Sam Kneller's Blog, page 51
March 14, 2017
Thinking Precedes and Activates Activity, Nobody Knows the Mechanism
The thinking process is the basis of mankind, it’s our thoughts that are at the origin of all our actions. We think first and then act.
Galacti’s Sidebar
We ask, what does this mean?
Well, it means that there’s a very important point that hasn’t even been addressed. How can the mental practice of thinking affect physical activity?
When we have an internal, unseen, immaterial thought about how to fix the kitchen sink, it connects to and affects the specific part of the material brain that handles the act of getting a washer and wrench to do it.
(chapter 9.10.2)
There must be some sort of an interface. Wherever those immaterial thoughts are, what process causes them to take the material actions that light up the brain scan?
Our group can play out various scenarios involving thinking about something and taking action. For example, when we immaterially ponder how to please our mate, it connects to and affects the specific part of the material brain that handles complimenting her for her patience.
In addition, when you think of the important exam you have to pass, it connects to the rational part of your brain that directs you to organize your study notes and quiz yourself on the weak spots in your knowledge.
This dynamic of the immaterial that affects our actions proves true repeatedly for the millions of other thoughts, intentions, predictions, plans, perceptions, feelings, desires, reasonings, and judgments we have day in and day out.
Every moment we imagine something, we can do it. We have image maps of brain activity stimulated by thoughts, but we don’t understand how they connect to each other or how they operate!
The material brain is a processor that receives thoughts and imaginings and then sends messages to the corresponding parts of the body to turn those ideas into actions.
The material brain receives thoughts and then sends messages to the corresponding parts of the…
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When I’m in a store picking up a package and notice a child falling over, my brain registers this event and I immediately think “Put down the package and go help the kid.” My brain coordinates my hand, my legs, and the rest of my body with reflexive action in order to perform those actions.
This is one example of the brain coordinating and processing a multitude of other actions via its material sensory system with swift and organized precision. Obviously, lifting up a child is easier mentally than solving a mental problem or psychological difficulty.
Imagine how much more complicated it is to make psychological changes.
If someone around you is having a personal mental crisis, you and a trained psychotherapist working with that friend, coworker, or loved one can help change the brain through talk therapy.
The brain may be struggling with old connections such as the habits we talked about earlier, being stressed and arguing, or old relationships causing difficulty relating to others.
If the person close to you follows suggestions such as replacing anxiety when he feels belittled with a more positive thinking process like expressing willingness to learn from criticism, it can lead to healthier actions and feelings.
Even talking about personal situations, receiving teaching from a psychotherapist, taking suggestions from a friend to do some physical exercise, or doing something positive can inspire a thinking change in the mind that changes the brain.
We can think of a “meeting of the minds,” or a mutual communication between the person in difficulty and a parent or friend. In a sense, we are talking to the neural connections,
communicating with synapses by exchanging ideas. On a one-on-one basis, we are experiencing from others how this new adjusted thinking can manage emotions.
Psychotherapy and talk therapy teaching work in this way. As teacher, the psychotherapist can be compared to someone making fine adjustments or fine repairs in neural networks. Through
helping someone to see the truth about a past relationship or traumatic situation, the psychotherapist helps the patient change his mind and create a new direction in his brain map.
As teacher, the psychotherapist can be compared to someone making fine adjustments or fine…
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After all this talking and teaching, can we see changes in the MRI images, in our CT scans taken in vivo on volunteers from our group? Yes, we can see the physical map changes in the 3-D images as a result of functional modifications of the neurons in the brain, but as of yet we cannot see the mind or thoughts.
We can, however, watch the differences in color of the images on the MRI as Galacti or a teacher in the group gives instruction, witnessing the changes in behavior of the brain which indicate
modification in thoughts, emotions, and expression.
And of course, we can imagine or think that we are finished with this exploration, that our minds are full of thoughts and our neural maps have been redrawn.
Well, it’s true: we are finished with this part of the journey, but the new thoughts are pieces of the puzzle and our brain maps are still plastic and changing as we continue our trek to assess,
analyze, and amalgamate in search of The Explanation.
Those three-week-old kittens and ducklings we spoke of earlier have reappeared in the lab, courtesy of Galacti. We watch them and we wonder: Do they think? Do their brain maps change?
Galacti has an insight: “Both fauna and man have brains, but it is solely man’s brain, mind, and intelligence that have bestowed on the world everything that you’ve learned, acquired, inherited, created, invented, devised, imagined, and dreamed. This includes the ideas and conclusions you have in your minds right now.”
Both fauna and man have brains, but it is solely man’s brain, mind, and intelligence that have…
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Our thoughts are diverted by a question: Why are we humans born helpless as infants, with a plastic brain that has incredible potential?
Why is it that our brains are more powerful than any other creature’s on Earth, yet they take many years to reach maturity, whereas animals born with brains and many living organisms without brains are operational immediately at birth or within a relatively short time?
This post is an excerpt from chapter 9.10.2 of Inventory of the Universe.
The Explanation Blog Bonus
This video is quite amazing regarding the development of technology that utilizes the three elements this blog post discusses: thought, brain and actions. Frankly, the expressions of these three elements is not quite clear. We see how ‘brain waves’ are retrieved and measured to correspond to actions … but what is not discussed, although it is present, is the imagination which is the thought patterns necessary for the brain waves to take place.
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TheExplanation.com
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Learn how to play Take Inventory – The Interconnectivity Game (free) that nourishes your neurons and is taking the world by storm. Play a round with family and friends. View the above videos and use the tags at the end of this blog for dozens of ideas to play Take Inventory – The Game.
See the index of the book Inventory of the Universe to find a specific chapter and read it online.
Purchase Inventory of the Universe at Amazon – Purchase the Kindle version
Google Play – Barnes@Nobles – Kobo – iTunes
Since you read all the way to here… you liked it. Please use the Social Network links just below to share this excerpt of Inventory of the Universe, Thinking Precedes and Activates Activity, Nobody Knows the Mechanism
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March 7, 2017
Thoughts, Musing and Cogitation Modify our Physical Activity
How Man Function: The mind think, the brain receives/transmits and then the body acts.
With our thoughts we concentrate, focus, and meditate, picturing that each of us has a leg affected by a muscle spasm or another condition. Concentrate on moving those legs from the thigh to the big toe, and thus restructure the pain areas in the brain.
(chapter9.10.1)
Painful sensations fade, and the legs move with greater ease without needle aspiration or other medical treatment. In a similar experiment, imagine that you have pain in your forearms. Now focus on some imaginary diverting task, such as listing as many world cities as you can name in alphabetical order.
The pain in the muscles lessens. Mind over matter. Psychosomatic problems can have the reverse effect. Imagine that someone has cut us off in traffic repeatedly, for example, and we develop a stomachache. Our thoughts affect our brain maps, which send signals to our bodies as an indicator of stress.
Fortunately, there are numerous examples that show our thoughts can change the brain in positive ways. For example, let’s take our piano player, who is performing an activity involving concentration. This musician coaches half our group in physically playing the piano.
We know that the supervised activity of playing the piano improves the brain by improving, strengthening, and creating new neuronal connections in our brain “web.” The other half of our group simply imagines touching the keys and learning to pick out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” or “Für Elise.”
What we may not realize until we examine scans of the brain maps is that the mental practice of the second group produces similar brain map changes to those of the first group, which is the one actually playing the piano. In sports training, gymnasts who are shown videos of proper form and technique for cartwheels and backflips are then asked to “play” the videos in their minds.
Once in the training area, the athletes who have visualized performing a handstand have modified their brain maps through imagining and can reproduce the same kinesthetic movements in an actual performance.
We move from athletic and musical prowess to the attention-commanding examples of people with paralyzed limbs who are able to reach out and touch loved ones. Formerly needing assistance for everything, these people are now able to manipulate robotic arms solely with their thoughts such as “I want to touch your hand.”
The robotic arms move exactly 300 milliseconds after the thought occurs. Other thoughts such as “Write a letter,” “Touch the controls on the MRI machine,” or “Pat someone on the head” produce the actions at quick speed. The electrical interfaces of the robotic arms, although impressive, pale in comparison to the idea that our actions are propelled by the speed of imagination, otherwise known as the speed of thought.
Your mind connects with your body. Your thoughts connect with your actions. Your mental prowess propels the hardware.
Your mind connects with your body. Your thoughts connect with your actions. Your mental prowess…
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Everything we imagine in this room leaves a signature in our brains. Each thought “writes” to the brain synapses and even “edits” them.
Each thought “writes” to the brain synapses and even “edits” them.
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If we imagine making a presentation, moving our fingers across a computer, playing on a piano keyboard, or driving, we alter the axons and dendrites in our plastic, malleable brains.
“It’s only a thought,” we say. “It’s just an idea.” Yet everything we’ve been thinking about since we began this trip, even imagining the Big Bang, creates a physical mark in our brain, as though “Big Bang” is written on our neurons. The mind can change the brain. Sustained thoughts (meditation, for example) can alter the neurons firing.
The mind can change the brain. Sustained thoughts (meditation, for example) alters the neurons…
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We don’t understand why this is so, but perhaps someday those thoughts and imaginings may be explained in physical, concrete terms. Could we one day “see” thoughts (we’re hungry, we’re thinking about home, we’re in love) in our tangle of “computer wire” neurons as those neurons fire? In any case, it’s clear that thoughts do change our brains.
This post is an excerpt from chapter 9.10.1 of Inventory of the Universe.
Since you read all the way to here… you liked it. Please use the Social Network links to share The Explanation with your friends.
The Explanation Blog Bonus
Here is an amazing video of what technology has accomplished using mankind’s functioning process following the steps: mind > brain > rest of the body. Or put another way: thinking > processing > accomplishment. In the video you’ll see a monkey actually following this process to eat. So, yes, animals can do it but at a very, very limited level.
Only man functions this way at a level that is so far superior with approximately the same sized brain … Consider what Jan Sherman accomplishes and realize that the mankind species has something extra special.
Dig Deeper into The Explanation
Join The Explanation Newsletter to stay informed of updates. and future events. No obligations, total privacy, unsubscribe if you want. Your gift is a free pdf of The Explanation and a free pdf of Answering the Big Questions in Life
TheExplanation.com
Email address:
Learn how to play Take Inventory – The Interconnectivity Game (free) that nourishes your neurons and is taking the world by storm. Play a round with family and friends. View the above videos and use the tags at the end of this blog for dozens of ideas to play Take Inventory – The Game.
See the index of the book Inventory of the Universe to find a specific chapter and read it online.
Purchase Inventory of the Universe at Amazon – Purchase the Kindle version
Google Play – Barnes@Nobles – Kobo – iTunes
Since you read all the way to here… you liked it. Please use the Social Network links just below to share this excerpt of Inventory of the Universe, Thoughts, Musing and Cogitation Modify our Physical Activity
The post Thoughts, Musing and Cogitation Modify our Physical Activity appeared first on The Explanation with Sam Kneller.
February 28, 2017
Unique Brains and Minds for each Human, but Brain and Mind Unity in Human Diversity
The mind, so ethereal, so diverse. The mental power that sets mankind above, way far above, everything else.
Look around at the adults and teenagers in this room. We hail from a variety of countries and cultures. Imagine that we all have our brains analyzed by the equipment in this room. To the untrained eye, the pictures might look like just a series of brains. Each of our brains is unique, however.
(chapter 9.8-9)
The seven billion people on the planet, which are represented by the sample tour group in this room, are all similar yet diverse. We are alike, but my physical appearance is different from that of someone standing next to me.
I also speak a different language and have a different accent. We are alike, yet the person standing next to me has a different psychological makeup than her neighbors. She also comes from a different culture with different interests.
Whether it’s a white baby born among the advanced technology of Scandinavia, an Asian baby born in the remote mountains in Outer Mongolia, or a black baby born in the deep jungle of tropical Africa, they all have identical critical periods and the same genetic worldwide propensity. There is brain unity in human diversity.
There is brain unity in human diversity no matter your race, country or religion.
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Whether it’s a white adolescent in the outback of Australia, an Asian adolescent in the bustle of Hong Kong, or a black child warrior in Nigeria, their neurons are pruned away in the same critical period. They have the same genetic worldwide propensity. There is brain unity in human diversity.
Whether it’s a white adult in the city of Vancouver, an Asian adult on the banks of the Mekong in Vietnam, or a black adult in Jamaica, their neurons are now stable and they all have to go through the same arduous process of reorganizing their neurons in order to acquire new skills.
A white elderly person in New York, an Asian elderly person in Nepal, and an elderly black person in Egypt or America all have vast life experiences and are encouraged to develop their neurons and keep the brain active.
There is brain unity in human diversity. We have been told that “we are all one,” but we ponder the truth of that statement here in this room. Is there an underlying message we should be getting? Is the universal brain telling us something that we haven’t grasped yet?
Why do all brains experience identical critical periods despite differences in sex and race? Why is it that the woman next to me, who was raised in Malaysia, has the same lifelong patterns of brain processing?
Why do all brains experience identical critical periods despite differences in sex and race? We…
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You might well say that we think different thoughts in a sense because our experiences are different, but we are alike in cognitive activity. Is it because we are all humans? Surely, but is there something more at work?
Mind and Cognition
We are back inside the scanning machines. We have come to a more nebulous aspect of our examinations: cognition, a multilayered process. We are all pondering the fact that we think. What exactly does that mean?
We could launch into an extended philosophical dialogue or debate, but to simplify, we’ll define cognition as that which deals with thoughts, including our intentions, imagination, perceptions, feelings and desires, critical thinking and analysis, reasoning, and judgment. For plainness, let’s associate all of this activity with the ‘mind’.
Galacti is a bit confused. What exactly is the mind? We can see the brain on our scans with the neurons firing. However, can we detect the mind in those pictures made of particles? To be fair, this question has baffled scientists as well!
Scientists have not yet pinpointed what the mind is, but for them it is a physical part of the brain. Other thinkers feel it could be an entirely different entity that exists apart from our neurons and brain tissue.
We can see the physical brain on the scans and in illustrations. We can touch the cortex tissue of the brain, which is perched on a pedestal in the lab. We can touch and examine the cortex. However, even Galacti’s capabilities won’t allow us to see and hold an elusive mind.
Galacti’s time-travel powers bring the French philosopher René Descartes from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Descartes seems a bit confused about all of this, but he decides that he is dreaming!
He is unafraid to launch into a philosophical argument, and happily proposes that the mind is a nonmaterial component existing outside of but interacting with brain activity.
Descartes is introducing the concept of dualism, which set the stage for the mind-body controversy that started in Descartes’ time and still rages today. We will ask Galacti to usher Descartes out and apply our mental powers to this question of mind.
Galacti’s Sidebar
This concept of dualism, or a separate body and mind, is different than monism, in which the mind is part of the body (specifically, the brain). Monism argues that brain and mind are one and the same, and that the mind can be accounted for in terms of the physical function of the brain. If we take this to an advanced philosophical level, we come to the concept of determinism.
We broach this topic for a specific reason. Whereas dualism indicates that the mind is immaterial and therefore can choose (thus exercising free will), monism identifies the mind as part of the brain, a material organ, as if the mind were a program running on hardware.
Everything is predetermined in monism, and the brain maps for the rest of your life are already written. There’s no choice, and hence no free will. Everything is written in advance and cannot be changed, no matter what you do.
Even our time-traveling tour guide isn’t sure which argument is correct, so the mind-body controversy churns on and the debate of free will versus determinism ferments passions.
I could choose to say “Explain one and the explanation of the other will become clear.” We shall return to this subject.
We’ve delved into the philosophical, but we’re trying to make practical sense of these ideas. While we’ve explored brain activity, our thoughts still defy identification. We poll the group and collect some additional ideas to define the term “mental.” The consensus is that the definition is “Of or relating to the mind. Intellectual and mental powers.
A term describing some intellectual processes existing in, executed by, or performed by the mind. Mental images of happy times, mind reading, mental picture, mental calculations, mental projections, mental health, a terrible mental state, mental suffering, mental powers, mental development, and mental hygiene.”
None of these actually tell us whether a thought is a thing, that is, whether it can be measured and whether the neurons in the brain scan produce mental processes.
This post is an excerpt from chapter 9.8-9 of Inventory of the Universe.
The Explanation Blog Bonus
In this video cognitive neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe and Piya Chattopadhyay discuss what the difference is between the brain and the mind. The beginning of this is very interesting because Rebecca Saxe points out that there’s clearly an interactivity between the mind and the brain, if I put it another way, the thoughts and the brain actions and, as she says, we don’t know how this works.
I would add that she talks about 2 methods to study the brain and mind: MRI and EEG. Both of these methods allow us to see brain activity, what’s happening on a physical level. Neither allows us to peer into the thought level … only the results of our thoughts as they ‘hit the brain’. It’s that interactivity between the two that is still a mystery to scientists.
Dig Deeper into The Explanation
Join The Explanation Newsletter to stay informed of updates. and future events. No obligations, total privacy, unsubscribe if you want. Your gift is a free pdf of The Explanation and a free pdf of Answering the Big Questions in Life
TheExplanation.com
Email address:
Learn how to play Take Inventory – The Interconnectivity Game (free) that nourishes your neurons and is taking the world by storm. Play a round with family and friends. View the above videos and use the tags at the end of this blog for dozens of ideas to play Take Inventory – The Game.
See the index of the book Inventory of the Universe to find a specific chapter and read it online.
Purchase Inventory of the Universe at Amazon – Purchase the Kindle version
Google Play – Barnes@Nobles – Kobo – iTunes
Since you read all the way to here… you liked it. Please use the Social Network links just below to share this excerpt of Inventory of the Universe, Unique Brains and Minds for each Human, but Brain and Mind Unity in Human Diversity
The post Unique Brains and Minds for each Human, but Brain and Mind Unity in Human Diversity appeared first on The Explanation with Sam Kneller.
February 21, 2017
Critical Periods: When a Child’s Brain Accelerates its Development
It’s as if each person can have a hand in “drawing” the mapping of neurons during the formative years of a child’s life, when the child’s brain acquires knowledge and develops neuronal connections.
Let’s explore the child’s brain at twenty-six months, or around two years of age, when a child’s plastic development is at its height. Stimulation and interaction with the world complete the basic brain structure.
(chapter 9.7.2)
As we revisit those right and left hemispheres of the child’s brain, we make some interesting discoveries. The right brain connects us to people and is responsible for the musical component of speech such as the tones, nuances, tempo, and volume by which we convey everything from contentment to anger.
The right hemisphere of the brain has its critical period from birth to the second year of life. We watch infants experience emotion. The “how-to” left hemisphere is responsible for speech and linguistics as well as problems using conscious processing.
By viewing a simulation of the right hemisphere of our own child’s brain as it develops during the first three years (synaptic development is rapid), we discover that the right hemisphere is larger during those years, especially at about two years of age.
It dominates the brain during this period. While this is occurring, children are right-brained, emotional creatures, but they cannot talk about their experiences except in simple words and phrases. This is because language is a function of the left brain.
Until about 30 months, children are right-brained, emotional creatures, but they cannot talk…
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We have experienced this ourselves as children, although we may not remember. We have also seen it with our own children, but we have never thought about the invisible workings of the brain. It is something to think about, and it evokes feelings in us.
We have the idea that these infants, who are hearing speech with their larger right brain, may be more attuned to language than we are. Imagine a two-month-old baby visiting the United
Nations or a major city in the world in which dozens of languages are spoken. That baby can hear the difference in sounds between Mandarin, German, French, and English.
When the baby reaches eighteen months to three years of age, the critical period of auditory cortex development, it will learn the sounds and words of its own language.
From eighteen months to three years of age, a child will learn the sounds and words of its own…
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As that critical period closes, imagine that child immersed in one culture such as English, staring quizzically when its friends say, “Guten Tag” or “bonjour,” which the child can’t translate as “hello.” The child will respond to “hello,” of course, or whatever the greeting is used in its native language. Unused language neurons fade until the child’s brain map is, in a sense, “written in” with American or British English, French, German, or another language.
As the critical period closes, unused language neurons fade until the child’s brain map is, in…
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It’s no wonder, then, that the adult brain finds immigration such a challenge. Remember our example of learning Mandarin or French for a job assignment? Imagine if you are an English-speaking individual who has been plunked down in China or Taiwan and is unable to speak the language. You struggle with the most basic greetings and words.
It’s no wonder, then, that the adult brain finds immigration such a challenge.
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You can imagine someone from China or Taiwan learning English as well. Our brains are not as well equipped to learn after the critical period, having been filled with our own culture. Our neural maps need rewiring and rewriting in that case because we are learning culture, writing, sounds, gestures, and syntax while the neural networks formed in our own culture constantly assert themselves.
Our tastes in foods, family interactions, music, dance, and socialization clash with this new culture, and we’re not even conscious that we’ve acquired the taste for French cooking or flamenco music.
Children learn more rapidly from age four to age eight, when synaptic development is peaking. However, we look at teenagers (there are a few on the tour) and think that there’s something illogical about the early mass of neurons present in a child’s brain and the sharp spike in development of synapses that falls off after age eleven.
Infants have 2,500 synapses per neuron (100 billion of them) at birth, a number that jumps to 15,000 per neuron at the age of two or three. We ponder the power of the 1,000 trillion neural connections in a three year-old child’s brain. That’s twice as many connections as our own adult brains have!
Surely our teens need more neurons in order to learn, grow, and mature. The teens on the tour are processing abstract concepts, which they can do more easily than young children, but they don’t have the neuronal capacity of their younger selves or their younger brothers and sisters.
It’s no secret that teenagers’ brains work differently, but why don’t they have the same advantage as young children, whose brains contain about 60 percent more neurons than the teens’?
Is there some sort of significance to teen brains being developed in some ways, but challenged in others, such as the circuits that control judgment, emotional control, and reasoning?
Teen brains are challenged by abstract concepts and the circuits that control judgment,…
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Let’s look again at the images of infants we have been studying. They come into this world with brains like clean canvases, though there are hints of “calligraphy” knowledge from the womb. After birth, they draw a flood of letters and pictures (like those of birds, animals, their city, their country, and their language) into their “library” from the environment through feeling, looking, hearing, smelling, and tasting.
Those bright, innocent, neuron-filled brains keep asking “Why?” “Why?” Each “Why” and each answer is absorbed so fast during these critical periods of neuron growth and discovery that it will make your head spin. As the babies in the home movies and the videos grow up, they progress through several critical windows.
From infant to toddler to child to adolescent, the youngsters receive encouragement, coaching, and influence from parents, family and friends. It’s as if each person can have a hand in “drawing” the mapping of neurons during the formative years of a child’s life, when the child’s brain acquires knowledge and develops neuronal connections.
In a real sense, these “maps” show the journey that these children’s future lives will take.
This post is an excerpt from chapter 9.7.2 of Inventory of the Universe.
The Explanation Blog Bonus
Below is a video that reveals what happens and the importance of relationships on young children during their first three years. Their neurons are developing at the rate of 700 new ones every second! Parents and all people are a tremendous influence on secure attachment relationship in preparing a child for its future.
Did you know that neurons ‘migrate’ in a very organized way to their ultimate destination in a forming brain. No other cells do this. Millions and millions of neurons forming this very compact mass and then slowly the circuits are developed and pruned. Worth a watch.
Dig Deeper into The Explanation
Join The Explanation Newsletter to stay informed of updates. and future events. No obligations, total privacy, unsubscribe if you want. Your gift is a free pdf of The Explanation and a free pdf of Answering the Big Questions in Life
TheExplanation.com
Email address:
Learn how to play Take Inventory – The Interconnectivity Game (free) that nourishes your neurons and is taking the world by storm. Play a round with family and friends. View the above videos and use the tags at the end of this blog for dozens of ideas to play Take Inventory – The Game.
See the index of the book Inventory of the Universe to find a specific chapter and read it online.
Purchase Inventory of the Universe at Amazon – Purchase the Kindle version
Google Play – Barnes@Nobles – Kobo – iTunes
Since you read all the way to here… you liked it. Please use the Social Network links just below to share this excerpt of Inventory of the Universe, Critical Periods: When a Child’s Brain Accelerates its Development
The post Critical Periods: When a Child’s Brain Accelerates its Development appeared first on The Explanation with Sam Kneller.
February 17, 2017
Find the Error!
Don’t Trust Anyone – Seek Truth – Live Free – Find Answers
Something is seriously wrong on the T-shirt. What’s the problem?
Comments below please.
I’ll update this post next week with the solution to this enigma.
Dig Deeper into The Explanation
Join The Explanation Newsletter to stay informed of updates. and future events. No obligations, total privacy, unsubscribe if you want. Your gift is a free pdf of The Explanation and a free pdf of Answering the Big Questions in Life
TheExplanation.com
Email address:
Learn how to play Take Inventory – The Interconnectivity Game (free) that nourishes your neurons and is taking the world by storm. Play a round with family and friends. View the above videos and use the tags at the end of this blog for dozens of ideas to play Take Inventory – The Game.
See the index of the book Inventory of the Universe to find a specific chapter and read it online.
Purchase Inventory of the Universe at Amazon – Purchase the Kindle version
Google Play – Barnes@Nobles – Kobo – iTunes
Since you read all the way to here… you liked it. Please use the Social Network links just below to share this excerpt of Inventory of the Universe, Find the Error!
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February 14, 2017
Critical Periods: When Babies and Children Learn
Critical periods of learning are real. There is a specific period in a child’s life when learning certain disciplines comes easier.
We have a pediatrician in our midst who shares her research about critical periods with us. Her pediatrician and scientist colleagues are proving the principle that the brain goes through certain stages of openness.
(chapter 9.7.1)
Critical Periods: When Babies and Children Learn
Adults often joke that their brains are too crowded and that they don’t have enough “computer memory” to learn certain concepts easily. While we can learn through practice (or neurons firing together and wiring together), evidence proves that there are certain times of life called “critical periods.”
These are times when windows open, allowing information to soak in. They then close. Optimal learning takes place as the brain soaks up exterior stimuli.
A human baby, swaddled and cuddled, takes in love and nurturing with its mother’s milk. Imagine the contentment as the child hears reassuring words while suckling. Snuggling against its mother, the baby feels at one with her and learns to trust others.
Emotional and social “wiring” is already taking place as the baby learns to associate these positive words and feelings of being loved with feeding time in the first weeks of life. If the parent cuddles and soothes the child, responding to cries with consistency and love and warmth, the child will expect that same kind of love from family members and future mates.
This first oral period, a critical nurturing period, may be the most important period in the child’s early brain growth and development.
For a baby the first oral period, a critical nurturing period, may be the most important period…
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Imagine the stages of infancy and childhood as windows of time, during which the nervous system develops. The newborn stage is an excellent example of a window of time in which new brain systems and maps develop with the help of stimulation from the environment. Critical periods are a vital part of child development.
This stimulation includes a mother’s voice, siblings’ chatter, and so on. The baby also takes in the environment by feeling, looking, hearing, smelling, and sucking, and its “library” of information is growing and being established for the rest of its life.
When these stages proceed normally, large-scale development takes place in infants’ superdense brains, which are one quarter the size of adults’ brains. Although babies’ brains are slow to respond to changes in stimuli at first, babies can process information at more rapid rates over the first few months.
Brain plasticity is off the charts during this time, with an amazing two million new synapse connections per second.
Baby brain plasticity is off the charts with an amazing two million new synapse connections per…
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Peak performance is reached as infants focus their attention (thanks to the nucleus basalis) on their mother’s face, a nursery rhyme, or a ball bouncing across the floor. Key connections or
bonds in the brain are strengthened. The parents are still an enormous influence here.
Think of the child’s brain changing like moldable plastic used in arts and crafts projects, finding its shape and laying down major neuronal connections. Once those connections or bonds solidify, the brain stabilizes and this critical mental period ends.
We watch videos of children in an emotional critical period lasting from ten to eighteen months. During this crucial period, the emotional command center of the frontal lobe develops in order to allow children to form family ties and friendships.
The newly developed circuits in the neocortex and limbic systems allow the children in the videos to read Mom’s facial expression and control their own emotions (anger, tantrums, and frustration). As adults, we will carry that emotional understanding and diagnose our own emotions, as well as read other people’s.
Babies, infants, and children traverse these critical chronobiological periods worldwide as their brains and bodies undergo periods of sensitization to new impulses and incitements. These are all critical periods of intense plastic development.
Infants traverse these critical chronobiological periods worldwide as their brains undergo…
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Take the phenomenon of language, for example. One of the most unique characteristics of humans is that we can actually express ourselves. This process receives a jumpstart in childhood.
As we listen to a tape of children speaking words or adults talking to children, we learn that somewhere between birth and the age of five, children progress from reading the movements of lips in infancy to registering vocabulary and grammar, and sometime between six months and a year, spoken language prepares the baby’s brain to be multilingual.
The children learn the word “ball” as well as the order of the words “I play ball.” This is a phrase spoken by one of the children on the tape. That’s the English version. The French version is “Je joue au ballon,” and the German version is “Ich spiele Ball.” Along with the particular language spoken, children learn pronunciation, or the way that the tongue, mouth, and so on work together to produce the words and accents.
In the parent voices on tape, we hear that New Yorkers, Texans, Cajuns, Midwesterners, Londoners, and Scots all speak English in diverse and easily distinguishable accents. Not only that, nonnative English speakers have their own accents such as those of native speakers of Mexican Spanish or Russian. Children can detect these.
During critical periods for language like the one lasting from birth to three years of age, the children on our tape can actually learn two or more languages. We stop and ponder why this is so.
Why should babies be able to read lips, and why does the freshness of their minds allow them to learn two languages (such as Spanish and English or French and German) more easily?
If children are exposed to bilingual teaching (one language at home and another in the classroom for example), they can speak both languages equally well due to the help of the environment and their teachers’ nurturing.
Let’s say a child learns and does his or her homework in French because he or she is living in France, and yet English is spoken in the home.
After the critical period, however, the children on our tape no longer learn English, German, or any other language with the same ease. We watch a time-lapse video of a young learner’s brain map as neurons dynamically integrate two languages.
We then see the window closing as the neurons are set in a more permanent pattern. We simultaneously hear the young learner speaking French with a French accent and English with an English accent. Both the visual and voice show us that babies pick up languages naturally, but with age, the learning process takes more effort.
Babies are aware of their mother’s voice in the womb, and they can recognize her sound at four days old. They remember the rocking and constant “shhhh” sounds inside the womb. Despite their large brains, however, their neuronal structure is like a sensory library waiting to be filled and their brain maps are only blueprints.
Each baby's neuronal structure is like a sensory library waiting to be filled and their brain…
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Why is this so? We think about our early years and our children’s early years, when we have a fuzzy picture of the world. We wonder why critical periods are so plastic and flexible that each new experience, such as babies hearing language, playing a game with Mommy and Daddy, or learning to recognize their faces, changes brain structure and makes a baby’s or young child’s brain sensitive.
Because of this sensitivity, babies and toddlers can pick up new sounds and words effortlessly during these first years, which are known as the “language critical period.” When a mother or father says, “Let’s play blocks” or “Show me the red block” during this period, the mere exposure to sentences, sounds, and words allows children to lock those words into their brains, which actually changes the wiring of the brain.
In essence, the library is filling up, but it is constantly open to receive new material and continuously under renovation until age five.
Interestingly, animals and birds such as newborn kittens and ducklings also have a critical period in which brain pathways rapidly form. We observe baby kittens at four weeks of age and ducklings in the first week of life. From three to eight weeks, those baby kittens will develop their vision.
The ducklings are already feeding themselves, and they will learn to fly at an age of somewhere between three and ten weeks. A four-day-old baby antelope runs through the lab. In most animals, these critical periods close forever after just a few months, and the animals have no stimulus beyond their routine to go with.
The ducklings will fly, migrate for the winter, swim, and feed on schedule, and the antelope will eat grass and migrate according to its innate brain makeup. We wonder why this is so, but let’s continue with our focus on humans.
This post is an excerpt from chapter 9.7.1 of Inventory of the Universe.
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This video, a TED Talk by Patricia Kuhl, is vital to understand the critical period for learning language. As she says, this is a worldwide phenomena and as you’ll see around the 8 minute mark only works with human beings, parents rather than just audio, computers or TV.
Many questions come to mind and she asks a few of them: Why is this a worldwide phenomenon? why does it need ‘human’ participation? Are then any other critical periods of other disciplines? These are the kind of question for which The Explanation will give the answers. Join our list and stay tuned.
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Learn how to play Take Inventory – The Interconnectivity Game (free) that nourishes your neurons and is taking the world by storm. Play a round with family and friends. View the above videos and use the tags at the end of this blog for dozens of ideas to play Take Inventory – The Game.
See the index of the book Inventory of the Universe to find a specific chapter and read it online.
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February 7, 2017
Think First, Think Repetitively, Your Positive or Negative Actions Follow
We always think (sometimes unknowingly) before we do things, even when it seems we’ve been foolhardy. This thinking and instantaneous decision making take priority and prompt either wise or foolish action.
The more I bowl and think first about bowling, the more I can bowl a perfect frame (I hope). I try this in the lab, organizing an impromptu league. Although I don’t bowl a perfect frame this time, I keep thinking, and improving.
(chapter 9.6)
The more you think first, before the action . . .
We always think (sometimes unknowingly) before we do things, even when it seems we’ve been foolhardy. This thinking and instantaneous decision making take priority and prompt either wise or foolish action. We are what we think.
We are what we think. This thinking and instantaneous decision making take priority and prompt…
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If you control the thought process, you can master yourself, but as history has proven, you can also influence and even control other people. Think of your favorite advertising slogan and whether it influences people’s behavior. The people under your sway, influenced by thought, become programmed for certain ideas and actions.
Propaganda and indoctrination work in this way, using immersion and repetition coupled with the right mood and intonation to make changes in the brain.
Fortunately, as we’ve just learned, our brains can participate in a virtuous loop as we improve our abilities through a wide range of activities.
Our mental activity stimulates neurons whether we’re imagining new concepts (such as the ones in The Explanation), concentrating on a mathematical dilemma such as a probability riddle, focusing on a book, meditating about a personal relationship, practicing a presentation in our minds, or learning our Mandarin.
The more neurons that fire during the contemplation or learning, and the more axon-dendrite transmission that takes place, the more our new thoughts, exercises and skills are integrated and incorporated in the brain. Even with thought, ‘think first’, practice makes perfect! Fortunately, this practice is assisted by and influences our brain chemistry.
As we learn better ways of driving, giving a presentation, or studying our probability homework, our brain releases the fine-tuning neurotransmitter, acetylcholine. Endorphins associated with exercise such as basketball make our members want to engage in the sport more often, which reinforces playing basketball in our minds.
Also, when we accomplish the skill of dribbling (or my personal preference, bowling) or successfully manage a community drive to organize food and clothing for the needy, dopamine released in the brain reinforces our dribbling or charitable habits by producing pleasure in achievement.
This is the virtuous loop, but we also see the vicious cycle. The more we think first about how to study to pass that exam that will earn us a degree and better employment, or how to best practice language lessons with a friend and native speaker in order to succeed in our new situation, the more the neurons fuse.
This gives us that pleasurable hormone rush when we succeed. Likewise, the more we think about trashing the lab, the more the neurons fuse and make us perversely elated when we succeed at doing something destructive. Putting other people down and being aggressive makes us want to do it more often if that bullying succeeds.
The more we repeat “good” and “bad” thought habits, the more payoff we receive, and the more the neurons fire in a set pattern.
The more we repeat “good” and “bad” thought habits, the more good and bad payoff we receive.
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Some of our group members volunteer stories of people who associate two desires, even subconsciously, that feed into each other. They include “I’m stressed out; I need some cake,” or “I’m upset; I need a drink.” In the case of children, they include “I don’t like my mom saying no; I can throw a tantrum and break something.”
The deeper the link between A (stress) and B (eating too much cake) becomes etched into our brains, the more our bodies express it. It becomes automatic like an autopilot, or like eating mindlessly in front of the television because you have done it so often.
The more we think about associate ideas: A (stress) and B (eating too much cake) the more they…
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The payoff hooks us more deeply with each repetition and produces added negative baggage such as a few extra pounds, missing work due to a hangover, or tension in the home. These consequences prompt us to seek the same remedy.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we all decided to practice positive associations? “I’m learning something new; this is exciting.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if we all decided to practice positive associations? “I’m learning…
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“I’m being challenged to understand, so I’ll imagine the concept.” Positive thinking begets more positive thoughts and associations. We see a smiling young man on one of the monitors and we imagine him thinking, “I’ve solved a number of similar problems before, so there’s no reason I can’t repair this computer.” Think first is a key.
We know that it can be challenging enough for adults to learn all they need to know, to practice through repetition, and to learn. Our brains are plastic. What about children? It must be easy for them. They’re blank slates. Imagine if we adults had the minds of newborn infants.
The world would be incomprehensible, as if we had landed in an alien society. Infants begin this way. How do they learn? How do they learn which number is larger, for example, or how to recite a nursery rhyme? How do they learn to do those things on command?
This post is an excerpt from chapter 9.6 of Inventory of the Universe.
The Explanation Blog Bonus
To be right up front with you I had difficulty finding a video for this post. Here’s an interesting one. However sometimes the wording can be ambiguous.
The notes below this video on Youtube say: Amazing photography of changes that take place when you think new thoughts! Thanks Dr. Joe Dispenza for this amazing video that shows how our mind can change our biology.
“Our mind can change our biology’. If this means that new thoughts can change our brains then I’m all in with total agreement. If it means our brains can change our biology then count me out. The fundamental question is, what is the mind? Is the mind a part of the brain, in other words, is it a ‘physical part’ of the brain? The answer to this question is vital and I get into it a little later in this chapter we’re reading in Inventory of the Universe.
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Learn how to play Take Inventory – The Interconnectivity Game (free) that nourishes your neurons and is taking the world by storm. Play a round with family and friends. View the above videos and use the tags at the end of this blog for dozens of ideas to play Take Inventory – The Game.
See the index of the book Inventory of the Universe to find a specific chapter and read it online.
Purchase Inventory of the Universe at Amazon – Purchase the Kindle version
Google Play – Barnes@Nobles – Kobo – iTunes
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January 31, 2017
Your Wired Brain, Praiseworthy Repetition creates Good Habits
Your wired brain changes its connections constantly, but repeating the right things established good habits. The neurons that fire together, wire together.
The wired brain is one secret to brain plasticity, or how the brain acquires information and changes, holds that the more we play the piano or learn a new skill, the more we develop a habit.
Let’s say that we have a trainer teaching us singing, a new language, or a new sport such as surfing or basketball. Our trainer, like all trainers, knows one critical rule: the way to learn a skill is to test yourself and repeat it over and over and over and over again. This is what creates a correctly wired brain.
(chapter 9.5)
Our trainer (in this case Galacti) will always emphasize and reinforce mastering the basics: scales in music, dribbling in basketball, pronunciation and breath support in singing, vocabulary in mastering a new language (as long as we converse as well as memorize words), and so on. Our neurons are taking note as we train.
Repetitive exposure to “praiseworthy” lessons is the basis of a high-functioning body and mind. We view videos of adults telling children, “Wash your hands. Brush your teeth.
Repetitive exposure to “praiseworthy” lessons is the basis of a high-functioning body and mind.
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Make your bed. Keep your rooms neat. Look left and right when stopping at a crosswalk. Give way to an elderly person. Say please and thank you.” We recognize these as basic life rules that children should practice daily.
Adults and workers have their share. We observe videos of automotive factory workers in a Ford assembly plant securing bolts on the instrument panel of a sedan on the assembly line. Another video shows an adult driving that car.
Driving is an activity that takes thought, but at the same time is repetitive: fasten seatbelt, start the car, and check your rearview mirror before backing out or turning. More videos detail other activities, such as lifting weights, doing the dishes, watering the plants, performing data entry, landscaping a yard, hammering in a nail at a construction site, or stocking shelves. Repetition of these activities leads to a properly wired brain.
We have repetitive exercises too, like “Wash your hands before eating,” or “Yield to oncoming traffic when driving and be courteous.” Again, these are repetitive exercises, but some of them have the ability to increase in difficulty, such as lifting heavier weights. As we’re pumping iron, we’re also “wiring” our brain and muscles to help us progress even further.
Physical therapists are aware of this principle. If you, a member of this tour group, sit in a leg extension chair to strengthen your leg after an injury, you will work that leg through incremental training that increases in difficulty over a short period called “massed practice” gives rise to an improved wired brain.You’ll find that concentrating an intense exercise effort to develop a needed skill in a short time is quite effective.
Incremental training that increases in difficulty over a short period called “massed practice
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Interestingly, massed practice applies to other situations, such as immersion learning with a new language. Let’s say you need to learn French or Mandarin in a hurry because you are being transferred overseas for your new job. Lessons that increase in difficulty over a short period can help you master the skill.
Whether your instructor or therapist is drilling you in conversation with phrases such as “I speak Mandarin; I am here to help you,” or in regaining the use of your arm after a stroke, massed practice is effective.
As you pronounce the Mandarin or French language or do your leg extensions, we can see on brain scans what neurologists have come to understand: neurons that fire together, wire together.
The more you repeat, “Je suis ingénieur informaticien” (“I am an IT engineer”), the stronger your brain connections grow as the dendrites and axons associate (“fire”) and wire together, that’s the wired brain. To put it another way, the more you do, the more you can do. It becomes the happy opposite of a vicious cycle. As we ponder this, we are aware that we can see something related happening in young children.
The more you repeat, the more the dendrites and axons associate, they fire and wire together,…
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If a young child in our midst had a weak eye that wasn’t focusing, we could cover the good eye for a week to encourage the weaker eye to do the work of both eyes. Within just a few days, eye exams will show that we’ve increased the strength of that eye and the child will be able to take off the patch.
A simulation from the digital library of the universe shows us that the optical nerves, the neuron conduits involved in sight, are firing at an increased rate and strengthening the eye’s vision so the child can read the lower levels of the eye chart.
Constraint-induced treatment can rejuvenate activities such as sight in the body and mind. Sometimes it uses the original neurons, but other times it makes different neurons step up to the task. Patients with a leg injury, for example, aren’t allowed to favor their good leg, so it is constrained. We take turns simulating this situation and pretending.
While we can all feel the frustration as we use the affected leg to walk, or our less dominant hand to reach for an object over and over again, we also receive encouragement, help, and support from our guide, who is playing the role of occupational therapist.
We imagine both the progress we can make in a short time and the overwhelming relief as we regain our sense of independence and normalcy. The signals, initiated in the brain, travel to our fingers and legs so that the repeated treatment creates more and more connections within the brain. We can walk after our injury, as well as play piano.
This would not be possible without the plasticity and resilience of our brains and the way that they tell us to move, move better, or play scales. The result is a better wired brain.
This post is an excerpt from chapter 9.5 of Inventory of the Universe.
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Below Dr. Lara Boyd describes how neuroplasticity, with work, helps you shape the brain.
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Learn how to play Take Inventory – The Interconnectivity Game (free) that nourishes your neurons and is taking the world by storm. Play a round with family and friends. View the above videos and use the tags at the end of this blog for dozens of ideas to play Take Inventory – The Game.
See the index of the book Inventory of the Universe to find a specific chapter and read it online.
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January 24, 2017
Your Plastic Brain is Changing Constantly – It has a Mind of Its Own
Your plastic brain is continually acquiring new knowledge and sensations. It never stops modifying its neuronal pathways. It has a mind of its own.
Someone in the group is playing a piano. She can’t help herself, since she has been imagining getting back to the piano and teaching her students. She says she’s “wired” to play the piano. According to scientists, this statement might be correct. With deeper studies into the workings of the brain, scientists have come to understand a principle that wasn’t obvious.
(chapter 9.4)
Galacti sums it up: the brain is always changing. Since every single action, movement, idea, and thought that passes through the brain reinforces, enfeebles, and/or modifies the neuron networks formed by dendrite-axon combinations, these network maps are never static.
As our piano player decides to improvise and perform a riff, the network maps are perpetually shifting, changing like a melody to reflect whatever she is at any given moment.
Galacti mentions a concept we may have heard about: The brain is “plastic” and can change structure and functionality. Remember the anatomical model of a human skeleton? We saw that our adult skeletons have approximately 206 bones.
The children’s song about “the leg bone” being “connected to the thigh bone” tells us that the 206 bones connect to each other at their extremities for the entirety of our lives. In contrast, the dendrite-axon combinations change their length, width, and accessibility from minute to minute.
Imagine our network of possible neuronal circuits switching partner connections, creating new connections, and pruning defunct connections.
The brain’s jellylike substance gives clues as to its changeability: it has a “mind of its own.” We’ll explore more about the mind shortly. As you think about this future topic, your brain is ever and always in action. It is a dynamic headquarters made up of tens of thousands of different specialized living organisms. Fortunately! It adapts itself every second of your life to keep you running, thinking, or whatever you are doing without interruption.
Whether I’m getting out of the full body scan or our piano player is plucking out Chopin, all mental and physical activities call on the brain to activate our physical senses as well as our mental prowess such as paying attention, memorization of keystrokes, and calculation.
If we consult a brain expert to learn about brain fitness, or if we’re engaged in some activity, our brains are doing aerobics. The brain and mind experts know that the more of a workout our brains get, the better shape we will be in, even after a traumatic injury.
Imagine: physical and mental exercise therapy can stimulate and rebuild the brain’s fundamental abilities following a concussion or stroke, for example. Both physical and mental exercise therapy help a stroke victim bodily and psychologically.
It helps reconstruct and extend physical functions such as language and movement, as well as cognitive functions such as memory and comprehension. Healing occurs as areas of our resilient, plastic brain take over from the areas wounded by stroke. Subsequently, the brain self-repairs and rehabilitates.
Our piano player with years of practice under her belt could recover from a stroke through practicing the piano. She has developed the habit of playing, and by continuing to play, she could form alternative neural pathways in the brain. There have been documented cases of piano players with brain injury recovering through playing an instrument.
This post is an excerpt from chapter 9.4 of Inventory of the Universe.
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Great explanation of what your brain gives you every day: the gift of neural plasticity — How your brain changes continually at the cellular level every second you learn.
This video reveals the incredible plasticity of the motor cortex – the growth and pruning of synaptic connections when you learn a new skill.
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Learn how to play Take Inventory – The Interconnectivity Game (free) that nourishes your neurons and is taking the world by storm. Play a round with family and friends. View the above videos and use the tags at the end of this blog for dozens of ideas to play Take Inventory – The Game.
See the index of the book Inventory of the Universe to find a specific chapter and read it online.
Purchase Inventory of the Universe at Amazon – Purchase the Kindle version
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The post Your Plastic Brain is Changing Constantly – It has a Mind of Its Own appeared first on The Explanation with Sam Kneller.
January 17, 2017
Your Brain is Multitasking 100s and 1000s of Functions Every Moment
Your brain is three pounds of jelly tissue, 78% water. It is incredibly fluid and responsive, more so than the fastest Internet connection! How can this be?
The state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques available in this lab, including recent ones that visualize the brain in psychedelic renderings of neuronal connections, allow us to see this intricate labyrinth of axons as “neural wiring maps.”
(chapter 9.3.2)
There are billions of smaller connections, which Galacti reduces with a few adjustments until we see the underlying structure of neurons being activated. Whether we’re running a marathon or merely standing still in contemplation, systems of neurons handle the job.
Every time I open my mouth, millions of neurons are activated. No matter what gesture one of our group members makes, millions more neurons leap to the task. Whether one is walking, carrying a backpack, looking at a display, or noticing other people, the neurons spring to action. This network of neurons is a somatic, voluntary system that operates when you decide to take action.
Even if you are just standing and contemplating the brain, neurons are at work in the autonomic or involuntary system such as breathing, blood circulation, salivation, digestion, water flow, waste elimination, and all the other automatic systems running full time in your body. Whether we’re awake or asleep, they’re in lifelong action enabled by the neurons.
Whether we’re awake or asleep, our body systems are in lifelong action enabled by the neurons.
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In addition, for those of you who are contemplating everything we’ve seen so far, neurons are of course involved in your cognitive functions. This means they are involved in thinking about what you’ve learned, imagining, processing ideas, initiative taking (such as browsing the digital library of the universe and inviting others to learn more), planning, and decision making.
In other words, neurons are involved in the entire gamut of activities that we associate with the mind, although the mind is so much more.
Your brain is multitasking hundreds and thousands of functions right this moment (and every moment) without rest. In fact, your brain doesn’t even rest when you are asleep!
Your brain is multitasking hundreds and thousands of functions every moment even when you are…
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We function better after a good night’s sleep because the brain continues to process the input received while we were awake, sifting, sorting, reinforcing what we learned and allowing us
to recall the information later: Big Bang, atmosphere, Earth’s core, wheat, animals, DNA, neurons.
To demonstrate this multitasking, we ask one of our members to have a MEG scan (short for magnetoencephalogram scan). An image of her brain is taken while she eats a pear.
All of her five senses come into play: she views the ripe, red fruit, feels the moisture on her skin, and inhales the scent before biting into the tasty fruit flesh, simultaneously listening to the crunch.
On the supersensitive scan, we see the sensory neurons recording and reporting their information, but we do not see the coordination of “intelligence,” if you will, into a total picture of the fruit.
“This is a pear,” say the optic nerves to the eyes.
“This is a pear,” say the motor nerves to the hands.
“This is a pear,” say the olfactory nerves and gustatory nerves to the nose and mouth.
“This is a pear,” the auditory nerves report to the ears.
On the supersensitive brain scan, we see the sensory neurons recording their information, but…
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We can see the neurons that connect the motor and sensory nerves, which work together. However, we can’t see on the scan that our traveling fruit-eater knows the pear is juicy, nor can we see that it is helping to ease her hunger. Her nerve system knows that she gets a piece of skin caught between her teeth, or that the skin feels shiny as she swallows it.
Each action or sense, no matter how trivial, affects our neurons and activates synapses that we can see.
All these actions (feeling hungry, holding on to the pear and waiting to dispose of it, trying to guess what time it is) are given high priority, medium priority, or low priority and are coordinated with all the other involuntary or voluntary actions taking place within our fellow traveler.
You may think the coordination of New York City or Beijing traffic is complex, but your brain is capable of integrating all of the sensory information, mental processes, and motor skills you need to drive a car in rush hour and help you reach home safely.
If you are awed by a colony of weaver ants from our animal chapter coordinating to build a nest, a herd of wildebeest migrating long distances in Africa, or the vast network of the Internet with 2.5 billion people and the interconnected transmission of all the messages, email and web pages, consider that your brain’s 100 billion neurons and the routing paths for your physical and mental activities act with split-second precision and coordination.
Your brain’s 100 billion neurons and the routing paths for your physical and mental activities…
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The gargantuan quantity of neuronal circuits for communicating information is expressed by the number 10 followed by hundreds of zeroes, a number far greater than the total sum of atoms in the Universe.
We’ve never imagined these sheer numbers of neurons or their speed, let alone the organization and coordination needed to make our body and brain run smoothly.
It’s stupefying that all the wiring and connections are overseen by your brain. Your brain is 1.4 kilograms of jelly tissue, of which 78 percent is water. It fills a space of 1,130 cubic centimeters in your skull, which is equivalent to a small balloon with a diameter of thirteen centimeters.
Imagine, right now, that 20 percent of your oxygen intake and 25 percent of your glucose consumption fuel your brain. Compare this with the size of the infrastructure and the energy input required to run the Internet, or the world’s most sophisticated supercomputer.
Pause for further thought and consider that this three pounds of jelly tissue is incredibly fluid and responsive, more so than the fastest Internet connection!
Your brain, this three pounds of jelly tissue is incredibly fluid and responsive, more so than…
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This post is an excerpt from chapter 9.3.2 of Inventory of the Universe.
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This video delves into the synapse of your brain … infinitely small space between neurons that transform the neuronal system into a communication network transmitting (multitasking) simultaneously vast amount of information to all parts of the body so that the somatic/voluntary (throwing a ball) and autonomic/involuntary (breathing) nerve systems function properly.
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Learn how to play Take Inventory – The Interconnectivity Game (free) that nourishes your neurons and is taking the world by storm. Play a round with family and friends. View the above videos and use the tags at the end of this blog for dozens of ideas to play Take Inventory – The Game.
See the index of the book Inventory of the Universe to find a specific chapter and read it online.
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