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Course: Health and medicine > Unit 7
Lesson 2: Biological basis of behavior: Endocrine systemEndocrine system and influence on behavior - Part 2
The endocrine system uses tiny amounts of hormones to regulate body functions. These hormones travel through the blood, affecting areas with the right receptors. The system maintains balance through metabolism and secretion, guided by feedback loops. This hormonal regulation plays a key role in behavior and psychological responses, linking physiology and psychology.
Created by Ryan Scott Patton.
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Are all of the hormones small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier? If not, how does the negative-feedback signal reach the hypothalamus and pituitary glands?(23 votes)
Most endothelial cells that make up capillaries in the brain have tight junctions that contribute to the blood-brain barrier. However, the endothelial cells that make up the capillaries in the hypothalamus have capillaries whose endothelial cells are fenestrated (i.e. contain "windows"). These fenestrations facilitate the negative-feedback signal. These fenestrations typically occur in three areas of the hypothalamus: organum vasculosum of the lamina terminalis (OVLT), median eminence, and neural hypophysis.(28 votes)
Hi. I was talking to my kids (both 8 yrs old) about adrenaline and the associated fight/flight syndromes that we at some point get to experience. My son asked me this question: "Does the capacity of adrenaline grow as you get older? Would a 3 year old release as much adrenaline?"
That in turn led me to my own question, which is: At what age does the body release adrenaline? Is there any point in producing it, if you don't have the ability to either "fight or flight"? For example would a toddler still release adrenaline?(18 votes)
The capacity to release adrenaline grows as a person grows but does grow faster than the patient. A teenager makes more than an infant which might make sense because a teenager has a much bigger body. However, even taking the changes in body size into consideration, a teenager makes more than an infant such that the concentration that can be measured in the urine is higher in teenagers.
Adrenaline is necessary for life because it helps regulate multiple different "automatic" processes in the body such as blood pressure and glucose levels. Adrenaline is made by the fetus, as well. The idea that adrenaline is a "fight or flight" hormone can only take you so far to understanding its actions. The fetus is often under a lot of stress and responding to, for instance, decreased blood flow from the placenta causes an increase in the heart rate and blood pressure to help maintain the right amount of oxygen in the blood. Similarly, a toddler can have a serious injury and need the same response mediated by the adrenaline.(26 votes)
I was really excited to hear more about the hypothalamus's interface with the pituitary... for example, in what ways would the release of GnRH be triggered by non-hormonal factors, such as aggressive social encounters or sexual arousal? What are some of the basic groups of psyco-hormonal triggers? Does nearly getting hit by a car trigger a reaction in the Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, or both? Can a person really alter their hormonal composition by changing their mindset and the types of activity they engage in? In what ways could one encourage balance and responsiveness in their own endocrine system?(5 votes)
Almost getting hit by a car and running away is a reflex. Reflex to "jump away from car" is dealt with by spinal cord and brain stem, the very first level of your brain we inherited from reptiles. These reactions (such as breathing even) are very stereotypical and conserved, even if learned (fire burns) and you don't think about them when you e.g. jump away from the car or take the hand off the heat source. After the initial reaction of avoiding imminent danger you feel the "adrenaline rush". But when you actually get nearly hit by a car "your heart skipped a beat". Plus as was told in the video, you have floating adrenaline in your bloodstream already, ready to be used.
Sexual arousal and orgasms are primarily thanks to oxytocin, not necessarily GnRH. GnRH is influencing the long-term production of sex hormones. As for triggers, you have smell, pheromones, memory of previous encounter, touch in erotogenic zones, etc...
But yes, most of it is in your head/influenced by it- so psycho-hormonal link is still to be fully understood :)(8 votes)
What are some proven methods to get control of unwanted hormonal responses?(2 votes)- There are drugs that modulate hormonal responses that are exaggerated. You can see nice examples in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. Too much epinephrine increases the frequency and contraction of the heart. Once you administer propanolol or other beta-blocker (blocker of epinephrine beta receptors), heart rate is slower as well as more stable. Other example can be oral contraception pills. These pills artificially modulate levels of hormones in order to prevent pregnancy or minimize side effects of menopause. There are few more, including treatments for overproduction or underproduction of hormones.
Generally the "unwanted" response is fought with blockers of the receptors, antagonistic compounds with opposite effects or supplementation of the hormone (if the unwanted response is due to the fact the hormone is missing)(4 votes)
What hormone levels are affected by liver disease?(3 votes)
Video transcript
And so we've kind of got an idea now about what hormones are, and what organs make them, but one thing that confused me for a really long time is the idea of how much of these
hormones are in our blood, and how they actually get from point A to point B. And so I'll make a
category for concentration. And my first thought when I started thinking about hormones, are that these must be just kind of infinitely present in our blood vessels. There are an unimaginable
amount of blood cells, and I just kind of categorized hormones with that level
of red blood cells, just a ton of them
flowing through our body. And while there is a wealth of hormones flowing through our
body at any given time, it's actually a fairly small amount. You're talking about
picograms per milliliter, which is one millionth of
one millionth of a gram. So really small amounts. Let's say that the pituitary is wanting to stimulate
the adrenal glands. It's releasing that amount of hormones, but it's not a straight shot. There is no straight shot
to the adrenal gland. So it's really just dumping this hormone into the blood. And then it's going everywhere, almost like your body's
showering in this hormone. And so very similar to radio waves, which are going everywhere
throughout the air, but are only picked up by those that are tuned into them, the endocrine hormones are flowing all throughout your body, but their effect is really determined by where the receptors are located. And so when you have
these autocrine signals, they're autocrine signals
because their receptors are right there at the
cell that are making them. And paracrine signals, they're paracrine signals because their receptors are pretty close to the cells that are making them, and the same thing with endocrine system. That just means their
receptors are a really long distance away from
where they're being made. And so that concentration again is smalll, but it's everywhere in the body and it's being regulated kind of by two main ideas. You've got the idea of metabolism, that for every one of these hormones that actually reaches its destination, 99 or so percent are actually metabolized by either the liver or the kidney. And the liver breaks these down and ultimately makes bile, and the kidneys breaks these hormones down and ultimately excretes them into urine. But for every one of these
hormones that are made, thousands of more are being metabolized and excreted in one way
or another from the body. And so the metabolism is
affecting concentration, but secretion is also
affecting concentration. And secretion affects concentration really through this important idea known as a feedback loop, and so I went ahead and pre-drew a feedback loop that I'll walk us through. And so the idea behind a feedback loop is that the products that are being made and causing that simulation in different parts of the body also stimulate the
cessation or the stopping of the production of
the hormones themselves. So that's a little bit of a confusing idea and I'll walk us through an example. So say we need more thyroid hormones and our hypothalamus starts releasing thyroid releasing hormones, which is how it communictates to the anterior pituitary that we need these hormones in our blood. The anterior pituitary then releases thyroid stimulating hormone, which stimulates the thyroid's production of the thyroid hormones
like we talked about, T3 and T4, triiodothyronine and thyroxine. So as these thyroid hormones
travel through the blood, again they're going
everywhere in the blood, not just from point A to point B. They're in all of the blood vessels, and they're just [unintelligible]
the body's tissues and these hormones. They eventually reach receptors on the hypothalamus and
the anterior pituitary, which when that thyroid
hormone is received, signals the anterior pituitary
to stop the production. I'll draw that in red so it's just really clear. It signals to stop the production of these hormones. And it does that in
the anterior pituitary, and also in the hypothalamus. It says "we don't need
these hormones anymore, "there are plenty of them." And that's a really beautiful effect, when you think about it, that the body is kind of naturally wired to not only elicit an effect, but also to kind of know when that effect is no longer needed. And so that's the idea of
a negative feedback loop. And the negative feedback loop is the main way that
secretion is controlled. And so you have these hormones, and you have these organs
that are making them, and you have this idea of regulation. And ultimately what that leads into is the endocrine system's involvement with the nervous system and behavior. And if behavior is just the coordinated internal and external response of our body in response to its environment, then we can see that the hormones that are signalling these effects in different parts of the body, plays a pretty integral role in behavior. And then behavior
ultimately forms the bridge between the physiology
of the endocrine system and the psychology and
the study of the mind and how we respond in
attitude and personality. And all of these effects
that we talked about in behavior, psychologically, the basis for those effects are the coordinated hormonal responses that are happening through
the endocrine system. And so in this bridge between the physiology and psychology, that's where you start getting into ideas of cognitive behavioral therapy. And cognitive behavioral therapy is this idea that you
can actually, you know, control parts of what your body's doing physiologically with your mind. It's under conscious control,
these little hormones, and so you can imagine that
when you're really afraid, I'll draw like being really afraid there, that you have epinephrine just coursing through your blood vessels, causing an increased heart rate and increased respiratory rate, and diverting energy
away from your digestion and your immune system, and into this kind of
fight or flight response. But as you become conditioned
to that fearful stimulus, and as you are no longer afraid of it, that you can actually become more consciously calm in that and resulting in less adrenaline flowing throughout your body. And so this entire mass of hormones that are circulating through your body at any given moment, are in some way under your control. And that's actually a pretty neat concept.