Christopher Ellis shares a professor's analogy for how the nervous system works: the brain is a mother, peripheral nerves are a promiscuous daughter, and muscles are a boyfriend with a Mustang. When stroke damages the brain, the daughter and boyfriend run wild without supervision, causing spasticity.
Let me give you a little interesting analogy one of my professors gave to us in grad school, which kind of took me by surprise because grad school is very serious and it's all about professionalism. And he made this analogy that was not exactly professional, but it did the trick because I still remember it. And it goes something like this. This is how you can determine between central and peripheral. So think of the central nervous system or the brain as a mother. The, The nerve, the peripheral nerve, that is, is like a promiscuous daughter. And the muscle is like the boyfriend who drives a Mustang. Like, that's the muscle, right? So if you have— if you eliminate the mother, so say like a stroke, in other words, and you're only left with the promiscuous daughter and the muscle, you get, you know, what's called a lot of facilitation, a lot of activity. So in the stroke world, that's called spasticity. Spasticity.
