International Research Compendium - Drug Free Australia

Receptors are protein complexes that are located in distinct regions of the cell
membrane and that neurotransmitters bind with to initiate the communication of a
signal between neurons.
Behaviour has a biological basis: The brain governs how you behave.
All behaviours and psychological processes have a neural substrate. These
substrates consist of interconnected physical locations in the brain with definable
patterns of activity that generate the behaviour or psychological state.
The brain manages the body functions and is the source of all thoughts and feelings.
It enables you to make choices and decisions and to plan and carry out your
movements so you can act on those decisions. This immense, hyperactive
communications system, which is the brain, enables you to monitor what’s going
around you rapidly and effectively. It also allows you to constantly adapt to changing
circumstances. You do this by changing your behaviour.
The brain can cope with complex tasks because of the way it is organized. Specific
places in the brain carry out specific functions of the brain.
The nerve cells in the brain are organized into thousands and thousands of groups (
nuclei ).
Each group of nerve cells concentrates on a small aspect of a bigger job. To get the
big job done, all the relevant groups of nerve cells work simultaneously on their own
small parts of that parallel processing. This explains how the brain takes care of all
the sensory and motor jobs directly related to complex task such as driving, while you
can do other things as well. While driving, you may be talking on a car phone, or
tuning the car radio, figuring out a problem you have at work. You can do all these
things at once because your brain divides up the work into small jobs and distributes
the information needed to perform each one to the pertinent specialized regions. The
brain monitors your thoughts, memories, needs, and wants and creates the emotional
and motivational context for all of your activities.
No single part of your brain handles a job by itself. Most functions depend on circuits
that link together groups of nerve cells. As the job becomes more complicated, the
circuits themselves link up with other circuits to form even larger constellations of
brain regions that all work together to complete complex jobs.
The limbic system of the brain is responsible for our emotions and feelings.
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