I'm back!
Y'all've been busy in my absence!
Came back with some really interesting information and a whole new field I want to delve into -- brain research. The field of merging the biological and psychologial studies of the brain is only about 10 years old, really since we got functional MRI, and new discoveries are being made monthly that profoundly affect our understanding of how our brains work and how we can best work ourselves and teach other. Totally fascinating stuff.
Forget everything you thought you knew that's more than three years old. If you are still in the mode of thinking the left brain logical right brain creative, forget it. Wrong. (Current research seems to indicate that all functions take place on both sides of the brain, but that the right hemisphere tends to deal with new situations and the left hemisphere tends to deal with solved problems.)
If you think the amygdala is the "fear" center, forget it. It's a lot more than that, and different from that.
If you think mens and womens brains are physically basically alike, and our differences are based on hormones, or social environment, or conditioning, or other "soft" bases, forget it. Wrong. The brains have many clear physical differences. The same stimulus will "fire" different areas of the brain in men as in women. For one thing, womens brains have more front-to-back connections than mens do, and mens' have more right-to-left connections than womens do. Also, some of the areas are of different sizes and wirings. For example, think men are better map readers than women? They are, but not because men care more; it's based on basic wiring.
Some other stuff:
Why do teenagers make bad decisions? Because the areas of their brain that are involved in decision making are only gradually developing during their teen years. They're basically "learning" to use those parts of the brain. When a toddler starts to walk, we don't expect him to walk perfectly the first time; we expect him to totter around, fall down, etc. At two, a child will slip on ice. At five he won't. His brain has learned better. In decision making, early teens are at the same level as the two year old walker. Just learning to learn how to use that developing part of the brain. So they will slip on "ice" they wouldn't once they have learned to use their decision making brain paths correctly.
Our schools are extremely brain unfriendly. I won't get into this here, but there's a lot on what our schools are doing exactly backwards as far as proper brain functioning is concerned. If anybody's interested, I'll go further into it.
I'll leave you with one note. Want to know the next big thing in neuropsychology? "Mirror neurons." You'll be hearing about these. Some researches consider them as important to neuropsychology as DNA was to biology. Brand new stuff. Big. You heard it here first! |
