It has always amazed me how little we actually know about the brain. It is the muscle that controls all of our movements, thoughts, actions and emotions. Our brain is being used every second of every day for every little and every big activity. It also controls our emotions and personality. Every time we interact with another person, our brain is controlling what we say and how we react and making sure that we are obeying social rules and regulations. This therefore means that if the brain is damaged in some way, some part of our life will change. This has been shown through strokes in which part of a person’s face is paralyzed because the section of the brain that controls that part was damaged. It has also been shown through the examples that Damasio uses, Phineas Gage and Elliot, that damage to the frontal lobes can cause a drastic change in personality and behavior. This simply makes it clearer just how influential the brain is in every day activities and life. Even little things like walking to class or talking on the telephone require the brain to be very active.

Thinking about my morning routine makes me curious as to whether or not I would be able to complete a simple task such as the walk to class if I had damage to my frontal lobes. From Damasio’s examples, it is clear that it is impossible to split the brain up into sections and functions that these functions perform. For example, there is no specific region that is in control of the ability to obey social conduct. There are two or three regions that control this function, which makes it more difficult to pinpoint the area in which there is a problem. Since it is unclear which area is causing the problem, it is harder to fix the problem, or at least attempt to find a solution. I’m not sure we would ever be able to "fix" damage to the brain, but there might be ways to retrain the mind to perform certain functions. If we knew both which part was damaged and how much of a function that part performed, would we then be able to teach the other parts of the brain to perform that function? For example, the ventromedial sector and the somatosensory sector control both control "reason/decision making and emotion/feeling" (p. 70). If there was damage to the ventromedial sector, could we then perform an experiment to figure out how much of the reason/decision making that sector controls and then teach the undamaged sector, the somatosensory sector, to perform those tasks? I suppose that that would be like re-teaching the brain to perform tasks that it already learned. It is much more difficult to discover problems in people who have certain frontal lobe damage because the damage is not intellectual or physical. The only people who can really spot that there has been damage are people who have know the patient before hand. I wonder if it would be harder to re-teach the brain if the doctor didn’t know what the person was like before the damage. That is to say, is the amount of control the ventromedial sector has over reason/decision making the same in everyone or does it differ from person to person? This difference would greatly affect the re-teaching methods. If the ratio was different in each person, the re-teaching methods would have to be altered depending on the patient. The amount of instruction, the type of information and the way that it was presented would have to be altered. For example, if in one person, the ventromedial sector controlled most of the reason/decision making and only a little bit of the emotion/feeling, then the re-teaching effort would have to concentrate mostly on re-learning the ability to make decisions and to reason out problems and less on emotions. This would almost require going to the equivalent of kindergarten again and learning how to interact with one’s peers. But on the other hand, if in another person the ventromedial sector controlled most of the emotion/feeling, then the patient would have to undergo a re-learning of morals and right and wrong and an attempt to make the patient feel an emotion over an event because it was wrong or unjust. I think that it would be much harder to re-teach emotions/feelings as opposed to reason/decision making because it seems to me that emotions are more innate than reason. Reason can be learned in school while one feels emotions and has instinct reactions from the time one is a baby. It would take a lot of skill and a lot of study to make a program that focused on re-teaching emotions or reason and it would take a lot more knowledge of the brain than we have at the moment.