Our Wonderful Brain

My dad showed me this picture last weekend and it really got me giggling. If you are like me, you would have only noticed the teeth and not the eyebrows! My dad explained to me that these mind tricks work because there of how our brain works and there are some really fun stuff to learn about it.

Only the important stuff

The first cool thing about our minds is that it only focuses on the important stuff. Our eyes work pretty much like a television screen to help our brains capture everything around us, but our mind then takes over and helps us notice only the things that are ‘important’ to us.

For example, when I’m in school, I don’t really notice what my classmates are doing when I’m paying attention to the teacher. But I also don’t notice what the teacher is doing when I’m paying attention to my classmates! My dad says that this helps us notice get tired out from paying attention to every single tiny thing that happens around us, and I agree with him.

Different memories

The next cool thing is that we have different memory for skills and facts. Skills like riding a bike, swimming or playing tennis gets stored in a part of our brain that doesn’t need us to recall the exact small steps to doing something, it just comes to us automatically when we need it. Facts on the other hand, gets stored separately.

This is why we sometime forget what happen but we won't forget how to ride a bicycle, even if we haven't rode a bike in a while. My parents tell me that this is what coaching mean by 'muscle memory', which I previously thought was that my brain had muscles! That's pretty cool stuff.

Brain connections

I think best thing about our brain is that we can learn new things. How it does it is that it makes connections, just like connecting one piece of string from the table to the window grill when you are building a fort. Each time we learn something new, a new string is tied, and if we keep doing it repeatedly, the connection becomes strong and it forms a new skill or memory.

That's pretty cool stuff!