Functions
The medulla oblongata controls autonomic functions, and connects the higher levels of the brain to the spinal cord. It is also responsible for regulating several basic functions of the autonomic nervous system which include:
- Respiration – chemoreceptors
- Cardiac center – sympathetic, parasympathetic system
- Vasomotor center – baroreceptors
- Reflex centers of vomiting, coughing, sneezing, and swallowing
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Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)
“Let us stop being afraid. Of our own thoughts, our own minds. Of madness, our own or others’. Stop being afraid of the mind itself, its astonishing functions and fandangos, its complications and simplifications, the wonderful operation of its machinery—more wonderful because it is not machinery at all or predictable.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)