BR_Brain Rules Part 1

Question 1

What does your pre-frontal cortex govern?

Answer 1

It governs several cognitive talents, called “executive functions” Solving problems, maintaining attention and inhibiting emotional impulses.

Question 2

How many brains are inside your head?

Answer 2

You have three brains inside your head. The most ancient is the brain stem, or lizard brain. This part of your brain functions just like a Gila Monster.

This brain stem controls most body chores: breathing, heart rate, sleeping, waking.

Second brain is your “Mammalian brain”. Its functions involve the four F’s. Fighting, feeding, fleeing, and the F word for reproductive behavior.

Covering the top of these two brains is a membrane called the Cortex (Human brain). The cerebral cortex is where memories are stored. It is where the blender splatters reside.

[MN: Outside your head there are two more brains. They are not considered a brain technically, but they do the exact functions like your other three brains.

First one is your stomach. Second one is your Adrenal glands that reside on top of your kidneys.]

Question 3

Name the responsibilities for:

1. Amygdala
2. Hippocampus
3. Cerebral Cortex
4. Thalmus
5. Hypothalmus

Answer 3

1. Amygdala creates emotions and the memories they generate.
2. Hippocampus converts short term memories into long term memories.
3. Cerebral Cortex [Human brain]is the where memories are stored. It is where the blender splatters reside. It is folded to form the top of your brain.
4. Thalmus is your control tower for your senses.
5. Hypothalmus is a pea sized organ sitting almost in the middle of your head. When your sensory systems detect stress, the hypothalamus signals your adrenal glands to dump buckets of adrenaline into your bloodstream.

Question 4

If you unfolded your cerebral cortex, how large would it be?

Answer 4

Your cerebral cortex would unfold to about the size of a baby blanket, with thickness from a piece of notepaper to that of heavy duty cardboard.

Question 5

Why do humans have such a long childhood compared to another animal, like a dog?

Answer 5

Our three brains evolved into one composite brain with three major parts. Our pelvis limits birth canal size. Our heads grew larger and many mothers died in child birth. For this reason, the human baby had to be born earlier so the head could fit through the birth canal.

As a result, our head and brain along with our body continues to grow and develop outside the womb. This is why human babies are so vulnerable to danger for many years.

A dog takes a year to mature. A human takes two decades.

To be safe, we had to gather in tribes and protect one another. We decided to try to get along with each other.

Question 6

How can I maintain my level of cognitive ability as I age?

Answer 6

A lifetime of exercise results in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance compared with those who are sedentary. Researchers consistently found that all kinds of mental abilities began to come back online with active exercise!

Question 7

How much exercise for my brain?

Answer 7

The gold standard is aerobic exercise, 30 minutes at a clip two or three times a week. Add a strengthening regimen and you get even more cognitive benefit.

But beware. Exercising too intensely, to exhaustion, can hurt cognition.

Question 8

Does exercise fight off dementia and Alzheimer’s?

Answer 8

Your lifetime risk for general dementia is literally cut in half if you participate in physical activity. With Alzheimer’s, the effect is even greater: Reducing your odds of getting the disease by more than 60%.

Bump it up to a 20 minute walk each day and you cut risk of stroke by 57%.

Question 9

What is my energy supply?

Answer 9

The energy supply is glucose, a type of sugar that is one of the body’s favorite resources. Your food gets reconfigured into glucose which is absorbed into the bloodstream via the small intestines. The nutrients travel to all parts.

Question 10

What else does exercise do for me?

Answer 10

It reduces your risk for more than a dozen types of cancer, improves the immune system, changes you blood lipid profile, and buffers against the toxic effects of stress.

Question 11

Are brain naps good for me?

Answer 11

The brain really wants to take a nap and does not care what its owner is doing. So when you are tired, normally it is your brain that is tired and needing a nap.

Question 12

What benefits happen during my brain nap?

Answer 12

The brain uses the time to clean house, sweeping away the toxic molecules that are a byproduct of the brain doing its thinking.

A brain nap will improve your performance by 34% for just a 26 minute nap.

Question 13

Define Stress.

Answer 13

Stress is defined as:

1. A measurable physiological response.
2. A desire to avoid the situation.
3. A loss of control.

Question 14

How did we learn to stress? What was it good for?

Answer 14

We are programmed for very quick, flash type stress, fight or flee responses. With modern day after day office politics, we cannot change anything, so we stress into “LEARNED HELPLESSNESS”.

Question 15

So why is stress bad for us? What damage does it do?

Answer 15

When we stress the hypothalmus dumps buckets of adrenaline into our bloodstream. This was originally needed to quickly flee from danger before getting eaten.

In the modern office world, it is political stress, normally the learned helplessness. Now all those buckets of adrenaline produces scarring on the insides of our blood vessels. These scars become magnets for molecules to accumulate, creating lumps called plaques. These can grow large enough to block the blood vessels, often resulting in a stroke or heart attack.

This process also kills off many of your white blood cells. Chronic stress affects immune system making you three times more likely to get sick. Colds, diabetes, and asthma.

[MN: Could be why Uncle Harry lives past 100. He laughs after most of his statements.]

Question 16

How does the stability of the home effect a child’s ability to do well in school?

Answer 16

Children with a stability problem at home are 3 times more likely to be expelled from school or to become pregnant as teenagers, and five times more likely to live in poverty.

[MN: I think this explains bullies in school, and single parent black familes with a mother who must work, while her child wants to be a gang member, and turning to drugs, eventually ending up in prison.]

Question 17

Will Identical twins having an identical experience emerge with identical brains?

Answer 17

No they will not. They each will have different abilties. Learning rewires your brain. When you learn something, the wiring in your brain changes.

Since each twin will have a different interest, the brains will be rewired independently.

Question 18

Is brain size different on a wild animal in a zoo versus a wild animal in the wild?

Answer 18

Yes. The animal in the wild will have a brain 15 to 30% larger! This is because the animal in the wild has to figure out things, like how to find food, and how to escape danger. And how to keep your cubs safe.

Question 19

How does the Brain act like a muscle?

Answer 19

The more activity you do, the larger and more complex it can become.

Question 20

Is it accurate to say that nearly every inch of your outer physical presentation to the world is dead?

Answer 20

Yes!

The surface of your skin, all nine pounds of it literally is deceased. This allows the rest of your cells to support your daily life free of wind, rain, etc.

Question 21

What happens in your hippocampus?

Answer 21

Your hippocampus is in the center of your brain and it is where short term knowledge is converted to long term knowledge.

Inside your brain there are schools of molecules called neurotransmitters, and they function like tiny couriers.

If you can imagine two trees being uprooted and turned 90 degrees so that the roots face each other, and then moved close enough to almost touch, you can visualize the real world of two neurons interacting in the brain.

Question 22

How is infant brain construction so remarkable?

Answer 22

The human brain, only partially constructed at birth, won’t be fully assembled for years. The biggest construction programs are not finished until you are in you early 20’s, with fine tuning well into your 40’s.

If we could look inside a child’s head, we would see that their brain is just as unevenly developed as their body.

Question 23

How can we explain individuality?

Answer 23

Consider a highway. We have the neural equivalents of large interstate highways. These big trunks are the same from one person to the next, functioning in yours about the same way they function in everybody else.

So a great deal of the structure and function of the brain is predictable.

It’s when you get to the smaller routes, the residential streets, one laners and dirt roads, that individual patterns begin to show up. In no two people are they identical.

That is the experience dependent wiring. Every brain has a lot of these smaller paths, which is why the very small amounts to a big deal.

Question 24

Why does a patient have to be conscious during brain surgery?

Answer 24

It is because of the blender effect on where everything, including speech, and motor functions like moving arms and legs are stored in the brain. No two brains are alike.

So the surgeon must spend a lot of time probing the brain and testing to see what is stored in the part of the brain he is going to operate.

Question 25

What has paying attention to do with learning and memory?

Answer 25

We do not pay attention to boring things. The more attention the brain pays to a given stimulus, the more elaborately the information will be encoded, that is, learned and retained.

Better attention always equals better learning.

Question 26

How long do people pay attention until they mentally check out?

Answer 26

After 10 minutes, most people check out. Their mind wanders and daydreams.

So when teaching someone something new, start with the overview then go into details.

Every 10 minutes you must do something to wake up the student’s attention if you expect them to retain it.

Question 27

What do your hemispheres concentrate upon?

Answer 27

The left hemisphere is small, capable of paying attention only to items on the right side of the visual field. The right hemisphere has a global spotlight. Getting a stroke on your left side is much less catastrophic because your right side can pitch in under duress to aid vision.

Question 28

Is multitasking good when it comes to paying attention?

Answer 28

Multitasking is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time. But I am talking about the brain’s ability to pay attention.

The brain can only “Pay Attention” to one thing at a time.

That is why a person who is interrupted takes 50% longer to accomplish a task and makes up to 50% more errors.

Question 29

Is multitasking dangerous while driving?

Answer 29

One study showed that simply reaching for an object while driving a car multiplies the risk of a crash or near crash by nine times!

Question 30

Is force feeding tons of info a good way to retain it?

Answer 30

No. Just the opposite. Small bits of information, repeated every few days.

The most common communication mistakes? Relating too much information, with not enough time devoted to connecting the dots. Lots of force feeding, very little digestion. This does nothing for the nourishment of the listeners, whose learning is often sacrificed in the name of expediency.

The brain is a sequential processor, unable to pay attention to two things at the same time. Businesses and schools praise multitasking, but research clearly shows that it reduced productivity and increases mistakes.

I decided that every lecture would be organized in segments, and that each segment would last only 10 minutes.

Question 31

Does our school system use a bad system for teaching and learning?

Answer 31

Yes. It is completely backwards.

In our brains, it would be far more conducive to read the chapter for learning the next topic as homework, then spend the next school day doing homework with the teacher showing examples of how to learn it then giving the students time to do the homework in the class room.

This method would fall in the natural order of how our brain works, [MN: overview and then detail] and learning would be much faster and retention would be much higher.

Question 32

About the rain man.

Kim Peek born in 1951

Answer 32

He could read two pages at the same time, one with each eye, comprehending and remembering perfectly everything contained in the pages. FOREVER!

Question 33

How much do people retain of something recently learned?

Answer 33

People usually forget 90% of what they learn in a class within 30 days. And the majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours after class.

Learning is not like pressing a record button and the information is locked in the brain.

When information enters our head, our brain acts like a blender left running with the lid off. The information is chopped into discrete pieces and splattered all over the insides of our mind. This happens instantly.

[MN: To retrieve the memory, the brain gathers the major splatters and confabulates the rest. So each time we recall the memory, we are losing more of the original splatters and encoding more confabulation. This is why the story changes in the telephone game.]

Question 34

Are vowels and consonants stored in the same place in your brain?

Answer 34

No, they are not. There was a woman who suffered a stroke in a specific region of her brain and lost the ability to use written vowels. She would print out a sentence spelling the words but leaving a blank space where a vowel would go.

So she realized a letter went there, and left a space for it, but because of her stroke, she was clueless as to what went in the spaces, because she could not recall her vowels anymore. P. 131.

Question 35

Do our brains have a central special place to store memories?

Answer 35

No. Because of the blender effect, they are stored all over the place. Like taking some salt and stirring it in water, it goes everywhere. Recall our brain is 75% water.

There is no central hunting ground where memories go to be infinitely retrieved. This means memories are distributed all over the surface of the cortex.

Question 36

Since there is no special place our memories go, how can we recall long term memory?

Answer 36

Remember the story of the college president to build the campus but not pour any sidewalks the first year. So a year goes by, and all the major usage places became well worn pathways. Then the President said to build sidewalks over the well worn pathways to be the most efficient!

This is similar to how long term memory works. If we keep retrieving a memory, there is a well worn pathway to it.

Then the brain paves it over to make it like a sidewalk for even faster retrieval.

Question 37

What is working memory?

Answer 37

Working memory is short term memory.

Question 38

How good is our memory of our childhood once we are about 50 years old?

Answer 38

Not very good. About 1/3 of what we recalled as a child.

In an experiment, only one third recall being spanked as a child when they were an adult. Yet 34 years earlier, 90% of the same people said they were spanked.

Question 39

What is maintenance rehearsal?

Answer 39

It is a proven method to extend a memory from short term memory to a longer term. Even life long if desired.

If you want to extend the 30 seconds to say a few minutes, or even an hour or two, you will need to consistently re-expose yourself to the information. This type of repetition is sometimes called maintenance rehearsal.

Question 40

So how long does it take to make a memory a long term memory?

Answer 40

Much like concrete, memory takes an almost ridiculous amount of time to settle into its permanent form.

If you want to study for a test you will be taking in a week’s time, and are able to go through the material 10 times, it is better to space out the 10 repetitions during the week than to squeeze them all together.

MN: Normal long term memory is always a memory you have recalled many, many times. For example, shooting pool or riding a bicycle.

Or just plain walking and talking. These are all long term memories.

Question 41

Why is short term memory a very good thing?

Answer 41

Forgetting allows us to prioritize. It allows room for new information and prioritizing memories as important or junk mail.

Question 42

So what happens in your brain when a short term memory turns into a permanent long term memory?

Answer 42

Long term memories are formed in a two way conversation between the hippocampus and the cortex, until the hippocampus breaks the connection and the memory is fixed in the cortex. This can take years.

This is why you cannot learn a perfect golf swing until years of practice. The swing procedures will be still in short term memory and you will forget to do a procedure or two in each swing until you perfect it over many years of training your muscle memory.

The way to make long term memory more reliable is to incorporate new information gradually and repeat it in timed intervals.

Our brains give us only an approximate view of reality, because they mix new knowledge with past memories and store them together as one.

Question 43

What happen if you try to recall a memory and have conflicting memories of the actual memory?

Answer 43

The brain has no idea what to do with this contradiction.

So it makes something up. (Confabulation) This now will be the new memory whenever you try to recall it.

This is the basic telephone game. The story evolves and becomes a new story, completely different from the original story.

MN: Sometimes this happens, but then I recall original memory from a different cue. Then you can recall the original memory.

For instance say I remember the actor in the movie was Sean Connery. I later visually look at a picture a few weeks later of actor Harrison Ford then suddenly realize it was Harrison Ford in that movie, not Sean Connery.

Question 44

Do we see with our eyes or do we see with our brain?

Answer 44

We see with our brain.

The eyes focus through a lens and take in electromagnetic radiation that bounced off an object and focus the image on our retina. Our eyes also will flip the image backwards and upside down on our retina. From the retina it sends signals through the optic nerve to our brain.

Our brain will add the colors and out of say 1,000 or so partial images and versions of lines, colors, moving or not moving etc., give us it’s (the brains) version of what we see. [These are called tracks] Of course we need our eyes to get these signals from the light waves. But we actually see with the brain.

How can I say that? Read the next question.

Question 45

I stated we see with our brain, not our eyes. So, how can we possibly see if we are not using our eyes?

Answer 45

60% of our brain is devoted to vision. During hours when we are awake, we use our eyes to begin the vision process.

At night when we are asleep, our eyes are closed but we have very vivid dreams where the colors, objects and people look very real. You can see their clothes, you can hear them talk. In a nightmare we suddenly can scare ourself awake the nightmare is so real. We think it is really happening!

Guess what. Our eyes were closed the whole time. This proves it is our brain that we see with.

Question 46

What is printing to our brain?

Answer 46

Printed letters and words are pictures to our brain. Our brain does not know what a letter is. To our cortex, there is no such thing as words.

Our evolutionary history was never dominated by books or email or text messages. It was dominated by trees and tigers.

MN: Since it takes a long time to learn to read and write, our brain interprets these tiny pictures and associates them as collections with meanings.

These are all in long term memory, the cortex, therefore we can read fast because our brain can associate these tiny collections of pictures meaning this or that.

Question 47

Why have we lost 60% of our ability to smell?

Answer 47

Because smell and color vision are fighting each other for evolutionary control, for the right to be consulted first.

Vision has been winning. About 60% of our smell related genes have been permanently damaged in this battle, and the captured battleground has been given over to color vision.

EOF