brain rules Flashcards
brain
What functions helped our brain evolve?
The first one is solving problems, the second one is function in unpredictable environment, the third is operate in near-constant motion.
How nature makes a brain? rule one
Rule one: our brain evolved for survival: both our bodies and physical environment development lead to our unique abilities.
Walking on two legs frees more energy to brain.
The influence of environmental effects leaded us to develop three things most of the other creatures don’t have:
1-we use our imagination.
2-we embrace variety: our evolutionary challenges lead us to develop, like accepting a lot of diets, this is big reason we are all around the globe.
3-we cooperate with others, because human is not as strong as other animals we did cooperate.
How nature makes a brain? rule five
Rule 5: our brains are each uniquely wired, while our brains have the same tissues and parts all our brains are uniquely wired that’s why everyone has different skills.
Experience early in life has higher effect in neural growth than later experience, neurons are the cells that carry out our brain functions and they allow brain to absorb info creating a neural path.
How does your environment effects your brain? rule number two
exercise boosts brain function, medina says the more we exercise the more brain power we have.
What is the oxygen function? Help neurons stay young and operational, help them function like focus and memory.
Why our new life style makes us function less, because of how much we sit because of the new modern life jobs and schools we don’t get as much oxygen to brain so moving is recommended and that’s why we get less smarter growing up.
How does your environment effects your brain? rule number three
we need to sleep to think: without sleep our cognitive abilities suffer.
Everyone has their own chronotype (sleep type) in children its more early type then in adolescence it changes then come back around 20.
Rule number 4
stress can hurt your brain: what does stress do to a brain?
Stress can affect your brain functions because humans didn’t evolve to handle this over long period, chronic stress effect your memory badly causing memory loss and problems in forming new memories due to, excessive amount of the hormone cortisol that causes disconnect between neurons.
The two main significant impacts of stress on learning are damaging the ability to retrieve information and damage the ability to change pre-existing information.
how brain perceives stimuli? Rule number 8
we learn the best when we use multiple senses: brain had evolved standing with all the senses matter fact making one sense better means the others will be better too, synesthesia is the prove that our senses are connected: and its when we activate a sense by other sense, what you take from this is learning in more than one way result better results.
how brain perceives stimuli? rule number 9
vision is dominant sense: well its dominant for some reasons but the main reason is that it does take bigger space than all the others combined, well still some disorders make other senses dominant like it said in autism hearing is the dominant.
you can use this in focusing on visual aids when you learn.
what is colavita?
the vision dominance.
how brain perceives stimuli? rule number 10
we are wired to respond to musica, medina says that music improves cognition, also he said it leads to improve auditory skills, and social skills and emotional skills. like the kids whoi enngaged in music acitivties.
how brain thinks? rule six
Rule six, multitasking doesn’t work, the media says the better we are focusing on something the better we can learn it.
How to stay focused instead of multi-tasking? If you do get into multitasking a lot here are some steps to stop this:
1-pick a few times of the day to check email, messages, and social media.
2-remove all distractions from your environment, if you still find yourself attached to social media take your phone away from you.
3-do the most difficult task in the beginning of the day, by doing that you eliminate the pressure from the beginning.
how brain thinks? rule seven
Rule seven: the brain needs to form, retrieve, forget memories: we can strengthen our memories through repetition and therefore boost our learning.
To form memories in the brain, go through complex process start with encoding, and there are two major types of that: automatic and effortful.
Automatic, is when encoding require a little effort, mostly Include visuals like seeing movie poster and remembering it.
Then there is the effortful process that requires consciousness and attention to form memory, this is challenging and usually needs a lot of repetition.
What happens when encoding is disrupted?
In any case the hippocampus is damaged you cant form long term memory.
Techniques to create strong memory:
You can give complex meaning to your memories, that makes it hard to forget.
Or create a memory palace.
Spaced review is also effective, reflect on memories you are trying to remember.
how brain thinks? rule 11
Rule 11 gender affects thought processes:
Women and girls are better in verbal communication because they use both hemisphere when speaking and processing verbal communication while men tend to use only one.
In respond to stress women tend to focus on details while men focus on the overview.
how brain thinks? rule 12
We learn by exploring: humans learn the best by exploring
Exploring is an essence of humanity, and we can observe that in kids as they explore things, but it’s not just kids thing but grow throughout life, as the scientific method of learning is built originally upon kids way: observe-> form hypotheses->experiment->draw conclusions.
what happens to kids at different ages?
At the age of 12 months children start experimenting with objects, throw it kick it, around 18 months they build object permanence which if you can’t see something doesn’t mean it did disappear.
At the age of 3-4 children ask questions about the world around them, to explore their curiosity plus it’s mostly the age of language.
At the age of 5-6 children begin to use creativity and critical thinking.
Now the fact is that learning never gets weaker by age we still can learn and advance at any age, there is no age that associated with weakening.
Finally always rely on your memory and don’t make it weakening
