[Music] consider this before viewing understanding the amazing brain part one think of the functions that are brain performs daily what do you know about how it works how many parts of the brain can you name during the program observe how the brain works differently at different stages in our lives note examples of how the functioning of a normal brain can be disrupted [Music] assignment Discovery now presents understanding the amazing brain part [Music] one 12 miles outside of downtown Boston there's a bank unlike any other right thank you very much thank you all right good night good night [Music] tonight a deposit is about to be [Music] made here at the brain Bank a mind is a terrible thing to [Music] [Applause] waste in a three lb mass of tissue about the size of a grapefruit the human brain guards the secrets of what makes us us until recently the brain was regarded as a black box whose secrets were secure from reach but now scientists are creating a revolution in imaging genetics and molecular biology that is Unlocking The Box as we open the lid we are beginning to understand Evolution's most miraculous achievement and as the brain offers up its Secrets our ability to tap its real potential may be at our fingertips [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] hey we are beginning to harness the brain's incredible ability to invent itself then reinvent itself throughout life this girl is a testament to the amazing resilience of the human brain young jod Miller leads an idilic Life as a 99-year-old girl you would never guess that she has undergone some of the most drastic surgery imaginable [Applause] happy birth Jody's first three years were textbook normal happy birthday dear Jody then about 6 weeks after her third birthday a storm of epileptic seizures took control of her [Music] brain she couldn't use her left arm hardly at all uh she Barely Used the left leg seizing a good good deal at the time multiple types of seizures ordinary life became impossible medicines did nothing and the seizures threatened to turn fatal desperate Jody's parents brought her to pediatric neurologist Eileen Vining we found her seizures were all all coming from her right Hemisphere and we knew that there is virtually nothing else nothing but rasmon syndrome that can produce that that picture uh in a young child rmon syndrome is a degenerative brain disorder that disrupts the electrical activity that makes our brains work tiny electrical explosions were flaring up in Jody's right hemisphere as seizures became almost constant she lost control of her left side only one radical treatment option remained we knew that she was never going to have her seizures controlled with medicine and we knew that she and her family faced taking out that half of the brain okay Dr Vining recommended a daring surgery called a hemisphere ectomy it would be performed by pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson the whole concept of taking out half of a person's brain uh would seem to to most people impossible human beings are incredible creatures with a brain that is beyond belief in terms of its capabilities to the point where we can take half of it out and still function in a normal way 85% of our brain consists of the cerebral cortex which is divided into two hemispheres each with four main lows the cortex handles many of our higher functions areas on both sides control thinking movement and sensation but the right side controls our left side and vice versa jod would lose almost all of her right Hemisphere and the cavity would fill with cerebral spinal [Music] fluid the operation has to be performed with great Precision to avoid damaging the parts of the brain that control Jodi's life functions like heartbeat and [Music] breathing the surgery went flawlessly what we're looking at here is an image in MRI that was done on Jody after her surgery and what it shows us is the fact that we in removed her entire right Hemisphere and what we're able to see here is indeed her very normal left hemisphere and all the beautiful gy of her cortex and we can see right down the middle the right hemisphere that was there is now replaced by fluid but how could Jodi function normally with only one hemisphere it's because of a miraculous ability of the brain called plasticity our brains can actually change shape creating new connections between neurons or brain cells to replace lost or damaged ones Jody's left brain started reconnecting almost immediately at least as good as this and if I remember he were Pink Just Like You this young lady had half her brain removed went home i' guess maybe 10 days later and was already walking she was ambulating she was able to walk out of the hospital and that's because her left hemisphere had such resilience such plasticity it was able to say okay something needs to move her left leg wa you going to open it okay jod continues to work on training her brain to overcome the slight paralysis in her left side sometimes but enough now that that's very good you need to do that stretching stuff honey you know that don't you are you doing enough of it no think so need a topic sentence the human brain is just an awesome thing because every time I look at it I say to myself this is the thing that makes this person unique it still is just such a wonderful thing to find a young person whose life now can move SP who's no longer having seizures who's developing in a normal fashion I take the good with the bad and I say this is a bad thing potentially that we have to do for an extremely good cause it begins with a few cells at the tip of an embryo brain cells neurons multiply at an astounding rate 250,000 a minute at only 5 months this fetus is well on its way to developing most of the neurons it will ever have about 100 billion but it's not the number of neurons that make the brain work so brilliantly it's the fact that they communicate with each other each tiny neuron can make up to 10,000 connections when neurons connect networks start to form allowing electrochemical messages to pass between them in a couple of years those 100 billion neurons will make 1,000 trillion connections we've known for decades that genes dictate the basic structure of the brain's networks but what we've started to understand is that it is our experiences that complete the brain and make us who we are sensation movement and even play Shape a child's brain each experience reinforces some connections these are the ones that will be retained throughout life creating our senses our ability to imagine to learn even to love in other words that make us who we are [Music] the capacity for learning is greatest when we are very young but as we grow older it diminishes there are critical windows for making the proper connections for some of our most important [Music] functions Liz ortner is in danger of missing one of those critical periods she was adopted when she was 2 months old and her parents soon began to suspect that she was deaf we even had the perfect test on all the kids were asleep except for her and um she usually goes Berserker when Daddy comes home told him just come in and and call her from behind he came in the house and he yelled at her and he he called her name and he got 2 feet away from her and she still had not a clo and as soon as he touched her then she went crazy and was you know happy to see him so we knew something was wrong normally Sound Vibrations are converted into electrical impulses in the inner ear the signals travel over the neural network to the part of the brain that perceives sound which lies within the temporal lobe and is known as the auditory [Music] cortex but lizz's ears had been damaged by an infection before she was born and her brain isn't receiving any stimuli from sound her doctor John NEP Parco knows that it can affect more than just her hearing there is a period of time early in life when mother nature devotes tremendous resources to development of the brain during that time normally brain circuits are being refined and that refinement allows a child to develop language without sound stimulation we know that what happens is that there's a narrowing of the potential the brain to use sound information later on and so this very expensive period of development is essentially wasted good morning how are you did you get some sleep last night about 2 hours I hope you're well rested yes we're all set to go I don't want you to carve too deep into her skull we'll be very careful about that say that okay Liz is now 14 months old as each day passes she's getting closer to missing the critical period in which she can easily learn to talk today she'll get a chance at beating the deadline a surgical team will insert an ingenious device called a clear implant into her inner ear if it works it will help reactivate her hearing Pathways transmitting electrical impulses to her auditory cortex she will be able to hear our surgical approach will be to come behind the ear as you can see right here and to open up this air cell system it's a it's a little bit narrow in a young child as you'd expect but going to plan on placing the device right about this location on on the skull up and behind the ear it should be a nice location for her Liz is one of the youngest children ever to receive a cier implant which gives her the best possible chance to catch [Music] up the operation takes only 2 hours those are all very acceptable values and we know we have good location of all of those contacts we're all set no problems no surprises the entire implant fed in very nicely we checked all expectations are high but it will be a month before the implant can be activated Liz needs time to [Music] heal 4 Weeks Later the ERS hopeful but anxious make the drive back to the hospital [Music] so it's here finally it's we've all been counting down the days this is a big day for like it's it's like being born into a new sense have to whisper to her I think she'll be shocked I think she'll be scared don't you know if I see her just you know look at me and smile with wide eyes I'll I'll be estatic um if I see her cry I'll I'll cry with her I can't imagine finding a new sense and that's what she's going to be doing she's heard nothing hi ever hi hi pretty girl is I'll go ahead and start with a very very very soft presentation of what will sound like to her like a beep beep beep so sound to her is something very foreign she might she might ignore it or she might get upset she might grab you I can't believe she doesn't know that you know Clapping Your Hands doesn't make a clap sound but she doesn't so if we can get her to recognize that there's a sound in life because of something um that's the first step I'm going to go ahead and start and these I do not expect her to hear these um in the beginning okay Liz is intent on her game while everyone watches carefully for any response to a soft beep did she blink it on the audiologist increases the volume just slightly y did you hear that did hear Liz ortner has heard her first [Applause] sounds you know where that sounded her brain can now begin the process of connecting itself for hearing and for speech if all goes well she should be talking within 2 [Music] years she's not it's going to be a lot of work and I know it's going to take a long time I know that it'll be a year I expect it to be a year before she understands her name I'm not in it for today or for a year I'm in it for when she's 30 and [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Beyond during childhood the brain manufactures billions more connections than it can ever use giving each of us innumerable options about what we learn and in what we can Excel but it's a case of use it or lose it as childhood ends a dramatic pruning process occurs the well-used connections are strengthened seldom used links die off by the time we're teenagers only half half of them remain but that's just part of the story there's a lot more going on inside the teen brain though at times it seems like you don't really know where you're going to go until that minute and then you end up somewhere you can't plan you can't playing like what you're going to do on the weekends cuz anything can happen I just wanted to do it just cuz of the luck it's probably like now like it's like one day I said let's do it so I just did it Randomness is some kind it's exciting recently science has confirmed what parents have suspected for eons the teen brain really is different Dr jurgan Todd has observed some profound differences in how teens and adults process emotional information essentially when we compared adult brains to teenage brains what we found was that adults use their frontal cortex to process information whereas teenagers use an older part of the brain the amydala to process information the amydala was one of the early structures to develop as our brains evolved it's where instinctive reactions such as anger and fear reside it may not be surprising that the teen brain uses it much more than the adult brain does as we mature stronger connections are made among the different structures in our brains the instinctive reactions of the amydala become tempered by the frontal cortex which is the human brain crowning achievement it's where planning reason and moral judgment reside an active frontal cortex is a sign of both emotional maturity and intelligence so what would the brain of a genius look like and what if he was a teenager we brought child prodigy Michael Carney to Boston along with his father for a unique test no one had looked inside the working brain of a genius before would jural and Todd see more connections or cortical area and would his brain function more like an adult or a teenager he's been called one in a billion in 1994 Michael was the youngest person ever to graduate from college at the tender age of 10 it was his third of four Guinness World Records Michael Kevin Cy Kum l I was the youngest person to graduated from high school at 6 also at 600 I was the youngest person to enter college at 10: the youngest person to graduate from college and at 14 uh was the youngest person with a master's degree it's uh like a I'm a 32-bit kid in an 8bit world I've always had to to balance the the adult and the child side I still play video games read comic books all that sort of you know regular kid stuff sort of odd because when I do act normal when I do act like a regular kid they they say oh you're so immature duh I'm 15 you know and then when I when I act adult they say oh you have no social life Michael is what's known as an Omnibus Prodigy he excels at whatever he sets his mind to his IQ goes beyond anything measurable when we took Michael to see Dr jurgel and Todd she wasn't quite sure what she'd see don't worry okay okay one question we'd like to be able to answer is how is a genius different than a normal in terms of brain processing and one way that we think this might occur is that the networks that the brain connections are different in individuals who are gifted or exceptional the team will give Michael different kinds of tasks and then record what areas of his brain become active with his impressive mental abilities they expect his frontal lobe to override the more emotional reactions of his amydala how you doing Michael okay okay Michael the table will move now okay they start by asking Michael to name as many words as he can that start with a given letter which utilizes his intellect he does extremely well hey Michael how you doing okay okay it's just going to be a minute I need to look at these pictures looks at photographs of people and interprets the emotion on their faces this one requires more subjective judgment and Michael has some trouble uh annoyance okay the results of Michael's tests LED jural and Todd to some intriguing observations the emotional task showed that he performed very much like a typical Adolescent and that is his amydala activated but his frontal loes did not not significantly activate whereas when we asked him to carry out a word production task Michael completed this task predominantly with his frontal loes so on the task that was more cognitive he was very adultlooking and on the task that was very emotional he looked very much like an adolescent y we really don't know why Michael is as bright as he is why he can process information as quickly as he can we can certainly say that the percentage of brain volume that includes frontal cortex is greater so perhaps he has more network capacity in that region of the brain so perhaps a superior intellect is a combination of activating more gray matter or cortex and having more connections regardless of brain power it takes time for emotion and intellect to connect and create maturity [Music] now that you've seen understanding the amazing brain part one talk about this teenagers use more of the amydala portion of their brand while adults use more of the frontal cortex describe these areas of the brain how might this difference affect relationships between adolescents and their parents discuss other factors that might contribute to conflicting views among adults and teens now try this with a partner take turns being blindfolded and wearing your plugs afterward write a paragraph describing your experience how were your other senses enhanced did you feel left out of what was going on log on to Discovery school.com teers for curriculum materials and resources to support understanding the amazing brain to learn more assignment Discovery suggests the brain by Jim [Music] bar consider this before viewing understanding the amazing brain part two how do doctors study the brain and its functions what medical technology did they use to get a better look inside during the program look for ways that computers have enhanced our ability to understand the brain note how technology helps people with brain damage improve their quality of life assignment Discovery now presents understanding the amazing brain part two [Music] [Applause] [Music] recent breakthroughs in understanding the brain have come about because of new technologies like the functional MRI or fmri beginning in 1994 it revolutionized brain research by capturing detailed pictures of our minds at work okay come on over do you have anything in your pockets the more scientists see the more complex the picture becomes the everchanging mind is like a film that is constantly being re-edited at an astounding Pace producing a new story for us every single moment at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston drct Cathy o crven is using the fmri to create snapshots of us seeing by scanning the brain as it processes visual information um what's going to happen is you'll be seeing images appear on that screen and what I want you to do is just look at the pictures and try to identify the people and the places that you see images of famous faces and places are projected onto a screen as the subject views them Dr o' crven records his brain activity we can actually tell whether or not um the activity is different when they're processing different kinds of images so while he's looking at at these pictures we can actually localize the two parts of his brain that are involved in processing those two kind of kinds of stimula when she looks at the data o Craven can read the mind of her subject she can tell what the subject was thinking about a face or a place if we look within the region where the place area is and we see this kind of activity these bumps this is uh how strong the signal was the brain activity as a function of time this is when the subject was looking at faces this is when he was looking at places faces again places again faces again places again the fmri can take a snapshot of the brain every half second but that's a snail's pace compared to the super speed of brain activity which processes hundreds of thousands of signals every second now there's a new invention that captures moving images of the brain's activity in 1999 by combining the fmri with a process called magnetoencephalography scientists at Mass General made the first ever movies of the brain at work the Imaging team at Mass General is headed by Dr Bruce Rosen the movies of brain activity uh that we're generating are really at The Cutting Edge of uh brain mapping technology uh because they combine the high resolution of FM and the high tempor resolution the ability to see in time of Meg these images have been slowed down to show how a thought can flicker across a brain in milliseconds they reveal a brain that is amazingly Dynamic we can actually watch that information uh in the uh brain is not static and and nor does it occur only in One Direction but it's actually kind of an e and flow of information from one part of the brain to another information fed back again uh in a very complex way that we're really only now just beginning to see much less to fully understand all this activity is made possible by one thing brain chemistry which enables the transmission of signals within the brain the brain is truly a marvelous creation it has been compared to an orchestra with many components performing as instruments playing brilliantly together to create the music of our minds each thought is a Triumph of Harmony and synthesis among billions of neurons our brains may actually remember everything we've ever seen experienced and imagined and it uses those memor memories to create an organized view of the world but if our brains cannot draw upon our memories in a coherent way the result is [Music] diss Marian Krauss was 27 years old when the first signs of her schizophrenia showed up she's a patient at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda Maryland hello Dr wber a few weeks ago um I was was having like a lot of delusional thinking six or seven months before I got sick um I was kind of depressed uh she's participating in a study run by Dr Daniel Weinberger he wants to know what physically happens in the brains of schizophrenics well then in October of 97 I was transferred from one ship to another and uh Marian was a damage control firefighter in the Navy when paranoid delusions first began to take over her mind on the second sh they quickly destroyed her career day also I started thinking that there was a conspiracy of people who intended harm to everybody who has a J in their name who does not evangelize for the conspiracy what could be responsible for the bizarre and destructive delusions of the schizophrenic and I could Dr Weinberger is among those who suspect that early damage to certain structures in the brain maybe even in Udo could cause the neural networks to go Haywire later in life hand many of the brain Imaging studies that have been done in schizophrenia have shown that the frontal lobe is not physiologically working correctly another region of the brain the temporal lobe called the hippocampus is also abnormal this is a part of the brain that's very important for comparing sensory stimuli to what you've experienced in the past the hippocampus files memories and retrieves them for use by the frontal lobe which takes the data and interprets it makes decisions and takes action Dy in the schizophrenics brain if the network connecting the hippocampus and the frontal lobe is disrupted perhaps the ability to use memory to make sense of the world is scrambled many patients with schizophrenia describe the feeling that they they feel that they are disintegrating that their brain is disintegrating that their mind is disintegrating which is terrifying yeah there's a sort of a soundtrack that goes along with my delusions you know I can the voices don't sound like they're coming from across the room or from somewhere else but they sound like they're you know embedded in my head for the schizophrenic the orchestra plays Out Of Tune distorting the normal variations a healthy brain produces I I don't I don't in everybody's piece is different based on their own complex interactions of the Scaffolding in the genes and the Environmental Training that they have but we generally recognize it as music unless some fundamental difficulty in how all the instruments relate to each other takes place and it just isn't music anymore throughout our adult lives our brains perform effortlessly never tiring never resting even when stricken they are capable of remarkable Feats of Rejuvenation Dr Jill Bolly Taylor was a rising star in the world of Neuroscience she was at Harvard Medical School special izing in neuroanatomy when something went terribly wrong in her own brain when I first woke up and open my eyes I felt this pounding behind my left eye a pounding and I wiggled my fingers in front of my face and and it was as though it they just looked kind of silly and then in the next instant my right arm went totally dead and it was in that moment you know my first thing my brain says is oh my gosh I'm having a stroke and then the next thing my brain says is wow this is so cool Jill needed to call for help but when she tried to phone her office she couldn't remember the number and when she looked for her business card she found her brain was unable to distinguish numbers from letters it took her 2 hours to work it out I try to say in my mind I say this is Jill I'm having a stroke and it was in this moment that I realized that's not what came out of my mouth what came out of my mouth was it was this this this sound but it was it was not language during the stroke the blood flow to part of the brain is blocked off the results can be devastating millions of neurons may die others may be temporarily stunned still other undamaged cells may be unable to send or receive messages because they are connected to dead cells it's as though the phone line has been cut at Mass General Hospital surgeons operated on a golf ball siiz Hemorrhage in Jill's left temporal lobe a cloth was placing pressure on two areas that handle language at age 37 she could no longer talk understand speech or even recognize color she would have to try to rebuild her brain by retraining undamaged neural networks to take on new roles it was impossible to know just how much function Jill would recover so here I am and I'm I'm holding these pieces and I'm trying to to match the size of this piece with the size of that and then and then mama says color color you can use color and I'm going color and all of a sudden it was like oh wow yeah that makes it a lot easier but prior to that I didn't even see the color it was just you know brand new information to my mind and so I went back to the puzzle and put all the pieces together it was like for my mind all these files existed I just needed to know that they existed and I needed to open them I understood that uh the sooner my mind reestablished its connections that had been broken then the easier it would be for me to relearn Jill had lost some of her most basic functions but she had a chance to undergo a transformation that few of us experience okay most of us have a dominant hemisphere the side of the brain we rely on was left brained which is the more organized and systematic side I had been a a highly analytical human being uh very thinking very cognitive left hemispher kind of person and I was climbing the Harvard ladder and you know my career was everything at the point that the left hemisphere shut down all the inhibitions got shut down off that right Hemisphere and and I didn't have a left hemisphere but now I had this very interesting right hemisphere to work with with so my perspectives shifted in what I looked at and how I saw things my art and my music began to flourish when Jill's right hemisphere came to the rescue she began to process information in a more visual imaginative emotional way Jill began to create a very personal form of art stained glass brains and so I went to my neuro books and I spread them all out on my table and I I started thinking okay if I wanted to make a stained glass brain cuz I thought it would be gorgeous what what would the pattern have to look like what's in there and what can I show in two-dimensionality I think that the brain is this incredible beautiful organ that allows us to have this existence in this three-dimensional world today Jill's found a new balance in her life but first she had to wrestle with a fundamental change in who she is what am I going to build my life into now and how am I going to help people understand that I might look like me I might sound like me but I'm different now that person died that morning and I had to allow myself to let go of returning to her because she had a big life you know she had a big life and I may never go back to that big life but I could build a new big life and that needed to be [Music] okay as we age the brain like the rest of our body becomes more vulnerable the powerful evidence is emerging that the brain works like a muscle the more we use it the stronger it becomes an active mind helps grow new Connections in the brain and the more connections we create the more reserves we have to combat the effects of old [Music] age the benefits are not only physical however exercising the mind is key to keeping it sharp Harry Shapiro a retired commercial artist was born in 1899 he has made it to this age with flying colors no cancer no heart disease a sharp mind and a good sense of humor I was the first born in my family my mother had six children I was one of them June July August six more months I'll be 100 years old sometimes it feels that way sometimes I feel I was born yesterday he likes Chinese food good pipe tobacco Bach and Beethoven in fact music even inspires his painting primitive dance it's from bethoven Seven Symphony there a the third movement is a is a dance A Primitive dance that's where I got my idea from I like to feel that there's a musical quality in this actually can almost I do I hum as I paint sometimes it's all over there Harry is the most recent addition to the New England centenarian study which is documenting people who have reached 100 I'll just say the numbers and you say them right after me Dr margerie Silver who heads up the study is testing Harry's mental ability I think the key is that the more you learn the more you're able to learn so the people who continue to meet new challenges to learn new things are the people whose minds are going to stay very sharp into old age are you ready two five 2 five 3 I was really surprised that he could repeat eight digits which is a test of attention there's only one other centenarian that did that and she had been a bookkeeper 59 2 84 well you did very well this 100-year old man was doing uh well above what the average person does at a much younger age he's just Sim this is different that's right what was really typical about him was his constant learning he was constantly thinking of new things he loved to learn he describes himself as a little boy loving to learn things and that lasted his entire life and consequently he every time he learned something his brain was building up more ability to learn it was building new Pathways new connections between the neurons therefore he's buil really built up a functional Reserve that really helps keep his mind working very well I think the reason I've lasted so long on this Earth is because of my love of painting and music and literature things that lift the spirit of man [Music] up the more we learn about the brain the more awesome it appears we're on the threshold of using our Newfound knowledge to tap its potential in ways we could never have dreamed even in the most severely damaged brains Johnny Ray was having a pretty good life had his own rules made his own hours just did whatever he wanted to do married with a family he was just a 52y old drywall contractor that had been in it all his life that work seven days a week then suddenly a blood vessel burst in his brain stem the extensive damage left him unable to move or speak but his doctors knew he was alert so he could still think he could uh still be able to communicate ideas uh he was able to show us that by ey blink so we knew there was ability there was something inside there that could respond his doctors came up with a revolutionary idea that depended on his brain's plasticity if it worked it would change the boundaries of medicine they implanted a tiny cone containing two specially treated electrodes into the part of his brain that controlled his hand movement the unique aspect of this electrode is that it's a glass coated and it has substances that stimulate nerve cells to grow in and form contacts we call synapses then they waited to see if his neurons would grow new connections into the electrodes if they did it might be possible possible to capture the electrical energy of the neurons and use it to connect Johnny Ray's brain directly to a computer Dr Philip Kennedy who invented the device believed that when Johnny thought about moving his hand his neurons would fire and this electrical signal could be used to move a cursor but was it really possible to create a circuit between a human brain and a machine after 3 months of testing there was little progress then finally something astonishing happened on July 2nd 1998 when Johnny Ray thought about moving his hand the cursor moved he thinks about it it moves the cursor moves by his thought he thinks about it the environment is changed by his thought we are interacting with the environment directly now being able to control our environment by thinking about it hi my name is Johnny Ray make a move across Johnny and hold there my name is Johnny Ray is using the electrochemical processes in his own brain to run an external mechanical device I feel too warm he was able to drive the cursor across the screen from left to right he was able to enter each icon and remained there for the two seconds while it said what it was going to say it's a new level of Mind Over Matter and it opens a whole world for Johnny Ray and others like him the communication I aspect is tremendous you can type your name and you can write a letter you can send an email you can receive email the potential is to put him on the internet to allow him to communicate with other people that have diseases disabilities allow him to express himself he has personality under all this that he can't express in any other form the miracle of the human brain is heightened by the possibilities that lie before us understanding how the brain works is really understanding what we are as people that should allow us to not only understand discrete functions like memory or language or Vision but should also allow us to study questions like uh human imagination human consciousness the men and women who are searching inside the brain remain in awe of it to comprehend that which enables comprehension is the ultimate search for who we are to understand our own brain is one response to the profound challenge issued from the mind of a great philosopher know [Music] thyself keep watching discussion topics and activity and resources for understanding the amazing brain are up next on assignment [Music] [Music] Discovery now that you've seen understanding the amazing brain part two talk about this in the program a probe inserted in the brain stem of a stroke patient enables him to work a computer with his mind discuss other technological advances that might assist people with mental or physical limitations in the future what ethical concerns might these advances rais now try this do you think you work primarily with your brain's right or left hemisphere for a day keep track of your thoughts words and activities then write a paragraph to do defend your choice citing examples from your day log on to discoveryschool.com teers for curriculum materials and resources to support understanding the amazing brain to learn more assignment Discovery suggests 101 questions your brain is asked about Itself by faith hi