Question: How does the "Reptillian" area function with out us thinking about it?

Amy Birch answered on 21 Jun 2012:

Hi 10jlmar,
The reptilian part of your brain is called the hindbrain and is the oldest part of your brain. This controls things like your heartbeat, breathing and digestion. These things don’t need to be controlled consciously because it would be very hard for us to do anything else if we had to constantly keep remembering to breathe! The brain measures different levels of chemicals in the blood to check that everything is working properly and then sends signals to adjust our breathing, heart-rate or get our stomach juices going when we are hungry (for example if our brain senses that our sugar levels are too low) It works pretty much like a computer in that way, and this means that the rest of our brain is free to think about doing more complicated things (like answering this question!)
🙂