Like if I said to you “raise your left arm” you could do it without even really thinking about it. You just will it to happen and it happens. How does that work?
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At the most basic level all your muscles are connected to nerves, that are connected to your spinal cord, that finally connect to your brain. So there is a direct physical connection between the part of your brain that thinks about moving all the way to the muscles that are needed for the movement.
The basal ganglia (which regulates dopamine and limbic signals) gets an electric and chemical signal from the prefrontal cortex via the mesolimbic pathway and passes a signal to the areas of the limbic system responsible for raising your arm. The limbic system sends electric and chemical signals through your spinal cord to the nerves responsible for raising your arm.
The fact that we generally think with some amount of language here suggests that the connections between the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes help to generate the thought in the prefrontal cortex.
Oftentimes, though, we lift pur arms without thinking, if we have an itch, we don’t think “I have an itch” in language, we just scratch it. So in this case, the basal ganglia is acting without any necessary cognition to scratch the itch through sensation and response to the sensation.
So for the general question, the mind controls the body by the prefrontal cortex (where you think) telling the basal ganglia (where you act) what to do. But it doesn’t always do so, and most limbic actions like walking are done without any real attention from the prefrontal cortex. Learning something abstract also requires the basal ganglia interacting with the prefrontal cortex to reinforce chemical and electric pathways in the whole brain to contemplate the abstract problem. So in this sense, the body also controls the mind.
This probably wasnt eli5 enough but neurology is fuckin never eli5 im sorry. There are also nonbiological theories of mind which I chose not to contemplate here.
Your brain in a thinking machine made of a bunch of nerves, which are like your blood vessels but for idea juice. Your brain is like the heart in that it pumps idea juice out to all your parts to tell them what to do, and idea juice flows back to your brain to tell it what’s going on. So when your eyes see a sandwich, they send idea juice to your brain with a message “seeing a sandwich”, then your brain reads the recent messages from your stomach to see if it’s saying “I’m hungry” or “we cool”, and then if it it’s been saying “I’m hungry” enough then your brain sends messages to your arm that tell it “pick up that sandwich and stick it in the mouth.”
Muscles are easy. Imagine being tased, your muscles tense up. Well the nerves that control your muscles do the same exact thing, your brain sends an electric pulse to the nerve, which then causes your muscle to contract. The strength of the pulse determines just how much it contracts.
And considering it’s an electric signal, it basically moves at the speed of light — though in reality, significantly reduced due to various factors, but still a fraction of a second to travel a few feet.
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