BRAIN

The brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. The brain is the most complex organ in a vertebrate's body. 

It is located in the head, usually close to the primary sensory organs for such senses as vision, hearing, balance, taste and smell. 

In a typical human the cerebral cortex (the largest part) is estimated to contain 15–33 billion neurons, each connected by synapses to several thousand other neurons. These neurons communicate with one another by means of long protoplasmic fibers called axons, which carry trains of signal pulses called action potentials to distant parts of the brain or body targeting specific recipient cells.

Physiologically, the function of the brain is to exert centralized control over the other organs of the body. 

The brain acts on the rest of the body both by generating patterns of muscle activity and by driving the secretion of chemicals called hormones. This centralized control allows rapid and coordinated responses to changes in the environment. Some basic types of responsiveness such as reflexes can be mediated by the spinal cord or peripheral ganglia, but sophisticated purposeful control of behavior based on complex sensory input requires the information-integrating capabilities of a centralized brain.

From a philosophical point of view, what makes the brain special in comparison to other organs is that it forms the physical structure associated with the mind. As Hippocrates put it: "Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations."

Understanding the relationship between the brain and the mind is a great challenge. It is very difficult to imagine how mental entities such as thoughts and emotions could be implemented by physical entities such as neurons and synapses, or by any other type of mechanism. 

The difficulty was expressed by Gottfried Leibniz in an analogy known as Leibniz's Mill:

One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception.

— Leibniz, Monadology

The most promising approaches treat the brain as a biological computer, very different in mechanism from an electronic computer, but similar in the sense that it acquires information from the surrounding world, stores it, and processes it in a variety of ways, analogous to the central preocessing unit (CPU) in a computer.

Font: http://en.wikipedia.org