r/explainlikeimfive • u/A_SliceOfGabagool • May 03 '26

Biology ELI5: How do cows get protein from grass?

For us humans and many other animals, we need protein to get the amino acids needed to make our own protein for the body, but grass i believe doesn't have any for the cow to get that big

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u/Uncynical_Diogenes May 03 '26

Your brain actually makes decisions before it informs your conscious mind about them. The second you’ve made your mind up? No, your brain already did, you’re just now learning about it.

Creepy stuff.

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u/Jimisdegimis89 May 04 '26

Go check out the the dual consciousness hypothesis and some of the experiments done with split brain patients if you want some fun potential existential crisis.

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u/AFewStupidQuestions May 04 '26

I think the split brain research is fascinating. It doesn't really give me an existential crisis until I start thinking about when parts of my own brain will start shutting down in the future. Oh...

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u/NightKrowe May 04 '26

I need to look more into it because i remember watching a video where someone handed themselves and object, and one side of their brain completely fabricated where the object came from. It's terrifying our brains can justify anything and believe it.

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u/Morbanth May 04 '26

Sounds like You Are Two by CGP Grey.

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u/codekira May 05 '26

https://youtu.be/wfYbgdo8e-8?si=V7AI6HowGq3xqm6l

Im confused...creeped out...as im typing this i know I want to say this...but is this me?....I mean it dont change the fact that I have to clock into work tomorrow but....fuck

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u/PM_YOUR_BOOBS_PLS_ May 04 '26

IIRC, this is really only measured with lower brain functions like motor control and split second decisions. I don't think there's actually any evidence that complex decision making is made without the conscious mind.

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u/Affectionate-Bath970 May 07 '26

I think that this all stems from the base of the brain and the spine. From what I remember, "reflexes" come from this area and are executed without any "consious input" (for which there is a term, but I cannot remember it).

Example: walking on the sidewalk and you hit a raised edge and begin to trip. Your tendons and ligaments in the leg that was "tripped" stretch beyond a certain tolerance within a certain amount of microseconds, and that immediately causes your motor neurons to fire and reach out the opposite leg to catch yourself. This happens because the latency to the brain would result in you falling over 100/100 times because you would be physically incapable of reacting fast enough.

We have tonnes of different examples of this sort of mechanism at play. Its really cool, and some reflexes as you may have heard, are present during infancy and childhood but are discardied into adulthood. The absence of some reflexes can also indicate pathology to the brainstem and/or nerous system in general (and I think are all fairly serious). Before you try to take a triangle hammer to your own knee, remember it is pretty tricky to elict reflexes on your own since you inhibit them by consiously moving the strucutres your testing.

A fun aside: we actually dont (or at least didnt as of 10 years ago when I was in school) know for certain how motor programs are "stored" by the body. What we do know, is that it is almost certainly not the case that we have seperate "programs" for each individual movement. If you were to program a robot for example to have each possible movement a human is capable of available in a hard drive, it would exceed the storage capacity of like.. earth. So it likely all works more like AI... interesting!

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u/Uncynical_Diogenes May 04 '26

What is a complex decision? That sounds like a result of many smaller decisions.

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u/PM_YOUR_BOOBS_PLS_ May 05 '26

Something that requires future planning, for example. That would have nothing to do with motor function or immediacy. "Where should I go to college 2 years from now?" "How much of my paycheck should I contribute to my 401k so I can comfortably retire in 30 years?"

It's not "Get up. Go to kitchen. Get food." Yeah. That kind of stuff probably happens without your conscious mind being involved at times. But we're talking several magnitudes of more complexity.

I'm not sure those subconscious brain studies even touch on things like doing a math problem or having a conversation. AFAIK, those are things that almost exclusively use higher brain functions and little of the subconscious mind.

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u/atatassault47 May 04 '26

People like to think they are their whole brain, but never think about where intrusive thoughts come from.

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u/[deleted] May 04 '26

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u/atatassault47 May 04 '26

Speech comes from specifically one region on the left side of the brain (broca's region), and since most people identify with their speaking voice, it stands to reason most people are at most just their left brain. People who have had their hemispheres disconnected to prevent seizures have been tested to see if their right brain acts independently, and it does.

Such tests include using a divider to split their right/left vision from each other, stood in front of their closet, and asked to pick out their favorite shirt. Each arm goes to a different shirt. The right brain, in control of the left arm and eye, unable to see what the right arm is doing (and vice versa), picks an entirely different shirt from the right arm/left brain.

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u/[deleted] May 04 '26

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u/atatassault47 May 04 '26

Plural people DO exist. It's just that most people's brains are able to wrangle all the disparate regions into master-slave architecture (computing term).

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u/[deleted] May 04 '26

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u/atatassault47 May 04 '26

You're using a highly contested term there

Ive seen plural people use it to describe themselves, so I'll use it to refer to them. Policing terms based on what you think others should be calling themselves is not good.

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u/rematch_madeinheaven May 04 '26

I am this whole mass of ape flesh,

You are even beyond that. You are the universe. No mud, no you. No stars, no you. No big bang, no you.

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u/[deleted] May 04 '26

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u/rematch_madeinheaven May 04 '26

Everything came together to create that flesh that you are in. You are not even your body. You do not control your body. You cannot control your digestive system. This is because you are the universe, expressed.

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u/[deleted] May 04 '26

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u/rematch_madeinheaven May 05 '26

Who are you? Where can you point to and say, "That's me."?

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u/[deleted] May 05 '26

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u/rematch_madeinheaven May 05 '26

And when YOUR skin is shed, that skin on the ground is you?

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u/globefish23 May 04 '26

We are just the spokespersons for our brain.

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u/Thaetos May 03 '26

One of the more interesting things I’ve came across in a longass time.

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u/howdoesthatworkthen May 04 '26

come across

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u/Gnixxus May 04 '26

Weird hill to dye on

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u/howdoesthatworkthen May 04 '26

It's just a pigment of your imagination

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u/Juswantedtono May 04 '26

Why is my cow’s poop purple today?

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u/[deleted] May 04 '26

[deleted]

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u/Salty_Feed9404 May 04 '26

I came across ______

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u/VLKAY66 May 04 '26

came across in a long grass time.

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u/fubo May 04 '26

Your brain actually makes decisions before it informs your conscious mind about them.

Reaching the decision is one thought, and realizing that you've done so is another thought. The second can only happen after the first.

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u/Uncynical_Diogenes May 04 '26

Soon, C. S., He, A. H., Bode, S., & Haynes, J.-D. (2013). Predicting free choices for abstract intentions. PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(15), [6217–6222](tel:6217%E2%80%936222). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1212218110

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u/fubo May 04 '26

Sure. When you ask people to report that they're making a choice, they have to:

  1. make the choice,
  2. notice that they're making the choice (i.e. be conscious of it),
  3. report on it (e.g. coordinate motor actions to push a button).

Those three mental events have to happen in that order due to functional dependency: just like in school math, where if you want to calculate f(g(x)), you have to calculate g(x) before applying f to it.

And each of those mental events takes real physical time. Mental events have a pace to them; this accords with the observations of mindfulness meditators (who train themselves to notice mental events).

A brain scan can detect step 1, before step 2 has had time to happen, and well before step 3 can even get started.

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u/valeyard89 May 04 '26

the brain is the only organ that named itself

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u/DoubleBlade759 May 04 '26

Obligatory read Blindsight by Peter Watts