Honest Book Reviews

Brain Structures and their Functions To learn more about neuroanatomy, please check out: "Neuroanatomy Text and Atlas," by John H. Martin. In the last post, we ended explaining the development of the spinal cord. We will continue this discussion by exploring the structures of the brain from a bottom-up perspective and describe their functions.  Cranial and Non-cranial Nerves If you read the last post (Here is the link:  http://hbookreviews.blogspot.com/), you should remember that the spinal cord was divided by two plates: basal and alar. When we move up from the spinal cord into the brain we would observe a collection of structures known as the brainstem. In here, the plates become nerves. The alar plate becomes the cranial nerve sensory nuclei and the basal becomes the cranial nerve motor nuclei. Remember that a nerve is a bundle of axons in the central nervous system (CNS) and that nuclei are a collection of cell bodies that are also located ...

The Brain and the Spinal Cord To learn more about neuroanatomy, please check out: "Neuroanatomy Text and Atlas," by John H. Martin. Glial Cells In the last cover, we covered primarily neurons, but the glial cells are also very important in the nervous system. Something important to note is that the same parts in the central nervous system (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system (PNS) have different names. We will see an example of this with a specialized type of glia cell. They outnumber neurons, however, the exact number is still being debated. One textbook affirms that the ratio is ten to one(1), while another one asserts that it is three to one (2). Whether is one or the other, the fact that there is more glial cells remains true. This might suggest that their function is vital for the nervous system. There are two types of glial cells: Microglia and macroglia. The former acts as immune cells because if there is an infection or damage detected in the...

The brain, the spinal cord, and everything else. To learn more about neuroanatomy, please check out: "Neuroanatomy Text and Atlas," by John H. Martin. Neuroanatomy, and psychology in general, can be studied with different perspectives, I will cover some of them in the following bullet points. Anatomical Perspective: This refers to the structure of body parts Cytoarchitectonic Perspective:This refers to the study of the tissue in terms of cellular structure (1). Phylogenetic Perspective: This refers to the comparative study of living organisms in terms of their evolutionary history (2). Functional Perspective: This refers to the point of view that studies a specific body part, in this case, the brain, in terms of functions. Ontogenetic Perspective: This refers to the study of a part of the brain in terms of its development (3). Using these perspectives, or other ones that are not mentioned here, we can look at the brain in terms of its differen...