Neurotransmitters are the language of your brain. They allow neurons to communicate to other brain cells. That’s not it, though. Muscles receive cues from neurotransmitters, too. In fact, these chemical messengers send information throughout the body.

The different types of neurotransmitters vary widely. Some manage your heart rate and blood pressure. Others make you feel motivated, stabilize your mood, or help you fall asleep.

To understand how neurotransmitters work in your body, let’s study the most notable chemical messengers. And you’ll learn how important they are for your brain and body.

How Neurotransmitters Help Your Body Communicate

Communication is key to your health. Neurotransmitters do that work, sending instructions from one brain cell to the next and transferring information throughout the brain and body.

The process starts where these chemical messengers are stored in tiny compartments at the end of neurons. These are called synaptic vesicles. Neurotransmitters live here until your brain needs to relay a message.

When a neuron makes a command (known as firing an action potential) neurotransmitters spring into action. These action potentials temporarily boost neurons into a higher energy state. More energy means brain cells can dump chemical neurotransmitters into the space between them and the next neuron. This gap between neurons is called the synapse.

Neurotransmitters are then collected from the synapse by neighboring neurons after an action potential sparks. A chain reaction follows. Each brain cell releases neurotransmitters to spread the message. When the command is completed, the neurotransmitters break down, float away, or are taken back up by the synaptic vesicles they came from.

Understanding 7 Major Neurotransmitters

While there are dozens of known neurotransmitters, there are seven major ones to focus on. They fall into two different types, depending on their actions.

Some are excitatory neurotransmitters. This means they encourage other brain cells to fire commands. Other neurotransmitters are considered inhibitory. They stop action potentials and help your brain turn actions off. Both are useful and necessary for your body to function at its best.

Familiarize yourself with each of the major chemical messengers that influence your health. They do a lot to keep your body and brain working in tandem.

1. Glutamate

This amino acid is common in your diet. And it acts as an excitatory neurotransmitter, stimulating neurons to fire commands. Glutamate isn’t just in your diet. It’s present in 90 percent of synapses, acting as the main excitatory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system.

It only takes a small amount of glutamate to excite neighbor brain cells. When neurons are working properly, all the glutamate released by the cell is picked back up by glutamate transporter molecules. This ensures levels of glutamate remain low in the synapse.

Too much glutamate can be tricky for your brain. Excesses can over-excite cells. So much so that neurons can’t bring their energy back down again. This toxic excited state causes brain cells to lock up and stop working. Good thing those transporter proteins are there to clear away the extra glutamate and protect your brain by cleaning up the synapse after each action potential.

Neuroplasticity also relies on glutamate. That’s because your brain uses glutamate to build pathways between neurons that reinforce your memory and help you learn.

2. GABA (γ-aminobutyric acid)

If glutamate is the most excitatory chemical messenger, then GABA is its polar opposite. GABA is a main inhibitory neurotransmitter. It reduces the activity in the central nervous system and blocks certain signals from your brain.

Without GABA, your brain would be “on” all the time. You need GABA to produce a calming effect that slows you down. It lowers your heart rate and blood pressure. GABA helps you relax and fall asleep. The normal stresses of your life respond well to GABA.

Take time to wind down before bed. Reducing your exposure to blue light can support the production of GABA in your brain. Deep breathing and mindfulness meditation can boost GABA, too. Helping you lower stress and fall asleep faster.

3. Dopamine

The most thrilling neurotransmitter has to be dopamine. That’s because it plays a major role in your brain’s reward system.

Dopamine floods the synapse between neurons when something rewarding happens. It’s responsible for that rush of joy when you accomplish a goal or succeed at a task. Dopamine perks your brain up and brings feelings of pleasure.

Some drugs prey on your brain’s reward system. They stimulate the brain to release an overabundance of dopamine. This creates a temporary sensation of pleasure, or a high. But coming down from a dopamine high is a hard fall. Afterward, you might feel depressed, tired, and less interested in your favorite activities.

Drugs aren’t the only way to mess with the normal dopamine levels in your brain. Addictive activities like video gaming, gambling, and shopping create similar highs. The surge of dopamine in your brain can make these habits hard to shake. That’s why it’s so important to understand how dopamine works so you can keep these behaviors in check.

Dopamine has plenty of positives, though. It encourages wakefulness. It helps your pancreas release the appropriate amount of insulin after you eat. Dopamine also coordinates your brain and your body to create voluntary movement. Writing your name, typing, and driving a car are all possible because of dopamine.

4. Adrenaline (Epinephrine)

If you have ever been spooked before, you know the feeling that comes from adrenaline—also called epinephrine. This neurotransmitter is responsible for your body’s fight or flight response.

Adrenaline is produced by adrenal glands located above your kidneys. But the chemical messenger works throughout the central nervous system to ramp up your heart rate and bring oxygen to your muscles quickly.

Why do you need adrenaline if you may never be in a true fight or flight scenario with a predator chasing you? Because your daily life provides plenty of situations where a similar—less life-saving—response is needed.

Adrenaline is your body’s defense mechanism against stress. If you’re running late and are afraid to miss your plane, epinephrine speeds up your breathing and heart rate so you can run through the security line.

Theme parks profit by taking advantage of adrenaline. They capitalize on the thrill a jolt of adrenaline can bring. It can make you feel jumpy in a haunted house or make your palms sweaty while you ride a rollercoaster.

Adrenaline sharpens your decision making, too. You can feel it kick in when you’re taking a test in school. Neurotransmitters like adrenaline can help your body to know how your brain wants to respond to stressful situations.

5. Serotonin

Take a break from your brain and shift your focus to your gut. Serotonin is an important brain chemical that does a lot of its work in your small intestine, too.

Serotonin in your digestive tract promotes feelings of satisfaction after eating and keeps your appetite in check. When a food you eat doesn’t sit well with your stomach, serotonin helps your body get rid of it.

Rotten or spoiled foods can make you feel nauseous. That’s because serotonin kicks in when you eat a potentially toxic food. It triggers your brain to make you feel queasy and helps your bowel dispose of the food quickly.

In your brain serotonin works a bit differently. It has a lot of influence over your mood, promoting feelings of wellbeing and happiness. Serotonin also helps you achieve more restful sleep and sets your body’s internal clock.

A serotonin imbalance can happen. When the brain doesn’t produce enough serotonin, you might experience a lower mood and sleeplessness. Confusion and brain fog may even set in.

On the other hand, too much serotonin coursing through your brain can be more dangerous. Some illegal drugs cause your brain to dump all of its serotonin stores into the synapse at once. This sudden spike in serotonin and later crash is called serotonin syndrome. It can create paranoia, impair your judgement, and negatively impact your memory. So, safeguard your brain’s supply of serotonin to maintain the delicate balance.

6. Oxytocin

Let’s debunk some myths about oxytocin. This neurotransmitter is much more than the “love hormone.” It’s more than the cuddly chemical messenger it’s been made out to be.

Oxytocin is a powerful neurotransmitter that affects many bodily functions. Your brain makes oxytocin in the hypothalamus and releases it via the pituitary gland to trigger responses all over the body.

Oxytocin urges the walls of the uterus to contract when a woman delivers her baby. This same chemical messenger fosters the bond between mother and child immediately following birth. Oxytocin also makes breast feeding possible, and stimulates the release of milk from mammary glands.

Men, don’t feel left out—oxytocin plays a significant role in your body, too. It helps your brain form strong connections of loyalty and trust. This helps you create important relationships with friends and family.

Be grateful for the chemical messenger the next time you interact with the people you care about. Your body needs oxytocin for its physical and social health— to live and love.

7. Acetylcholine

It may be last on this list, but this neurotransmitter was the first discovered in the human body. Acetylcholine is unique because it directly affects your muscles.

Acetylcholine works at the neuro-muscular junction. That’s the point where your nervous system and muscles meet. When acetylcholine is released from neurons, receptor proteins on muscle fibers take hold of it. Then the presence of acetylcholine triggers an action potential or command in the muscle fiber. But instead of sending signals to a brain cell, acetylcholine makes your muscle contract.

Every time you move your muscles, acetylcholine is in play. This can be voluntary movements or unconscious ones like your heartbeat or the contractions of peristalsis that moves food through your digestive tract.

Muscle movements aren’t all acetylcholine does for you. Your brain’s learning and memory functions are also impacted by this important neurotransmitter.

Apply Your Neurotransmitter Knowledge

Now that you know how neurotransmitters work, consider ways to help them be more efficient for your health.

Planning for enough sleep each night is a great way to give your brain a break that’s possible because of GABA.

Serotonin keeps your gut happy by eliminating foods that upset your stomach. So, eat plenty of protein to restore the serotonin levels in your gut.

You can increase the production of oxytocin by holding your kids close and spending quality time with the people you love.

And you can keep your dopamine levels in check by keeping an eye out for addictive behavior creeping into your daily routine.

Take a minute to appreciate all the work neurotransmitters do in your body. From your heartbeat to your breathing, digestion, and bonding, chemical messengers keep your brain and your body communicating.

You don’t need to be a neuroscientist to grasp the basics of how the brain works. Sure, your body’s command center is complex—a lot happens inside your skull. But a handful of key concepts can help you establish a working knowledge of the fundamentals of brain power. 

Start flexing your mind muscles and learn about four basic brain-science concepts. 

The Mechanics of Brain Power  

Your brain is packed with nearly 100 billion (100,000,000,000) neurons. Each links with other neurons to create networks that, in total, boost trillions of connections. This massive, complex web makes your brain the powerful central computer it is. And that’s how it’s possible for the brain to handle all the world throws at it—thinking, reacting, recalling, and controlling every aspect of your life.

But how does it work? The complexity makes it hard to understand. But knowing the parts and spinning a simple metaphor can help unravel the mysteries of brain mechanics.

The neurons in your brain look like a tree stump, with a main body (called the soma) and roots reaching out all around. A tree’s roots are for collection—spidering into the soil to bring in nutrients and water. The roots coming off a neuron body need to collect and communicate. 

That’s why neurons have two types of extensions—dendrites and an axon. Dendrites collect information and take in signals from other neurons. And the axon transmits messages using specialized chemicals called neurotransmitters.

Synapses are the interfaces where messages are transferred. These connections between the axon terminals of one neuron and the dendrites of another make communication in the brain possible. 

Each of your neurons is like a tiny TV news network. The reporters and producers are the dendrites reaching out to sources, collecting facts, and gathering the news. The anchor who broadcasts the news is the axon, passing on messages from the news network (or, in this example, the neuron). 

Together, this connected community of information sharers keeps your brain up to date and communicating fluidly. 

Exploring Your Ability to Adapt with Neuroplasticity

Your brain takes in so much data every minute of every day. Your environment, emotions, and other circumstances are also constantly changing. With all the input and perpetual transition, your brain has to adapt.

Neuroplasticity describes your brain’s incredible flexibility.

This is much more than the ability to change your mind about a topic. Neuroplasticity is the physical adaptations your brain makes by rewiring neural connections and networks. Using neuroplasticity, your powerful brain can switch the area where certain tasks are performed if the need arises. (Be careful not to confuse neuroplasticity with neurogenesis, which is the process of creating new neurons.)

Many circumstances have been shown to prompt the brain reorganization done through neuroplasticity. Physical injury, emotional trauma, and emotional stress all initiate change. More positive situations, like learning and improving your environment, can also stimulate neuroplasticity.

You know your brain is going to adapt. What you can do is help guide that rewiring through positive habits.

Executive Functions Help You Grow Up Mentally

Your ability to conquer your daily life has a lot to do with a collection of cognitive skills called your executive functions. And you learned and earned these skills—because you aren’t born with fully developed executive functions.

They include:

• Shifting attention around
• Controlling your impulses
• Regulating behavior
• Considering consequences before acting
• Remaining focused

Executive functions also help you toss around abstractions until you eventually create concrete conclusions. And they encompass your working memory, mental flexibility, and aspects of your creative problem-solving abilities.

Even if this concept is new to you, it’s not to your brain. You’ve used your executive functions to make your way through school. They’ve helped you achieve physical health goals. Executive functions even aided with managing emotions during tricky or rough times. And now you know what to call them.

Working Memory vs. Short-Term Memory

Defining memory seems simple. It’s what you can remember, right? Your brain’s storage capacity. What you can recall when you need to.

There’s a little more to memory than that. It starts with defining and differentiating the main types of memory.

Long-term memory is pretty self-explanatory, and easily separated from short-term and working memory. If it’s stored for more than a minute, it likely falls under long-term memory. But comparing working and short-term memory is a little bit more involved.

Short-term memory is the ability to remember small amounts of information for under a minute. Your ability to keep a number in your mind for long enough to write it down is an example of short-term memory. But you forget a lot of what’s stored in short-term memory. 

Working memory has limited space, but it’s a conduit for moving information from the senses to short- and long-term memory. And it also shuffles longer stored items to the front of your attention and mixes them with current stimuli to help you accomplish tasks in front of you.

Cooking your favorite meal provides an example of working memory. You’re pulling the ingredients, proportions, and timing from your long-term memory. Your working memory helps you complete the dish by mixing sights, sounds, and smells with the stored data in the recipe. That helps your meal come out right—without extra or incorrect ingredients and cooked properly.

So, the main different between working and short-term memory? Working memory allows you to manipulate memories and stimuli. Short-term memory is just temporary storage.

What’s Next for Your Neuroscience Journey?

This is just the tip of the brain-science iceberg. But now that you know more about these topics, you can expand your learning with some interesting facts about your brain. Or maybe it’s time for you to take action. Start feeding your brain the right foods, and establish a baseline to aid in tracking the progress of your cognitive skills.

No matter where this rabbit hole leads, you understand how your brain will adapt, the way neurons will facilitate the communication of new information, and how facts will be stored in your memory.

Your brain is a mystery only it can solve. Unraveling the riddle of how your body’s command center works—perception, the formation of thoughts, memory creation, and more—might seem like daunting, headache-inducing work.

But your brain is up to the task. Every second of the day it takes in so much information. Then it links disparate parts to make a whole thought, decision, memory, or picture of your world. Your brain is the ultimate processing unit, taking facts—from senses, chemical messages, or other stimuli—and spitting out a conclusion.

So, if you’re going to demystify your brain, it’s probably best to lay out the facts first. And your amazing brain will do the rest of the work putting the puzzle together.

Here are 41 facts about brain anatomy, perception, thoughts, memory, and healthy habits for your brain:

All About Your Brain Anatomy and Structure

1. Your brain, if you’re an adult, is about three pounds (1.4 kilograms) of firm-jelly-textured human computing power. And it’s surprisingly fatty—about 60 percent of the brain is fat.
2. All your thinking, deciding, and processing drains about 20 percent of the total energy, oxygen, and blood in your body. So much power and so many resources for about two percent of your total weight. And delivering all that blood, oxygen, and nutrients requires almost 100,000 miles of blood vessels to be packed into your skull.
3. Your brain did a lot of growing in your first year of life—when it tripled in size. But life shrinks your brain. After you hit middle age, your brain decreases in physical size as time passes.
4. A bigger brain doesn’t mean anything. Physical size hasn’t been found to have any significant correlation with higher intelligence. In general, research has only found brain size to be responsible for around 10 percent of intelligence variability.
5. You do have a left and right brain. That’s because it’s divided into two almost symmetrical—but not identical—hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum (a nerve bundle).
6. Your brain is kind of cross-wired. The left side controls muscles on your body’s right side. The right side of your brain is responsible for pulling the strings on the muscles of your left side. It sounds confusing, but your brain has it figured out.
7. The whole brain chips in for creativity and other mental tasks. So, artistic people aren’t really relying more on their right brain. Analytical people aren’t more left brained. Slight cognitive differences have been found in the hemispheres, but it’s not accurate to call yourself right brained, unless the left side has been removed.
8. There are three major parts of the brain: the cerebrum, cerebellum, and brain stem.
9. The cerebrum is the brain’s biggest part, accounting for 85 percent of its weight. It needs that size to handle a lot of survival tasks (movement, senses, temperature, and judgment). And the cerebrum also tackles higher-order operations—problem solving, reasoning, emotions, and learning.
10. You can thank (or blame) your cerebellum for your posture and balance. And your brain stem handles a lot of processes you do without thinking. But they keep you alive—breathing and keeping your heart beating. The brain stem also shuttles information from your sensory organs, helps you swallow, and cough.

11. Science also splits the brain up into four lobes: the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes. Each lobe handles specific tasks. The frontal lobe tackles thinking tasks, as well as movement and short-term memory. Sensory information on touch and taste is processed in your parietal lobe. Your occipital lobe is all about processing and storing the information your eyes take in. The temporal lobe works on memory storage, smell, taste, and sound.
12. That’s a lot information already. Does your head hurt? If it does, you can bet it isn’t actually your brain. It interprets signals from around the body, but feels no pain itself. You can even trace brain freeze to the blood vessels in your throat constricting from cold, not your actual brain.

How Your Brain Works and Communicates

13. You use more than 10 percent of your brain. In fact, your whole brain is working most of the time. It has to. That’s the only way your complex body runs smoothly and you stay safe.
14. The human brain is far better than the best computer ever created. It can handle a lot of information every second, and process it all faster than a computer. And that means A LOT of information—up to 10 to the 16^th power every second.
15. All that processing means information travels fast around your brain. Although the speed of information varies, it’s estimated info can ping around the brain at about 250 miles per hour (402 kilometers per hour).
16. What makes all this speed and computing possible? Neurons. There are about one hundred billion—a one followed by 11 zeroes—of these nerve cells in your brain. They’re able to communicate with other neurons via chemical or electrical signals.
17. Neurons are cells, but they have unique properties that set them apart from your other cells. And these physical differences help them do their job. Neurons have special branches on one end called dendrites and axons on the other. The dendrites receive information, while the axon on the other end sends the information to the next neuron.
18. Synapses are the spaces between neurons where they come very, very close to touching in order to relay information. When you have a new thought or remember something, new synaptic connections are created.
19. The chemical messengers of the brain are called neurotransmitters. That makes sense because your body makes these chemicals to literally transmit messages between neurons. You’ve probably heard of a few neurotransmitters like adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin.

20. Your brain isn’t the same as anyone else’s. Your experiences—including what happens to you and what you learn—wire your brain in a unique way. And that wiring continues to develop as you learn and experience more.
21. The mechanics of the working brain are amazing. It allows you to do so many higher-order tasks (processes not tied to survival). But multitasking is still impossible. When someone says they’re multitasking, they’re alternating between higher-order tasks. They may do the switching quickly, but the tasks aren’t happening simultaneously.
22. Your brain gets bored easily. Research has found that every 10 minutes you need something that sparks you emotionally to hit the reset button on your attention. If that 10-minute number sounds long, it’s because the human attention span (how long you can pay attention to a single thing) continues to shrink. It’s down to an average of eight seconds—down four seconds in just 15 years.
23. Even if your brain gets bored, it never loses focus on survival. It’s your body’s command center, so survival is always the first priority. That means your brain constantly makes decisions about safety and solves problems to keep you safe. In nature, those fight-or-flight decisions may actually be lifesaving. But in modern life, the constant barrage of non-dangerous, but stressful situations trick your brain into survival mode. This can create unhealthy levels of stress.
24. Your whole brain doesn’t sleep—not fully, at least. And your dreams are proof. Science doesn’t even know everything about dreams. But they’re thought to be a function of imagination, psychology, and neurology mixing together.

Shaping Perception and Thought in the Brain

25. In a dream, you might perceive a fantastical environment or adventure. It’s your brain’s job to set your perception. It uses sensory data to paint a complete picture of your world. Perception isn’t as simple as collating sensory data, though. It’s more complex.
26. Those brain-sensory complexities can create conditions like synesthesia. This is when your senses converge to layer a perception on one sense. A common example is when people see colors when they hear music.
27. The reason perception can vary has everything to do with the brain’s interaction with sensory information. Take hearing as an example. Your ears collect sound waves. But your experience of hearing and listening is shaped in the brain. So, that’s why two people can have the same sound waves enter their ears, but think they hear something different. Like with the Laurel vs. Yanny viral sensation of 2018, if there’s any ambiguity, your brain uses your experiences to flesh out the phrasing to give you a perception of the sound. And that can be different for people.
28. Brain researchers can watch you think. That’s because physically, thoughts show up in imaging as many neurons firing. There are still a lot of mysteries about how thoughts are formed and what processes are responsible, though. At a basic level, your brain connects different information to form a new mixture called a thought.

Making Memories

29. You should be impressed by the brain’s ability to perceive the world and generate thoughts. But memory is just as amazing. It’s estimated your brain can store 2,500,000 gigabytes of information.
30. You have two basic types of memory: short-term and—you probably guessed it—long-term memory.
31. There’s a reason your short-term memory is also referred to as working memory. For the most part, it operates by allowing you to remember information long enough for you to use it. That’s why you can remember a phone number to dial it, but might forget it right after the call ends.
32. Dredging up memories isn’t exactly like pulling a file from a folder. Your brain has to recreate and reimagine that memory. And it’s not a perfect copy of the original.
33. The ability to look up any of the information in the world is great for everything except your memory. Your brain isn’t lazy, per se. But it’s very busy and prioritizes tasks that absolutely need to be done. So, if it knows you can look something up again, your brain may not store that tidbit of information.
34. Pictures are powerful tools for memory. Studies have shown people retain 65 percent more information when images are involved.
35. Science has a name for wisdom—all the situations and information you’ve experienced and stored. Scientists call it cognitive template.
36. Want to help yourself remember information? Try these tips. Repetition helps. Repeating information really works. So does adding more context. That means stringing a few bits of information about a person with their name to help you remember it better. These associations strengthen memory. You can also try to pour information into your brain at a slower rate. A flood of information just won’t sink in, as well.

Facts About Habits to Maintain That Insanely Awesome Brain

37. Water plays a big role in brain health and computing power. That’s because your brain is about 75 percent H₂O. So, stay hydrated to keep your brain cranking full-steam ahead.
38. Sleep is important to being your best self. You’ve been sleep deprived before. Did you have a banner mental day after your four hours of shut eye? Doubtful. Sleep is when your brain rests (but, as you know now, doesn’t completely shut down). A lack of sleep impacts information processing, attention, memory, mood, and logic.

39. Your brain gets sleepy. So, if you crave a nap about 3 p.m., that’s normal. It’s just your brain trying to rest. Keep that in mind when you’re designing your daily schedule.
40. Just because your brain likes naps and wants plenty of sleep that doesn’t mean it wants you to be sedentary. Actually, the opposite. Regular exercise supports brain health and cognition as much as your waistline.
41. Don’t stress. Your brain doesn’t like it. Stress is bad for your overall health. But it can really cause problems with learning and many important aspects of cognition. Your brain can deal with short-term stresses. It was built to help you survive, after all. But hours of steeping in a stressful situation is bad for your brain. So, work on coping mechanisms that take you out of your long-suffering stressful state.

From Facts to Action

Now that you know a little bit more about your body’s command center, take care of it. You don’t need the knowledge of a neuroscientist to appreciate and pamper for your brain.

Do the things it likes—sleeping, learning, exercising—and avoid stress and behaviors that might harm it. And don’t forget to feed your brain the nutrients it needs by eating a diet full of fruits, vegetables, and good fats. Your brain is hungry for healthy foods, and knowledge. Continue to feed it both so it can stay happy and healthy.