ABSTRACT
The human brain is one of Nature’s greatest achievements. It is the development of the brain which has allowed humans to progress from their humble origins to putting a man on the moon. This chapter consists of an overview of the brain and contains many references to other pages where the area of the brain in question is explored further in more detail, usually in relation to a particular mental health pathology. At the simplest level the brain works something like a computer, but this is a computer like no other. It has been said that to build a computer to do everything the human brain does, the computer would have to be the size of Europe. Like a computer, the brain has an input (called a sensory nervous system) and an output (called a motor nervous system). Between these two systems, the brain carries out
cognitive functions, i.e. mental processing such as thought, memory and interpretation of the world about us.
