Question: How does are brain control are limbs and muscles and eyes with such precision?

Elliot Jokl answered on 22 Jun 2016:

Good question!

And I don’t really know the specific answer. You can think of your brain like a very complicated set of wires and circuits, much like a computer. But instead of metal wires, you have brain cells that form these circuits. These circuits can take a thought like “I’m hungry” and turn it into me walking into the kitchen, looking for some biscuits, picking up the packet and eating them. Different areas of the brain communicate with each other through these brain cell circuits and send out signals through the nerves that connect to our muscles to tell them what to do.

The brain is so complicated that I’m not sure that there is anyone who knows exactly how this wiring works, but we do know that there are specific areas of the brain that are responsible for different things like the control of our muscles.

I guess the main reason we are so good at controlling our muscles is because this helps us to survive a lot! So when we were evolving, the ones with the best control of their muscles survived and caught their prey and didn’t get eaten by saber tooth tigers (or something like that). So over time, there was a lot of pressure to develop good muscle control. This was probably helped by us growing bigger brains, so there were more nerve cells in our brains to help our brain and muscles communicate well.