Of the nervous system, the reticular formation In addition to that, participating in a lot of these lower functions Plays a big role in controlling things like circulation, The reticular formation of the brainstem plays a big role in lots The reticular formation of the brainstem. Somas scattered about to a lot of the grey matter Much of the brainstem grey matter are just these distributed neurons that aren't in nice discrete little places or bundles, and we call this the reticular formation of the brainstem. Matter's on the inside and most of the white Matter more scattered about, although most of the grey It's a lot more mixed together than it is on the spinal cord.

Most of the white matter of the brainstem is on the outside. Has some similarities to the spinal cord, particularly down low in the medulla, where it's connecting to the spinal cord right here, and similarly to the spinal cord, most of the grey matter of the brainstem is on the inside and Each one of these three main divisions of the brainstem has a littleīit of a different shape. 'Meduh-la' or 'Medoo-la.' I hear people say it both ways. Let's cut through the medullaĪnd look at it from the top. Section through the pons, so if we cut through the pons like this, and we look down at the pons from the top, this would be a view ofĪ section of the pons. Don't worry about the names of any of those right now. Stick out the front of it, and some little bumps on the back. On it from the top, it's got these big parts that Let's pretend we're cutting through the midbrain right here. Recall that this top part up here is called the midbrain, this middle part is called the pons, and this lower part is called the medulla. Let's take a look at some sections, to look inside the brainstem. It's just this little guy right here, but it does a lot of things. There's a lot going on in the brainstem, even though it's a fairly small structure. Nervous system together, its anatomy is complex. Basically, because theīrainstem is connecting all these others of the All these little stringy things coming out are the cranial nerves, and most of them are coming out of the brainstem. Here's the cerebellum, and here's the brainstem. Here's a different image of the brain, looking at it from below. The brainstem connects the cerebrum on top and it connects the spinal cord below, and it connects the cerebellum, which is behind the brainstem. The brainstem connects, basically, all the parts of the Is right around here, and if we look at our larger drawing of the central nervous system, this is the brainstem right here. We briefly discussed the brainstem when we were talking about the structure of the nervous system as a whole.

Voiceover: In this video, I'm going to talk about the brainstem.

Brain stem pons