Question

Biopsychology Question:

In two paragraphs, discuss your thoughts and feelings around the fact that all your thoughts, emotions, memories, personality is embedded in the activity of billions of neurons.

Answer 1

Here, we shall discuss about 4 points such as thought, emotion, memory and personality followed by their relationship with neurons. We are well aware of the fact that brain or central nervous system is the one that controls all the 4 factors mentioned here. Neurons are ones that are found in the brain and is strongly related to all 4 factors. Let us first start with emotions. Emotions are the ones where parts of the brain such as the amygdala plays key role. More specifically it is the limbic system which includes the amygdala, hypothalamus, thalamus, and hippocampus that participates in facilitating different emotions. Neurons present in amygdala re of two types, these neurons gets fired during each emotional situation such as happiness or sadness and sends message to respective areas of the body as to create response accordingly. It is the left hemisphere of the brain that is associated with thought and memory. Neurons would first encode the information and would store the information in either short term and long term. It is the retrieval part of the memory where thought or application comes into play. Here the neurons that are responsible for storing memory if are strong enough and never damaged, they would provide access easily with respect to the information one is looking for. Mnemonics is one of the methods where brain can easily store information and retrieve when necessary.

Personality is one which is found as a combination of all factors mentioned above. Personality is one which develops through ages where neurons will absorb and store information which are necessary and eliminate those which are found essential. For example, a personality develops to a sportsman when he uses his neurons in retrieving sports based information to a very high level than seeking any other info. This would make neurons flexible enough in looking for sports related information around and providing long term memory as compared to those unwanted ones or to those stimuli where an individual is the least exposed to.