Understanding

Your fabulous brain helps you make sense of your world. Your senses feed it information, and your brain instructs you on what to do about it. There are also many things that your brain takes care of without you having to think about them.

Breathing, for instance. The brain stem (medulla, for you techno kids) looks after your breathing. It sends electrical signals to your lungs to keep them running. Otherwise, you would do nothing else but think about breathing.

The same goes for your beating heart. Your brain stem takes care of it so you can think about more important things.

Those more important things are handled in places like your frontal lobe–the part behind your forehead. Of all your brain parts, it is the most complicated. It’s where decisions are made.

It’s a place of action. Incoming messages from your senses are sorted and used to help you understand things. Even simple decisions like what flavour of ice cream to choose for dessert go through your frontal lobe.

It reminds you that you don’t like strawberry flavour but love chocolate. Easy decision, right there.

Not so easy are those decisions that involve emotions. A decision means you need to make a choice. Choices can be difficult, especially if other people’s feelings are involved. It’s all part of being human and the journey of understanding you’re on.