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Which body functions are not entirely dependent on the brain?
I know that brain dead patients will not breathe without the aid of a machine but the brain will still beat for some time after the breathing machine is turned off suggesting that while breathing is brain dependant, the heart beat is not. So I m basically wondering if there are any other functions in the body that are not entirely brain-dependant?
2 Answers
- Anonymous2 years agoFavorite Answer
Heart beat, breathing, and some other autonomic functions take place largely in the spinal cord, governed by very primitive parts of the brain located physically low in the brain stem. Yes, you can pretty much blow off most of your head and still breath for a while. One of the most dramatic cases was a chicken who was slaughtered, only to never actually die, living for months walking around without a head and even being taken on tour with a freak show.
There's a number of humans who discover they are missing large parts of their brains in later life, functioning normally throughout. In those cases, from birth when the brain is not developing normally, the parts that know they need to grow do so anyway, wrapping around what they do have, sometimes in odd ways.
