Introduction:

Valentine's cards are often covered with hearts. While our heart may beat faster at the sight of a loved one, our brain, not our heart, is where we experience emotions such as love and anger. This is also where we initiate, decide, think and control our actions. The nervous system provides us with the means to get messages about the environment act on these, and keeps our body running. Nerve impulses are constantly flashing into the brain, around it, and away from it via the spinal cord and along the cable like nerves that are all through our bodies. The brain regulates and monitors these impulses. The brain is capable of creativity in a way that no computer has yet achieved.

Click on a heading in the chart below to learn about that system in the box at the bottom of this page.