Why are we able to use the brain to fight the urge to sneeze or vomit, when it’s the brain that’s urging us to do so?
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It’s usually not the brain urging us to do these things but some other part of the nervous system.
When it is the brain, it’s different parts of the brain operating independently. (After all, the brain is just “part of the nervous system” anyway.)
It sounds like you have the idea that the brain is kind of one big thing that operates as a cohesive unit, but that’s not it at all. The brain has all these different parts doing different things, and a lot of the time they’re interacting and moderating each other, and sometimes they all agree on stuff, but that’s usually in emergency mode like fight or flight. Most of the time, your brain is a bunch of parts just loosely coupled but doing things largely independently of one another.
The same way you can run a game and a music streaming service on your PC at the same time. The brain is only a part of the whole system, the urge to sneeze and the ability to resist sneezing are two seperate programs, the PC that is your brain, can run at the same time.
I’ll add, generally speaking, sneezing, and vomiting are usually involuntary reactions, while fighting those reactions is very voluntary. Our ability as humans to overcome, and suppress those reactions, urges, and other involuntary responses to stimuli through some training, or practice helps support the adage ‘mind over matter.’
OP I dont have an answer but that was a really good question I never would have thought to ask!
Look up the autonomic nervous system, sympathetic nervous system, and para-sympathetic nervous system
There’s roughly 3 parts in the limbic brain. See the Wikipedia article about the evolution. The mammal or reptilian brain is the one that wants to sneeze, the neopallium one is (sometimes) able to suppress the urge.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbic_system
Part of what makes the brain an interesting and complex machine, is its ability to do things in parallel, which may contradict each other.
Cognitive dissonance is basically one part of the brain overpowering another in making a decision. So are addiction and task avoidance, (to vastly oversimplify)
Sometimes a very low level part of the brain that controls reflexes gives the order for something to happen, like a sneeze. A bunch of complicated things happen in your neural pathways and muscular centers, but the conscious part of your brain is still running, and may decide you *don’t* want to sneeze right now. What that part of your brain feels is a resistance and a lack of control.
One example of how conscious thought is a higher ordered power in the brain. What we think is more powerful than we really appreciate.
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