What is Homeostasis?
What is Homeostasis? | Physiology | Biology | FuseSchool
Homeostasis is a term first defined by Claude Bernard in 1865. It means maintaining a constant internal environment.
Senses all around the body are measuring various things and sending the information back to the brain. The brain then does its best to keep all these things stable and constant to keep the body working properly. Homeostasis is maintaining a constant internal environment.
What kind of things need to be kept constant in the body? It's very important to keep our temperature the same, at around thirty seven degrees Celsius. You can find out more about this in the video on temperature regulation. You also need to keep the levels of sugar in the blood constant along with levels of ions and water. Your blood pressure needs to be carefully monitored along with the amount of waste in the blood such as carbon dioxide and urea.
Let's say one of these factors goes too high or low, what is the brain going to do to get it back to normal levels? The answer to that is negative feedback. Negative feedback is the process whether the brain uses either a hormone or the nervous system to send a signal to the part of the body that can rectify the problem. For example, after you eat a meal with your blood sugar level increases. This is detected, and the pancreas will release a hormone called insulin that causes the sugar to be stored in the liver. The blood sugar level will then return to normal.
Negative feedback is the leap from which the body takes a stimulus, reacts by responding accordingly and brings the body back to the normal levels.
So why is homeostasis so important? Our metabolism, which is all the chemical reactions in our bodies that keep us alive, is controlled by enzymes. These enzymes only work in very specific conditions. If these conditions change, they could stop working and we could die.
Luckily, all of this happens without you having to think about it. If you had to do it yourself, you would have to spend all day and night just trying to keep all these things constant and we'd have no time to doing fun like watch videos of cats on the Internet.
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