Although there are plenty of muscles in your face, scalp, and inside your head, the brain itself is not a muscle. Instead, the brain is one of the largest organs in the body and is essential for life itself and most of the voluntary and involuntary actions your body can do. It is also the center for thought, memory, and understanding.
Some people may consider the brain to be similar to a muscle because, like this other type of tissue, it can be worked out, trained, and get stronger. Just like an athlete will exercise the muscle so it performs better when he or she is participating in a sport, individuals can exercise their brain so it can remember more, think better, and figure out more complicated problems.
What Is The Brain Really?
This large organ that sits inside your skull is a complicated bundle with multiple parts and a very complex network of nerves that carry, transmit, and figure out impulses from the rest of the body. It includes glands that create hormones such as the pituitary and also room for storage of memories.
How Does The Brain Operate like a Muscle?
Most muscles do just two things: contract and relax. You contract the big muscle in your arm and your hand moves upward. You relax it again and your hand drops down. Most body parts are operated by a system of multiple muscles that work automatically in conjunction with each other to deliver the motion or action that you desire.
The brain operates differently. Many processes are completely automatic, such as breathing and your heart beating. Your brain takes care of these things as long as you are alive. If you want the brain to take some action, such as figuring out a puzzle or remembering something from long ago, you need to tell it to do so. In this way, brain functions much as a muscle would.
Also, your brain can be trained and exercised to get stronger. With muscular exercise, the cells are damaged and repair and you grow new ones as you bulk up. Too many damaged cells in your brain and you become disabled. Also, of course, your brain can never bulk up or grow in size. However, the neurons can get stronger and actually grow new ones.
What is really changing when you exercise your brain is its ability to make connections and to forge associations between the information stored in your memory banks, current input, and experiences.
As people get older, cognitive function often declines. They find it more difficult to remember things from long ago or just a few minutes past. Reasoning ability, puzzle solving ability, and other thought processes become more of a challenge. If the brain was like a muscle, they could exercise it and regain total control. Unfortunately, has body parts and organs age, a full range of ability is seldom regained again.
If you ask if the brain is a muscle, you may have to use your brain power to figure out the answer. While it is not made up of muscle tissue and does much more than contract and relax, your brain can get stronger if you work at.
