A brief journey through the brain

We all have incredible brains. They continue to function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week whether we’re awake or asleep, conscious or unconscious.

The brain can be explored in a variety of different ways using many different terms, such as hemispheres, lobes, layers and matter. Here we will be dividing it into three sections.

The lower brain (sometimes known as the reptile brain) is the one that we are born with. It regulates our breathing, our sleeping, our waking. It regulates us automatically, without us having to be conscious of it. Everything about it concerns self-preservation.

The middle brain (or the mammal brain, the limbic system) develops in our early years and continues to evolve throughout our life depending on the experiences we have. This area deals with emotion, memory and hormones, among other things.

The upper brain (the rational brain, the human brain, the neocortex) is designed for advanced functions such as speech, reasoning, problem-solving, self-control and interpreting.

When it comes to threats and perceived threats to the body, the functions of the lower and middle brain instinctively come to the fore, while the upper brain function diminishes. This might be an important piece of knowledge for our general well-being: Neither ourselves or anyone around us will always have access to the part of the brain that is rational.

Moreover, as the brain takes around 25 years to fully develop, anyone under that age will have a different way of experiencing the world, different strengths and abilities based on what parts of the brain have already been constructed, which parts are under construction and which parts are only in the planning stage. Add to this the notion that everyone has had different life experiences – which will also shape the way their brain functions – and hopefully we might give up on any expectations that there is such a thing as normal or normality.