Your Brain Map

Your Brain Map: 84 Strategies for Accelerated Learning

 Website that the tutorial is from!

http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/learning-strategies/

Cerebral Cortex

1.     What do the frontal lobes do?

 The frontal lobes control your personality, and is where problem solving, memory, language, judgement and impulse control happen. This area of the brain basically deals with behavior. 

2.     What is the relationship between selective attention and learning?

 Studies show that your intelligence level is related to how selective you are when remembering information, called "selective attention".  It improves your memory capacity since it allows you to prioritize important and more used information over unimportant information.  It's more about how you control the focus of your attention and giving importance to more important facts that equals a greater intelligence.

3.     What is the last part of your brain to develop and what can you do to prevent it from deteriorating?

 The frontal lobe is the last part of your brain to develop, and is the first to start to deteriorate. One way that you can stop it from deteriorating is by performing exercises, being more engaged with your environment and transforming information instead of simply memorizing it. 

4.     What does the neo cortex do?

 The neo cortex helps you navigate your body, controlling your senses, spatial awareness and motor skills and is more receptive to your environment than other areas of the brain. 

5.     What is the role of the pre frontal cortex?

 The pre frontal cortex controls your personality, and social behavior. It organizes thoughts and actions, and helps align these with your internal goals. 

6.     What do we know about the pre frontal cortex’s relationship with multitasking?

 The pre frontal cortex has a "central bottleneck" that stops you from doing more than one thing at a time, meaning that multitasking is actually nonexistent and it's actually your brain jumping from one task to another quickly. This often means that the quality of both of these tasks is inferior. This kind of reminds me of a quote from Parks and Rec's Ron Swanson ,"Don't half ass two things, whole ass one thing". 

7.     Which part of the brain is associated with speech and language development?  Give an interesting fact about this region.

 Broca's area is responsible for speech production, language, and interpretation of other's actions. This is also the area of the brain that's associated with learning a second language, and scientists believe that bilingualism has benefits for the brain because both language systems is active in a bilingual's brain, even when only one is being used, causing the brain to be forced to "work out". 

8.     Which part of your brain is responsible for thinking the following: “Is it hot in here or is it just me?”

      Your somatosensory cortex is responsible for responding to touch, pain, and temprature. If the environment is too hot or cold, it sends a signal to move elsewhere or to think "is it hot in here or is just me". 

9.     What does your visual cortex do for you?

The visual cortex helps differ between colors and faces, and allows the brain to pick up on specific visual features. 

10. State three interesting or significant facts about your occipital lobe.

The occipital lobe deals with imagination and allows the processing of long and short term memories. This part of the brain is engaged when a kid is reading a book with no pictures (only words). You can engage your occipital lobes by visualizing yourself doing a task, and it would improve your performance of this action in real life (if you imagined it as closely as possible). 

11. What would happen if your temporal lobes were damaged?

 If they were damaged, especially  the medial temporal lobe, you would have no long term memory, so you would not recollect how to read because you would have no recollection of the alphabet. You would also be unable to recognize things that you do remember, and would need reminders. 

12. What is your “fast brain” and what does it do?

 The fast brains is the eye fields, that control your eye movements and allow your brain to register information quickly. It can pick up information in milliseconds. 

Neuron

13. State 3 things that you could do that would influence your synapses, and have a positive affect on your life and health.

 Exercise and a healthy diet can influence the omega fatty acids that affect the brain's synapse. Eating these omega three acids - like salmon - can improve the functioning of the synapses. It was also shown that socializing also improves your brain function. 

14. What is the relationship between multi-sensory or multi-modal learning and your dendrites?

 Multi sensory or multi node learning was when you cross reference data in your brain that can convert the new knowledge from something that you have memorized to something to something you may have learned. 

15. How does “big picture thinking” and mnemonics affect dendrites and/or learning?

 Using patterns is allows people to remember information easier, which is why mnemonic devices are beneficial to learning. Big picture thinking is also used to fully comprehend a subject, and then breaking down the subject into its relevant parts. By making your learning contextual, you can relate it to what you are interested in. A dendrite's lifespan is influenced by your experience and input activity, so by using these paths again and making them deeper to remember important information, it can help with recollection. 

16. Describe a neurotransmitter that you feel is very important.  Justify your reasoning.

 A neurotransmitter that plays a big role in the human body is dopamine. Our brains release dopamine when an experience is sensed as enjoyable, and is there to reward your brain for learning new information of having a new experience. Without dopamine, we wouldn't be interested in learning or trying new thinks, and it serves as an incentive for your brain to retain new information. The more interested you are in a subject, the more dopamine is being released. 

Limbic System

17. What does the corpus callosum do?

 The corpus callosum runs down the center of your brain and allows communication to happen between the left and right hemispheres. It deals with cognitive, motor, and sensory functions between the two hemispheres. It is where we get our oral language skills from and how we comprehend how language is structured. It is also involved in reading, which further ties into how important it is for comprehension. 

18. What is the relationship between music and the corpus callosum?

 Studying music can help strengthen the connection between the two hemispheres of your brain, but in order for this to be a lasting effect, you have play/practice music frequently. There was a study shown that showed that children who practiced music for 2.5 hours a week showed an increase in 25% of their corpus callosum, showing that the two hemispheres of the brain were now communicating more effectively. 

19. Why is the thalamus important?

 The thalamus is responsible for motor control, sensory information and sleep and wakefulness cycles. In addition, it deals with your memory, attention, emotions, consciousness, awareness and attention. It also relays information from the senses and sends the information to the cortex, and processes it as well. 

Relate and Review

Summarize what you learned from this tutorial.  Relate what you learned to your everyday life and how you can make it better.  Use at least 5 of the bolded words from the questions.  5-sentence minimum. You may use the back of this if needed.

This tutorial showed us how the different parts of the brains have their own functions but still come together as one to allow us to be fully functioning. It reminds me of when we did the reading of the women who kept falling down because part of her brain wasn't processing information correctly, and how other parts of the brain took over for that dysfunctional part. I thought it was interesting how the tutorial seemed to sectionalize the different parts of the brain rather than presenting it as one coherent piece like the reading did. It was cool to go deeper and more specific into the parts of the brain and what makes it up, like learning about the neurons. I think its amazing how even though theres so many neurons and so many synapses to get through, our brain manages to go through the cell body, axon, dendrites, and synapses in a flash to make our body do what we tell it to do. It was really interesting to see how important neurotransmitters are in the brain and how specialized they are to influence the brain in specific ways. I also didn't know that learning music helped strengthen the connection between the two sides of the brain and the matter in the corpus callosum,  it would have made convincing my parents to let me do band a lot easier in freshman year. There were also new parts of the brain that I didn't know about, like the neo cortex and the pre-frontal cortex, that helps navigate your body and control your personality respectively.