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Matt Kelly explains how the blood-brain barrier works as a gating system that filters what enters the brain, keeps neurotransmitters in place, and uses pumps to eject toxic substances that could damage neural tissue.
Matt Kelly explains how the blood-brain barrier works as a gating system that filters what enters the brain, keeps neurotransmitters in place, and uses pumps to eject toxic substances that could damage neural tissue.
And it does a lot of things. It has a lot of different gating channels. It has a lot of different filtration, if you will, et cetera. And one of the ideas, to keep it real simple, is it tries to keep what is in your brain in there and tries to keep things we don't want to go to the brain out of the brain. Now, sometimes that's done by just holding onto things like we make neurotransmitters in our brain and we don't want the ones we made in our brain to escape and go too far away. So the blood-brain barrier helps keep those in. Sometimes there are toxic substances that the blood-brain barrier actually has a pump to eject out of the brain side, for example. So it's very, very important.
