Understanding human brain is sometimes a very complicated task. Definitely, picturing the human brain is interesting if some expert is willing to explain to you in depth. Here is the picture (or structure) of a brain.


Caption: The three main section of a human brain

I am sure everyone who have studied science will know the three sections (in brief) of a human brain. The biggest section of the brain is the cerebrum (the larger brain, most of my cognitive psychology work is based on the cerebrum), followed by the cerebellum (the smaller brain) and the mendulla (attached to the spinal cord) which controls human reflexes. My research focuses somewhere near the occipital, parietal and tempral lobes. Anwyay, I will try not to turn this blog to a book :) lol, or it will definitely be boring.

My conversation with Dr. Rui has once again broaden my knowledge. He brought me new understanding, such as tumor (cancer disease) in a human's body. According to him, few really important human organs that will most likely cause death when a tumor is found in it, such as the liver and the brain. Dr. Rui is a very patience person, and willing to scribbled a whole piece of A4 paper (both sides) to just explain to me the existance of tumor in a person's body. So let me explain based on what I can recall from the paper that we have scribbled.

Let me start explaining from the oesophagus, a tube in the body which takes food from the mouth to the stomach. I think this is important since this organ is really important since it has some relation to my mom. From my understanding, if a doctor telling you that they found some disease in your oesophagus and at a very critical stage, then you should expect that to be a tumor. A basic understanding of the occurence of the oesophagus disease in a person's body is that they smokes too much, or normally drinking too much alcohol. The other reason of having this disease is that the person drink too much hot water, let says for a long term period, i.e. 20 years. My mom often drink hot tea and coffees. The moment the water is boiled, she will pour the 'hot' water into the mug and drink it immediately! Dr. Rui said that this will damage most oesophagus cells, and in a long term basis, when most of the cells were damaged, the person will start feeling itch in their oesophagus. That is the very early symptom of the oesophagus cancer. Try not to drink warm water beyond the temperature of '40 degree celcius' to prevent such disease.


Caption: A tumor found in the oesophagus

Normally, a person's understanding of cancer (or tumor) is that an incurable disease. That is what people keeps telling us, as long as the disease is incurable, that is a cancer. We can only put that as a basic understanding of the cancer disease. To be more precise, the occurence of a cancer disease is when a tumor called "carcinoma" were found in our body (I will explain what carcinoma is in the latter section of this post). Three normal ways to have cancer disease; (1) genetic: from anyone within the three generations in your family tree to have such disease, (2) food: the lack of vitamins from food, mainly vitamin A, C, and E, and (3) habbits: try avoiding bad habbits such as smoking, drinking alcohols, hot water, taking drugs, etc.

Tumors can be categorized into two; the first is a normal tumor and the second is the "carcinoma". The difference between these 2 tumors is that the first type will only grow at a specific place in your body. So if the doctor successfully removed that tumor from your body, then you will be fine because it will not grow anymore except for different circumstances. If the tumor in a person's body is a "carcinoma", then that person will most probably die at any time. The reason is that this "carcinoma" tumor will infect other body organs in a very short term period. For example, if a "carcinoma" tumor is found in a person's liver, and he discovered it very early, then went for an operation. Even if the tumor is successfully removed from the liver, but it will still infect other organs in our body. Many people said that the lack of protien in our body will cause "carcinoma" to grow in a person's body. That is not true since currently, no evidence have proved that the lack of protien will cause cancer disease to spread in a person's body.


Caption: A picture of the "carcinoma" tumor

Let's go back to the human brain. I always think that the brain is the most important organ in a person's body. Actually, every organ in our body are equally important. The only difference is that once the brain is affected by different disease, causing it to die, then a person will die. Unlike our kidney, if one of the kidney is damaged, we still have another kidney to support us to continue living.


Caption: the internal section of a human's brain

The above is a depiction of a human's brain. You may see something like this if you split a person's brain into 2 :) lol. Anyway, i will explain how the operation in the brain works! Usually, a doctor will has no choice to operate the person's brain when they found a tumor in the brain. From my understand, brain are jello's. Dr. Rui gave me a more specific term to explain a brain. He said, "it looks something like those white soft thing, what is that called, hmm, oh yah, tofu" lol.


Caption: A picture of a tumor found in a person's brain

I took this picture from some webpages. According to Dr. Rui who had operated more than 100 people's head to save their lives from different disease, only around 10% of a person's brain is important, that is also the section of the brain that controls a person's sensory and perception. As long as this 10% of the brain is not damaged by anything, then you may still have a chance to survive from brain injuries. I remember a news a year ago, saying that a person survived from death when his head got shot. The bullet went through his head, deep into his brain and comes out from another part of his head. It means that the bullet actually went through his brain. Surprisingly, he still survived. Since the 10% of the brain plays the most important role in a brain, then I would not feel surprise of why is he still survived by now. He is probably the luckiest person in the world where the 10% of his brain was not shot.


Caption: the 10% of the brain highlighted in the central executive

If a tumor is found outside the 10% of the brain, then brain specialist would be able to operate his head and remove that tumor. Even if the tumor found in the brain is a spreading tumor like the "carcinoma", the doctor will still suggest to remove it. The reason is to prevent his patient from suffering the pain in his head. A tumor is divided into 2 sections, (a) liquid and (b) the solid cells.


Caption: an operation in the brain

I have tried looking all over the internet for a picture similar like this, in a more cartoonist version, and glad i found this. A picture of a real operation in the head will be really gross. Let me explain how the operation of the brain works. I will skip all those thorough understanding of how to detect tumor and disease in the brain with x-ray and ultrasound technologies.

Firstly, the person has to shave off his hair before the operation. In the operation room, the doctor will apply anticeptic to the patient, and will start removing the skin when he is unconcious (i think xray will determine where is the tumor and where to operate) with a normal knife. The person's head skull should be visible by then. Then, the doctor will use a special device, that looks like a driller to drill 4 holes on the skull to highlight that section where they going to operate later (I found this part very disgusting. Imagine someone is drilling my head). The doctor will then use a special knife (no pictures available) that will operate the skull. Since the 4 holes will outcome in a rectangular shape, the doctor will use this special knife to cut the skull and make it in rectangular shape (looks something like the picture in the above). According to Dr. Rui, the sharpened knife will move automatically, be able to cut the skull from one end to another in less than few seconds. The knife will automatically stop moving if it detected that the knife is going to reach to somewhere else. He will then remove the skull very slowly.

A person's brain is wrapped by three different layers, that is the membrane layer. The first layer is very thick, followed by the second and third layer. It gets thinner in the second and third layer. Do you know those silicon casing that we usually buy to protect our mobile phones? Yes! The first membrane layer will look so similar to that lol. Anyway, the doctor will cut the three membrane layers and form a cross shape (+). Then, the real brain operation of removing the tumor will begin.

Dr. Rui said that they usually use some kind of device, which looks like a long needle. This needle will act as a vacuum cleaner. The reason of using this needle is to remove the liquid section of the tumor. Because the tumor is visible, the doctor can remove the tumor entirely. After removing the liquid of the tumor with the needle, they will start removing the solid part of the tumor by operating the brain (removing the jello's). If you recall what I have included in the above, as long as the tumor is not affecting the 10% of the brain (in the central executive), then the doctor will still be able to remove the tumor. There is another alternative methods to remove a "casinoma" tumor than just operating the brain; that is to drill one little hole in the head (after applying anticeptic to the patient), and put a very tiny needle to vacuum the liquid in the brain. However, this method will not remove the tumor entirely since the brain is not operated, and that is why the exact location of the tumor is not visible. I think the reason is that a patient infected by this "casinoma" tumor in his brain will normally die at any time and since operating the brain is such a big operation, normally the doctor will not take such risk for the patient.

When the operation is over, the doctors will apply stitch to the first membrane layer (that looks as tough as silicon mobile phone casing lol). Once the second and third membrane layer is broke, there will be no way to refixing them. The doctor will then produce some tiny holes in the skull so they can stitch the skull the same way as stitching the membrane layer. Finally, they will stitch the skin again.


Caption: internal organs in a human's body

Besides just discussing about a human's brain, we did speak of the liver. I just realized that one of the liver's function is that to produce protien based on the amount of water that we consume, reacting with the acid animo contained in our body (something like that). The liver is something very fragile, and it only rely on the ribs to lift it in our body. It will be a long story anyway, so I am keeping it for different posts in the future.