Read some brain science and learn to become smarter

Source: Internet
Author: User
Tags repetition

Many people find that they often forget things, efficiency has been reduced, previously from the perspective of time management to write a lot of specific recommendations, today to see scientists from the perspective of scientific research advice, a lot of suggestions can be written with the previous article mutual verification.

The following is from "Let the Brain Free", author John. Medina (John Medina) is a developmental molecular biologist who focuses on the development of genes and psychiatric genetics in the brain.

One of the deepest impressions of the book is that the more you move, the smarter your brain is. People who exercise often have an advantage in physiology, psychology, and emotion than those who do long hours at their desks. Laboratory data show that regular exercise can significantly improve the ability of the subjects to solve problems, mobile intelligence and even memory.

Law 1: The more you move, the smarter your brain
    • Our brains evolve on foot-12 miles a day!
    • Want to improve your thinking skills? Get Moving!
    • Exercise allows more blood to flow to the brain, bringing a lot of glucose as energy to the brain, as well as providing oxygen to absorb the residual harmful electrons. Exercise can also stimulate the formation of proteins, prompting neurons to connect with each other.
    • As long as two aerobic exercises a week can reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease by half, and reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease by 60%.

Therefore, want to study the effect is good, do not blindly sit in front of the computer, go out appropriate exercise, come back to learn better.

Law 2: The brain has been evolving
    • There is not only one brain in our skull, we have three. First introduced the "Lizard Brain", which controls our breathing, we also have a brain like the cat brain, in these two parts of the brain is covered with a layer similar to the fruit of the jelly thin material, what we call the cortex, it is the third component of the human brain, is also a powerful and "human-specific" brain.
    • Weather changes disrupted the food supply of our ancestors, who were forced to jump off the tree and live on the prairie. Afterwards humans took over the Earth by adapting itself to the change itself.
    • Walking from four legs to two legs upright on the prairie saves energy and allows the human brain to develop more complex and sophisticated.
    • Symbolic reasoning is a unique talent of the brain. This ability may be due to our need to understand each other's intentions, motives, it is human collaboration within a small group is possible.

Remember to read such a sentence, the general meaning is that if the brain for a long time not to contact new things, become a fool sooner or later.

Law 3: Every brain is different.
    • What you do in your daily life, what you learn will materially change the way your brain looks-in fact, what you're learning is reshaping your brain.
    • Each region of the brain develops at different speeds between different people.
    • No two brains store the same information in the same place in the same way.
    • Our intelligence is manifested in all aspects, many of which cannot be revealed by IQ tests.

What you learn will reshape your brain, for example, if you work hard at programming, your brain is suitable for programming. If you work hard at music, the brain is suitable for the music field. If you are not interested in anything, your brain becomes a mediocre brain.

Law 4: The brain doesn't care about boring things
    • We can't concentrate on boring things.
    • The brain's attention "Spotlight" can only focus on one thing at a time: not multitasking.
    • We are better at referencing patterns and refining the meaning of events than we remember the details.
    • Emotional arousal helps the brain learn.
    • The audience will be distracted 10 minutes after the start of the lecture, but you can capture their attention by telling a story or creating a mood-rich event.

In other words, the brain only focuses on what it is interested in.

Law 5: Short-term memory depends on the first few seconds
    • The brain has many types of memory systems. One of the following 4 sequential processing stages: Encode, store, retrieve, and forget.
    • As soon as the information is entered into your brain, it is split into fragments and then sent to different areas of the cerebral cortex for storage.
    • Most of the events that can predict whether or not things will be remembered in the future occur at the earliest moments of learning. The finer we encode it at the earliest moments of our memory, the stronger our memory will be.
    • If you can replicate your surroundings when remembering to touch something, you can increase the chance of remembering this thing.

Early memory is important. Many of the things you remember now are very impressive when you first touched and stayed.

Law 6: Long-term memory depends on regular repetition
    • Most of the memory disappears after a few minutes, but the memory of those who pass through the fragile period is gradually increasing over time.
    • Long-term memory is formed in two-way communication between the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex, until the hippocampus cuts off the connection to the cortex, and the memory is fixed in the cortex, a process that takes several years.
    • For reality, the brain only gives us an approximate view, because it mixes new knowledge with past memories and stores new and old memories as a thing.
    • The way to make long-term memory more reliable is to gradually enter new information into the brain and review it at regular intervals.

Repetition can effectively strengthen the memory, such as the code to write more, close your eyes can also write.

Law 7: Sleep Well, the brain will turn well
    • There are two of the brain's fighting forces, which are also made up of cells and chemicals, that are in a state of constant tension, a force that tries to make you sleep, while another force tries to keep you awake.
    • When you are asleep, the neurons in your brain show exuberant rhythmic activity, and perhaps it is replaying what you learn during the day.
    • How long it takes to sleep, and when to go to bed, is different in this respect, but everyone has a biological drive for a nap in the afternoon.
    • Lack of sleep can damage people's attention, executive function, working memory, emotion, mathematical ability, logical reasoning and even dexterity of movement.

The importance of sleep, as we all know. Staying up late will hurt your brain and don't stay up all night.

Law 8: Stress can damage your brain.
    • Your body's defenses are reacting to severe, transient dangers by releasing adrenaline and cortisol, for example, when our ancestors encountered saber-toothed tigers during foraging. Chronic stimuli, such as conflicts in the family, severely damage our defenses, because our defenses are evolved only to deal with short-term stress responses.
    • Under chronic stimulation, adrenaline causes scars on the walls of your blood vessels, which can lead to heart attacks or strokes, and cortisol hurts the hippocampus's cells, which weakens your ability to learn and remember.
    • For the individual, the worst pressure is that you feel overwhelmed and helpless to lose control of the problem.
    • Emotional pressure has a huge impact on the whole society, affecting children's learning ability, affecting the work efficiency of employees.

Pressure is all there, and decompression skills are not necessarily everyone.

Law 9: The brain likes a world of multiple senses
    • We obtain information about an event through the senses, translate it into an electronic signal (some of the signals come from the vision, some of the signals come from the auditory, etc.), and then send the signals to different areas of the brain, then reconstruct everything that happens, and finally the brain is aware of the whole thing.
    • The brain seems to be partly dependent on past experiences to decide how to integrate this information, so two people may have a completely different perception of the same event.
    • Our senses are evolved into patterns that need to work together, for example, visual effects on hearing, which means that stimulating the senses at the same time may make us learn better.
    • The scent has unusual power to evoke memory, perhaps because the olfactory signal bypasses the thalamus to go straight to its destination, and in these destinations includes the emotional director known as the amygdala.

The awakening of various senses can effectively improve the efficiency of learning and working. For example, listen to headphones (preferably brain Boeing music) to write code, the effect is good.

Law 10: Vision is the most powerful sensory
    • Vision is now our most important sensory organ, which takes up half of the brain's resources.
    • What we see is that the brain tells us what we should see, not exactly.
    • Our visual analysis is divided into many steps. The retina assembles photons to image the same information flow as a small movie. The visual cortex handles these streams, some areas record actions, some areas record colors, and so on. Finally, we put this information back together, so we see the outside world.
    • Pictures let us get the best learning and memory, written or verbal information can not do this.

Sometimes a picture of the top thousand words, that is that.

Law 11: The brain also has gender differences
    • Males have an X chromosome, women have two--one is used as a backup, the X chromosome is a cognitive "hotspot", and he carries many genes associated with the structure of the brain.
    • Women's genes are more complex because the active X chromosome in the cells is a mixture of mom and dad. The male X chromosome is from the mother, and their Y chromosome carries less than 100 genes, while the X chromosome carries 1500 genes.
    • The brains of men and women are structurally and biochemical in different ways, for example, the male amygdala is large. But we do not know whether these differences are of great significance.
    • Reactions to acute stress in men and women are different: Females activate the amygdala in the left hemisphere and memorize the details of the emotions; The male activates the amygdala in the right hemisphere and remembers the gist.
Law 12: We are natural explorers.
    • Infants are an example of how we learn, and they are not passively reacting to the environment, but instead they explore the surrounding events through positive observations, assumptions, experiments, and summaries.
    • Specific parts of the brain help humans develop certain scientific attitudes in the process of exploring the world. The right prefrontal cortex of the brain examines the errors we assume (for example, "The saber-toothed tiger is not a threat to us"), and the area adjacent to it tells us that we should change the behavior (run).
    • Because of the presence of "mirror neurons", we can identify and mimic certain behaviors, and mirror neurons are distributed in various parts of the brain.
    • Some areas of the adult brain are as malleable as babies, so we can create new neurons that allow us to learn new things throughout our lives.

The brain likes new things, and novelty can make the brain more flexible, so don't stop letting the brain explore because of our laziness.

Read some brain science and learn to become smarter

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