The Body: A Guide for Occupants

by Bill Bryson

is the home of our more basic operations: sleeping, breathing, keeping the heart going. The brain stem doesn’t get a lot of attention in the popular consciousness, but it is so central to our existence that “brain-stem death” is the fundamental measure of deadness in humans in the United Kingdom. Scattered through the brain rather like nuts in a fruitcake are many smaller structures—hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus, telencephalon, septum pellucidum, habenular commissure, entorhinal cortex, and a dozen or so others—which are collectively known as the limbic system (from the Latin limbus, meaning “peripheral”). It’s easy to go a lifetime without hearing a word about any of these components unless they go wrong. The basal ganglia, for instance, play an important part in movement, language, and