Jump!" while its message to the throat and lungs, instead of "Yell," would be merely, "Say, 'Goodness!' or 'Whew!'" and you would say it and run on.

If the thing in the grass, instead of a thorn, happened to be a snake, and you heard it rustle, then the warning message would come through your ears to the brain, and you would jump just the same; though, as it is not so easy to tell by a hearing message exactly where the sound is coming from, you might possibly jump in the wrong direction and land on top of the danger.

This is the way in which you see, hear, and form ideas of things. Your eye telegraphs to the brain the colors; your ear, the sounds; and your nose, the smells of the particular object; and then your brain puts these all together and compares them with its records of things that it has seen before, which looked, or sounded, or smelt like that, and decides what it is; and you say you see an apple, or you hear a rooster crow, or you smell pies baking. Remember that, strange as it may seem, you don't see an orange, for instance, but only a circular patch of yellowness, which, when you had seen it before, and felt of it with your hand, you found to be associated with a feeling of roundness and solidness; and when you lifted it toward your nose, with the well-known smell of orange-peel; so you called it an orange. If the yellow patch were hard, instead of elastic, to the touch, and didn't have any aromatic smell when you brought it up to your nose, you would probably say it was a gourd, or an apple, or perhaps a yellow croquet ball. This is the way in which, we say, our senses may "deceive" us, and is one of the reasons why three different people who have seen something happen will often differ so much in their accounts of it.

It is not so much that our senses deceive us, but that we draw the wrong conclusions from the sights, sounds, and smells that they report to our brains, usually from being in too great a hurry and not looking carefully enough, or not waiting to check up what we see by touching, hearing, or tasting the thing that we look at.

This message-and-answer system runs all through our body. For instance, if we run fast, then the muscle cells in our legs burn up a good deal of sugar-fuel, and throw the waste gas, or smoke, into the blood. This is pumped by the heart all over the body, in a few seconds. When this carbon dioxid reaches the breathing centre in the medulla, it stirs it up to send promptly a message to the lungs to breathe faster and deeper, while, at the same time, it calls upon the circulation centre close to it, to stir up the heart and make it beat harder and faster, so as to give the muscles more blood to work with. If some poisonous or very irritating food is swallowed, as soon as it begins to hurt the cells lining the stomach, these promptly telegraph to the vomiting centre in the brain, we begin to feel "sick at the stomach," the brain sends the necessary directions to the great muscles of the abdomen and the diaphragm, they squeeze down upon the stomach, and its contents are promptly pumped back up the gullet and out through the mouth, thus throwing up the poisons.

And so on all over the body - every tiniest region or organ in the body, every square inch of the skin, has its special wire connecting it with the great telephone exchange, enabling it to report danger, and to call for help or assistance the moment it needs it.

Houghton Mifflin Company
Copyright, 1911, By Woods Hutchinson
All Rights Reserved
Tenth Impression

About the Author

Woods Hutchinson (1862-1930) was an American physician, born at Selby, Yorkshire, England. He graduated from Penn College, Oskaloosa, Iowa, in 1880 and received his medical degree from the University of Michigan four years later. He worked as a professor of anatomy at the State University of Iowa and then became a professor of comparative pathology at the University of Buffalo.