The reticular formation also plays important roles in walking, eating, sexual activity, and sleeping. The job of the reticular formation is to filter out some of the stimuli that are coming into the brain from the spinal cord and to relay the remainder of the signals to other areas of the brain. Running through the medulla and the pons is a long, narrow network of neurons known as the reticular formation. The spherical shape above the medulla is the pons, a structure in the brain stem that helps control the movements of the body, playing a particularly important role in balance and walking. In many cases the medulla alone is sufficient to maintain life animals that have the remainder of their brains above the medulla severed are still able to eat, breathe, and even move. The brain stem begins where the spinal cord enters the skull and forms the medulla, the area of the brain stem that controls heart rate and breathing. Its designed to control the most basic functions of life, including breathing, attention, and motor responses. The brain stem is the oldest and innermost region of the brain. Our sensitive lips, for example, occupy a large area in the sensory cortex, as do our fingers and genitals. Again, the more sensitive the body region, the more area is dedicated to it in the sensory cortex. Just as the motor cortex sends out messages to the specific parts of the body, the somatosensory cortex, an area just behind and parallel to the motor cortex at the back of the frontal lobe, receives information from the skins sensory receptors and the movements of different body parts. This finding follows from a general principle about how the brain is structured, called contralateral control, meaning the brain is wired such that in most cases the left hemisphere receives sensations from and controls the right side of the body, and vice versa.
They found that stimulating the right side of the brain produced movement in the left side of the dogs body, and vice versa. Furthermore, they discovered an important and unexpected principle of brain activity. When the German physicists Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig applied mild electric stimulation to different parts of a dogs cortex, they discovered that they could make different parts of the dogs body move. “But someone who does not suffer from this type of disorder can also be aware of their heartbeat,” said Roy.
Patients typically perceive their heart rate more clearly than most people. Awareness of one’s heartbeat is known to be correlated with a number of psychological problems, including anxiety disorders.
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