8 Fascinating Things We Learned About the Mind in 2015

I recently came across an article from last year that is worth sharing. It describes “8 Fascinating Things We Learned About the Mind in 2015” written by Carolyn Gregoire. While a couple of items would certainly constitute “no-brainers,” several of them are quite startling.

1. Smartphones are wildly distracting (constantly looking at a screen is detrimental).

2. Psychedelics may be the next big thing in mental health care (there is a renaissance in psychedelic research  for psychiatric purposes).

3. Pollution is worse for the brain than we realized (exposure to air pollution is associated with neurodegenerative diseases.)

4. The brain and immune system are actually linked (there is a direct connection between the brain and the body's immune system)

5. Erasing memories could be the future of addiction treatment (mind hacking can help with permanent memory erasure)

6. Nature does the mind good (there are mental health benefits to spending time outdoors)

7. To boost your mood, boost your bacteria (increasing healthy bacteria in the stomach can improve health)

8. Good sleep is critical to a healthy emotional life (healthy amounts of sleep can improve emotional intelligence).

For more details on these discoveries, see the website below.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mind-brain-research-2015_us_5671ac66e4b0dfd4bcc03848

 

Left-brained? or Right-brained?

 

Left-brained or Right-brained?

Few discoveries in contemporary neuroscience have had a greater spill-over effect into the educational community than the now-legendary “split-brain” (corpus calloscotomy) research of Roger Sperry for which he received the 1981 Nobel Prize in the category of Physiology or Medicine.

Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga began his early career in the field with Sperry, and subsequent made significant contributions to our understanding of how the two hemispheres of the brain communicate with one another (or fail to do so when surgically separated from one another).

Later, when these hemispheric interactions were translated into educationally appealing terminology, “left-brained and right-brained” seminars were advertised at nearly every educational conference. We saw educators, whose genuine motive was merely to be well-informed and effective in their classrooms, flock to professional development workshops on this topic.

While the notion of cortical specialization is an accurate representation of the inner workings of the brain, every healthy human brain is intricately interconnected with massive pathways stretching across the neural divide rendering the content of many of these seminars misleading at best. There are over 300 million nerve fibers crisscrossing from one hemisphere to the other.

We have unraveled more of the brain’s deep secrets over the past 5 years of research in neuroscience than during humankind's last 2,500 years on this planet. Now, one of the "unguarded secrets" is that we learn with a “whole brain” that craves and creates meaningful connections. The foundation of all learning lies in the one quadrillion connections among the neurons throughout the brain and in both of the two hemispheres. The corpus callosum sends as much as 4 billion bits of information between the two hemispheres each second.

My Brain Valentine

(a.k.a., "I’m in love with a corpus callosum who makes me whole")

Left-brained?

 

Right-brained?

Well, I use both of ‘em.

Because I have you,

My corpus callosum!