Im wondering that if we are the brain why we cant control things like pain and our immune system.
In: Biology
The brain doesn’t control the nerves that sense pain, they send impulses to the brain, not away from it. It would be like asking why your radio can’t control the broadcast, it’s a one way system. The nerves that control movement are different nerves (hence you can loose feeling in your hand if you sit on it too long, but can still move it)
Pain keeps you alive. If you could turn your pain off at will, you would be more likely to die before reproducing, which drives evolution to favor nervous systems that can’t be turned off by just thinking it.
You are taking a simplistic mechanistic approach to the human body.
So let’s go with that. You are driving your can. You can control the direction and speed but you don’t have a control that increases and decreases that water temperature that cools your engine.
That portion of your car isn’t under your direct control. The water temperature happens because of factors beyond your direct control. It is automatic.
Large portions of the human body are regulated but are not under your direct control. The autonomic nervous system handles many of those functions. You can try holding your breath. However you will be forced by that system to breathe before you lose consciousness.
There are other systems within the body that are programmed to function without any regulation. Your energy production within your cells isn’t controlled by the nervous system or the autonomic nervous system.
Just because you are in the driver’s seat doesn’t mean you are the car.
The brain sends out electrical signals on the nerves. It can only control things that are electrically controlled.
The immune system is chemically controlled, by chemical signals in the bloodstream, not electrical connections. The brain can sorta control pain, but it’s hard to override a critical safety system.
I would imagine, if there were mutations that allowed for control of those things, it would ultimately be a disadvantage for survivability and result in being selected against. Generally, you would not want to turn off pain response.
I’m not sure conscious control of your immune system would allow you to respond better. For however that would even possibly work, I’m sure it would be prone to doing a much worse job, especially for an infant, that doesn’t know how to control such a thing. It would also require a level of intelligence, and understanding, making it something that really couldn’t manifest until we get to higher cognitive species and at that point, nature has developed an optimal auto response that would provide an advantage over something that would potentially kill when mismanaged.
You are one-third of your brain. You are the Ego. There are two other parts that experience reality just as much as you that you aren’t really fully aware of or even experience. They’re called the Id and the Superego.
These other two parts are part of you. But everything that you can point to in your own head as something that you consciously experience consists of only the parts that make up the Ego.
Your Id experiences the pain and then projects it to your Ego, screaming at you to make it stop. Since you are unaware of the reality of your Id, you can’t control it screaming at you. It just screams and screams and there’s nothing you can do about it besides stopping whatever stimuli your Id wants stopped.
Your Superego can also be referred to as your conscience. When you do something that your Superego deems “bad”, it will, in the same way as your Id, project its experience to you by screaming at you for doing that bad thing. That’s why you “feel bad” when you fuck up and can’t control whether or not you feel it. Short of physically assaulting someone, you can’t really stop them from screaming at you.
Don’t ignore these other parts of yourself. They experience reality just as much as you do. Listen to them. They are trying to communicate with you, they just don’t have the ability to use language.
This is just a model of something that we truly have no idea how it really works.
Because the idea that we are just the brain in sole and one-way control of the body is a myth.
The idea of the brain as a single entity under control of our conscious mind is, too. It’s a series of interrelated systems, many of them completely autonomic.
We’re still learning exactly how that very two way control works, exactly how much control over the body is exerted by the spinal cord without asking the brain first, all kinds of things. Neurology is a young and deeply incomplete field.
You are not your brain. The thing you call your self, “I,” is like a piece of software, an adaptive construct or neural mechanism that allows abstract awareness beyond simply reacting to stimuli.
But ignoring that, think about just how much information your brain is handling at every moment. Your brain filters out a lot of “noise” that you don’t have to pay attention to. Do you have any idea how overwhelming it would be to have to constantly control every aspect of your biology? Imagine having to simultaneously tell your heart to beat, your lungs to breathe, your intestines to pump, your liver and kidneys to filter toxins, your glands to fight infections, your skin to sweat, your blood vessels to expand or contract, etc etc. You wouldn’t be able to do anything else but exist. Be glad that your brain handles all that stuff automatically.
We don’t want to control pain. Pain is a signal that something is going wrong and needs to be fixed. Being able to ignore that would be a bad thing.
I see it as you have the conscious part and the subconscious part. Your automatic side controls things like heart pumping, breathing, secretion. Your conscious part needs rest sometimes, while your subconscious is a software running in the background with no pause.
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