the.com/central nervous system
Your body's dictatorship: brain and spinal cord, everyone else just takes orders.
means The brain and spinal cord together — the command center that processes information and issues instructions to the rest of the body.
from From Latin centralis (middle point, from centrum, 'center,' itself from Greek kentron, the fixed point of a compass), joined to nervus ('sinew, nerve') and systema (Greek for 'organized whole'). The term took shape as 18th- and 19th-century anatomists began classifying the nervous system into central (brain, spinal cord) versus peripheral (the branching nerve network reaching the rest of the body) — a division based on structure and location, not metaphor, though 'central' fittingly stuck for the part that actually runs the show.
- actual size
- brain and spinal cord only, nothing else
- speed limit
- signals travel up to 268 mph along nerves
- energy hog
- brain burns 20 percent of your calories idle
- no backup
- damaged neurons rarely regenerate, unlike skin or bone