Brain Map!

Your Brain Map: 84 Strategies for Accelerated Learning

Cerebral Cortex

1.     What do the frontal lobes do?

The frontal lobes control behavior, personality, problem solving, language, memory, impulse, and judgment.

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

Selective attention is how selective you are when remembering information, and it translates to intelligence levels. It also improves your memory capacity because it allows prioritization of more important information.

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

The frontal lobe develops last, and one way to prevent it from deteriorating as quickly is to perform mental exercises that engage with the environment and transform information, rather than memorizing the information.

4.     What does the neo cortex do?

It helps with spatial awareness, fine motor skills, environment receptiveness(when compared to other areas of the brain), body navigation, and controlling the senses.

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

It controls personality and behavior in social settings, and also organizes and aligns actions and thoughts with goals.

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

The pre frontal cortex actually contains a “central bottleneck,” which prevents you from doing more than one thing at a time and thus multitasking. When you “multitask,” your brain is simply jumping from one activity to another very quickly and it in turn lowers the quality of everything you are multitasking on.

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

The Broca’s area is associated with speech and language development. One interesting fact about this area is that speaking more than one language, in example being bilingual or trilingual, provides large benefits to the brain as it forces your brain to keep both languages active at all times, even if only one is in use.

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

The part of your brain responsible is the somatosensory cortex, as it helps the body to respond to touch, pain, and varying temperatures.

9.     What does your visual cortex do for you?

This allows you to see differences in colors and other specific  visual features, and also allows you to recognize different faces.

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

One interesting fact about the occipital lobe is that the it functions in an unexpected “crossed” manner, where the right side works for the left eye, and the left side works for the right eye. Another interesting fact is that it helps in visualization; some studies have shown that visualization in great accuracy can translate to a similar performance in real life. Finally, it allows you to imagine things and process both short and long term memories.

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

The most important part of the temporal lobe that you cannot damage is the medial temporal lobe. This is because that region is responsible for long term memory, so if that part was damaged, you wouldn’t be able to remember things and would need to constantly relearn different tasks.

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

Your fast brain is the eye field. It basically allows your brain to interpret all the information it receives due to the eye moving rapidly and picking up a lot of information quickly.

Neuron

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

Synapses are affected by omega fatty acids, so in turn, by exercising and eating a diet with lots of omega three acid containing foods, your brain function can be improved.

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

Dendrites and multi-sensory and multi-modal learning are related as dendrites are required in cross referencing data in the brain to convert new knowledge into learned knowledge.

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

By utilizing big picture thinking and mnemonics, we are able to draw more connections to things we already know, which helps us retain the information and learn it more effectively. It allows us to easier break down a big picture into smaller, more easily understood part. This causes the dendrites to better communicate to help us retain the information effectively and improve recollection.

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

One important neurotransmitter is dopamine because it teaches us what is good to do, and what is not. For example, when we experience something enjoyable, such as winning a competition, we are then motivated to repeat the action again, which leads to success in pursuing areas of interest.

Limbic System

17. What does the corpus callosum do?

The corpus callosum is in between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and facilitates communication between the two hemispheres, including sensory, cognitive, and motor functions. It is also involved with language structure and reading/comprehension.

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

Extensive studying in music strengthens the communication between the two hemispheres via the corpus callosum. In one study, children who played music for around 3 hours every week had a 25% increase in their corpus callosum.

19. Why is the thalamus important?

The thalamus is important because it regulates sleep cycles and awakeness. It also processes and sends information from the senses to the cortex, and deals with memory, attention, emotion, and consciousness.

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.

An interactive infographic by Open Colleges

This tutorial discussed different parts of the brain and how each functions, as well as why a lot of structures are important. One part that I thought was really interesting was the information on the corpus callosum, which stated how with prolonged practice in music, the corpus callosum actually increases in size. It made me wonder two things. Firstly, I was curious as to what about music specifically made the corpus callosum larger. Secondly, I was curious as to whether there were any similar activities that increase the corpus callosum, and whether other parts of the brain could increase in size as well due to doing certain activities. The tutorial also taught me that the thalamus plays a huge part in sleep cycles, so I assume that jet lag is heavily associated with that part as the hormones released are likely affected. The frontal lobe is also very interesting because it contains the prefrontal cortex and the neo cortex. The prefrontal cortex controls personality and behavior in social settings, and also organizes and aligns actions and thoughts with goals. The neo cortex helps with spatial awareness, fine motor skills, environment receptiveness (when compared to other areas of the brain), body navigation, and controlling the senses.