What's in My backpack

How my brain works

“your brain is the planet’s most powerful learning machine. But our current systems of education aren’t doing enough to unlock our true potential”.

This is right. Education nowadays only cares about the grade you get from a test rather than actually questioning wether you really learned something or not. And with learning something I mean if you actually have taken the information in you and know how to implement it rather than learning the information by heart to get a good grade for a test and couple of days later already forgotten what it was about.

School does kill your creativity. Doesn’t matter if you have a good teacher or not the school will have the last say in everything. School teaches you to do certain things in a certain way and if you don’t do it in that way, if you are a little different from the rest then you are portrayed as wrong immediately. Can bad grades be the judge of wether someone is smart or not. Is book smart the only smart we know? According to schools yes. But I don’t agree on that. One who has bad grades can be as smart as one who has straight A’s. The cause of the bad grades might be caused by a wrong way of teaching for that individual. That individual might be the smartest person walking around but needs a different approach of learning. Or maybe the material is too easy for that individual which causes the classes to be boring and not wanting to learn anything. One might need an ‘Auditory’ learning style where information is passed on through listening; through spoken word, of self or others, of sounds. Or one needs an ‘Kinesthetic’ way of learning where physical experience is involved; touching, feeling, holding, doing, practical hands-on experiences. Or one needs a ‘Visual’ learning style which involves the use of seen or observe things; pictures, diagrams, demonstrations, displays, handouts, films, flip-chart. Education does not look into this.

What can you do yourself to improve the working of your brain? We watched this video of Daniel Amen talking about his study on the human brain. Don't get me wrong his lecture was very interesting but he made me question a lot about my lifestyle. He's there talking about an event at his church and how angry he got when seeing donuts and hot dogs being served to the kids and I'm sitting here thinking back about how many burgers I have eaten this week alone.

It got worse after he showed some pictures of a healthy brain and an unhealthy brain. The unhealthy brain had holes and looked smaller than the healthy brain. He then continued with saying what can cause a brain to look like that; smoking (check), eating fatty food (check), not enough sleep (check), and this was just a small part of the whole list of causes. By the end i thought oke great I only have a couple of weeks left...

His reasoning behind giving these lectures is to make people aware of their unhealthy lifestyle and that it's not too late to start making drastic changes. It's a pretty good reason and I stand behind him but he could've brought it in a more sensitive way. He achieved his goal though; I am going to think more about living healthier.