Lesson 4 — The Structure and Organization of the Nervous System


Get Focused


Can you imagine being able to control your breathing and heart rates similar to the way you control your legs? The nervous system has unconscious or involuntary sections and conscious or voluntary parts. Processes vital to life, such as breathing, are controlled unconsciously. How long you can hold your breath? Your nervous system overrides your decision and starts your breathing again.

This lesson explores mechanisms that increase breathing rate and slow it, returning the individual to a normal or balanced state. This state is termed homeostasis.

Everyone has a brain and a spinal cord. Most people are born with both working the way they should. The brain is the centre of "who" you are — your personality, your values, and your ability to determine right from wrong. Your brain communicates with your spinal cord to allow you to walk, move, feel, experience life, and perform body functions such as breathing.

In this lesson, you will investigate the following focusing questions:

  • How is the nervous system organized, and how do these parts communicate with each other? 

  • What interrupts the normal communication mechanisms of the sympathetic and parasympathetic parts of the nervous system?

 
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