Brain Box

Brain Box

Three pounds of folded tissue runs everything you are. Your thoughts, your balance, your heartbeat. This module maps the brain's three big regions and what each controls, then asks the hard question: why is the brain so difficult to fix?

Three regions

The **brain** controls all your complex behaviour, through **billions** of interconnected neurones organised into distinct **regions**. Three of them come up again and again.

Label the brain

Label the brain's three main regions (hint: the cortex is the big folded part on top).

Read the symptoms

Neuroscientists mapped the brain largely by studying people who had lost the use of one region. Three patients each have damage in a different place. Work out where.

• Patient A thinks, speaks and remembers normally, and their heartbeat is steady. But their movements have become jerky and they cannot stay balanced. Where is the damage?
• Patient B is struggling to breathe and their heart rate has become unstable. Their thinking, memory and balance are all unaffected. Where is the damage?
• Patient C moves smoothly and their breathing is normal, but they cannot form new memories and struggle to find words. Where is the damage?

Which damage is worse?

Damage to the medulla is far more immediately life-threatening than damage to the cerebellum. Why?

• The medulla controls breathing and heart rate, which the body cannot survive without
• The medulla is much larger, so more brain tissue is lost
• The cerebellum can regrow itself, but the medulla cannot
• The medulla sits closer to the cerebral cortex

Mark the answer

A student wrote this in an exam. Tap the TWO phrases that name the wrong region.

• The brain is divided into regions.
• The cerebral cortex is responsible for memory and language
• .
• The medulla coordinates movement and balance
• .
• The cerebellum keeps the heart beating and controls breathing
• .
• Both of those last two happen without conscious thought

A hard organ to study [Higher tier]

Understanding and treating the brain is genuinely difficult, for three reasons that are worth naming separately in an answer: • It is extremely **complex**, with billions of neurones and no simple map of what sits where. • It is **delicate**, so any intervention risks harming healthy tissue. • It is hard to **access**, sealed inside the skull.

How they mapped it [Higher tier]

Neuroscientists have worked out what each region does in three main ways. They study patients who have brain _____ and record what those people can no longer do. They _____ stimulate parts of the brain and watch what happens. And they use _____ scans, which show both the structure of the brain and its _____.

Explain the difficulty [Higher tier]

Explain why scientists have found the brain so difficult to study and to treat, in about 50 words. A full answer needs all three:

• two properties of the brain itself that make any treatment risky
• why simply studying it is hard, before treatment is even attempted
• one method neuroscientists use to map it despite those difficulties

In the exam

Brain mapped. Grade-9 habits for the brain: • **Cerebral cortex** = consciousness/intelligence/memory/language; **cerebellum** = movement + balance; **medulla** = heart rate + breathing. • HT. The brain is hard to study and treat because it is **complex, delicate and hard to access**; it is mapped via **damage case studies, electrical stimulation and MRI scans**.