Sleeping, indispensable for living
The brain switches, every day, from one state to another, that is to say, from conscience to sleep. When it is awake, the brain recognizes its environment and can think up actions in advance to comply with everyday life demands. During sleep, the activity diminishes and the models of thought are almost totality disconnected from the exterior world.
Sleeping also allows the body to rest, but perhaps the most important function is that it gives the brain the possibility to be reloaded and to classify the information stored during the day. The ones in charge of activating consciousness and sleeping are the neurotransmitters, chemical substances that are elaborated and released from the neurons.
Memory, data storage
It is an information deposit of the brain that enables the registry of data, important emotional events, sensations and even ideas that have been previously experienced or worked on. No region of the brain saves all the memories because the place it is kept depends on the type of memory. For example, riding a bike is a memory saved in the motor zones, while those related to music are stored in the auditory zones. There are three levels of memory, according to how long an information is remembered:
– Immediate or sensory memory: retains the stimuli (images or sounds) during a few seconds.
– Short term memory: gathers sensory data and can retain them during a few hours or days.
– Long term memory: it enables the storage and recording of memories for our entire life. It has three forms: procedural memory implies abilities learned with practice (example, riding a horse); semantic memory, which has to do with words, language, facts and their meanings and episodic memory, that registers specific events, like going back to school.
Valentina Tereshkova se convierte en la primera mujer en viajar al espacio