That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites-The Brainstem

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

In this week's Neuroscience Bite, we continue our series of discussions on different brain areas with the Brainstem. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kregolsen and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another Neuroscience Bite. As I mentioned on our last bite, for Season 4 what we're going to do is focus on a different part of the brain for every bite. So Wednesdays I'm going to teach you the neuroanatomy of the brain and what all the going to do is focus on a different part of the brain for every bite. So Wednesdays, I'm going to teach you the neuroanatomy of the brain and what all the little parts do. And on Sundays, we'll do full episodes of the podcast. So today on this bite, the brainstem. The brainstem is basically the structure that comes out the bottom of your brain that connects the central nervous system to the

peripheral nervous system. So the brain has to communicate with the rest of the body and send messages. So the brainstem is that point where the neurons from the brain project down to control the muscles and other parts of your body and also to bring in afferent sensory information. But the brainstem also has some core functions. Most of them are tied to regulating the body, if you will. There's balance. The brainstem plays a crucial role in maintaining balance. There's blood pressure, breathing, facial sensation, hearing, heart rhythms, and even swallowing. And the brainstem also contains 10 of the 12 cranial nerves. Now these are nerves that start in your brain and they control your facial movements, sensations, and taste. We'll do a separate bite on the 12 cranial nerves and review

what they are. So the brainstem basically helps with most of these automatic functions in the body and controlling movement and bringing in information from sensation. But there's three sort of key components to the brainstem. The brainstem has the midbrain. This is the top part of the brainstem, and it's very crucial for regulating eye movements, amongst other things. There's the pons, which is the middle portion of the brainstem, and this plays a crucial role in coordinating facial movements, hearing, and balance. And finally, the bottom part of the brainstem is the medulla oblongata. And it helps regulate your breathing, heart rhythms, blood pressure, and swallowing. So what you should have got from that is that the brainstem and the different parts of the brainstem are responsible for controlling and regulating parts of these

automatic sort of responses that you have. The brainstem also has the reticular activating system. It's basically a network of neurons that help play a role in your sleep and wake cycles. And it also helps you stay alert and be attentive to your surroundings. So the brainstem, like I said, comes off the bottom of the brain. It's sort of if you were at the back of your neck where it connects to your skull and you went up in there and got to right where the base of the brain is, the brainstem sort of tucks right in there. A good Google image search will help you find the brainstem. And in fact, one of the things I'm going to do to support this is I'm going to write a little blog post on the website. So we have a thatneuroscienceguy.com website that's actually a link to my personal website. But what I'll do to support the neuroanatomy bites is I'm going to write a little blog post. So I'm going to post one right now about the hippocampus because that's

what we talked about last week. And I'll post one about the brain stem to bring us up to date. about last week and I'll post one about the brainstem to bring us up to date. Thanks for listening to this neuroscience bite. Remember you can email ideas to thatneuroscienceguy at gmail.com or just follow me on Twitter at thatneuroscienceguy and you can DM me. We love all the ideas that are coming in and we're going to have a lot of episodes this season that are focused on your ideas. My name is Olof Kregolsen and I'm that neuroscience guy. Thank you so much for listening to this bite and I'll see you on Sunday for another full episode of the podcast.