How are the thoughts? Are they electric impulses? They get allocated to what part of the brain, and how do they get allocated?
In: Biology
The science isn’t totally settled on how brains work, but what we do know goes something like this:
Each part of your brain relates to something specific. The smaller the part of the brain, the more specific the task (such as a tiny speck in your visual cortex being responsible for seeing *only* vertical lines). When you think of something, all the relevant parts of your brain light up in a cascade, each adding in their parts of your thoughts.
Memories, by contrast, are the at least partially the connections between neurons and the larger structures. There’s a saying that goes “Nerves that fire together wire together,” meaning that any time two components of your brain activate at the same time, under the same circumstances, the connections between those parts strengthen, thus making it more likely in the future that if one activates, the other will also activate. If you see fire and touch it, then get burned, your brain will wire the visual image of that fire to the memory of that pain, and thus you will think “fire burned me” every time you see fire.
Of course, it’s immensely more complex than this, but that’s the basic idea.
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