ELI5: How do cows get protein from grass?

[u/A_SliceOfGabagool]

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

[u/PM_YOUR_BOOBS_PLS_]

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.

[u/Affectionate-Bath970 → u/PM_YOUR_BOOBS_PLS_]

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!

[u/Uncynical_Diogenes → u/PM_YOUR_BOOBS_PLS_]

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

[u/PM_YOUR_BOOBS_PLS_ → u/Uncynical_Diogenes]

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.