Hunger, Thirst, Sex, and Sleep: How the Brain Controls Our Passions

177 Pages·2012·2.208 MB·English

by  John K. Young

Hunger, Thirst,
Sex, and Sleep
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Hunger, Thirst,
Sex, and Sleep
How the Brain
Controls Our Passions
John K. Young
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham (cid:129) Boulder (cid:129) New York (cid:129) Toronto (cid:129) Plymouth, UK
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Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2012 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
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ISBN 978-1-4422-1823-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4422-1825-3 (ebook)
™
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Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 The Anatomy of the Hypothalamus and the Control of Hunger 5
2 The Hypothalamus and the Control of Thirst and
Body Temperature 43
3 The Hypothalamus and the Control of Sex and Emotions 65
4 The Hypothalamus and the Control of Sleep 91
5 The Hypothalamus and the Control of Hormones 109
6 Some Final Thoughts on Mice and Men 139
Notes 145
Index 157
About the Author 161
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Acknowledgments
F
irst and foremost, I want to thank my wife Paula for many years of lov-
ing companionship and encouragement. I also want to thank my brother Bill
for his encouragement and support. Second, I want to acknowledge many
stimulating and enjoyable conversations about the science of the brain that
I’ve had with colleagues such as Thomas Heinbockel, Jim McKenzie, and
Blair Turner here at Howard University.
OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN YOUNG
Sacred Sites of the Knights Templar. (2003). Fair Winds Press: Gloucester, MA.
The Building Blocks of Human Life: Understanding Mature Cells and Stem Cells. (2007).
Recorded Books: NY.
Human Anatomy: The Beauty of Form and Function. (2008). Recorded Books: NY.
Introduction to Cell Biology. (2010). World Scientific Press: Singapore.
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Introduction
I
feel compelled to begin this book by offering you readers a brief apol-
ogy. I have been studying and thinking about the hypothalamus for more
than 30 years, and after that long a period, I probably am a bit “over the
top” about this subject. As the saying goes, if you are a hammer, everything
looks like a nail! Since I am obsessive about the hypothalamus, it is prob-
ably not too surprising that when I look for the sources of human happiness
and human problems, for me, parts of the hypothalamus are what come to
mind first.
It is not too bad a sin to focus so consistently on a part of the brain that
is so interesting. As I hope I will show you, the hypothalamus does have a
profound influence on many important portions of our lives: it commands us
when to eat or drink, it tells us when we need to sleep, it regulates our sex
lives, and it controls many of the hormones that control our bodies. Abnor-
malities in the hypothalamus appear to play a role in many medical condi-
tions, including disorders that you would not expect to be related to the brain,
like diabetes and cancer. Also, for neuroscientists, the hypothalamus is an
enticing area of the brain because it is neither too complicated to completely
understand nor too simple to be boring.
Some parts of the nervous system perform elegant analyses of data
that we still can scarcely comprehend. The cortex of the brain, for example,
processes information in a complex way that lets us identify faces as human,
distinguish the faces of our friends from those of strangers, and guess the
emotional state of our friends from their expressions. Recent research has
begun to show how nerve cells in one brain area (the hippocampus, located
just beneath the temporal cortex) allow us to recognize our friends and ac-
quaintances. For example, researchers in California recently studied electrical
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