Through Psychology - Making the Most out of your Brain (II)
From the button to the top, from the back to the front
This is how our brain develops - the button part, the limbic system, is responsible for our awareness/sleep cycle, our basic emotions like fear, our body maintenance and basic needs, in essential, our security and protection. Basically, everything the baby needs to keep himself alive!
The top, the cortex, is responsible for receiving information, keeping it organized, store it or eliminate it. It is responsible for analysing and synthesizing information. Everything the child needs to learn in her school years.
The back part of our brain corresponds to the occipital lobe, responsible for everything related to the vision. Then, we have the temporal lobe, responsible for the audition, and the parietal lobe, responsible for perception and basic motor skills.
These are the first lobes to be structured, according to their place in the brain - from the back to the front. As you can already see, these parts develop themselves accordingly to what the child needs: to grow up and learn everything about this complex world.
And the front part corresponds to the frontal lobe, especially the pre-frontal lobe, the one responsible for our coordination and complex motor skills, the one that takes all the information of the other lobes and transforms it into answers to give back to the outside, the one responsible for our decisions, our motivations, our initiatives, our SELF, our PERSONALITY.
This is what we need when we arrive at the eighteens or nineteens! This is what makes us adults responsible for our own lives! So, this has to be the last part to be develop as we only need to start making our own decisions at this moment: adulthood!
Amazing how our brain works right?!
Now that you are aware of what stage you are, let us think about how we can improve our brain activity.
If you need to improve your reading and interpreting area, think about what book genres are you interested in. Is it comics or novels? Do you like reading outloud? Join a local school on a voluntary reading time.
If you need to improve your attention span, look at as much details as you can during a specific activity, like going from home to work. Have you ever noticed that old green door almost falling from its hinges?!
If you need to improve your memory skills, think about trying some board games, usually they require playing with a group, so besides working on your memory, you will have some fun! Not interested? What about memorizing the usual places of your important things at home, then change them around and remember their original place?
If you need to improve your writing, think about what type of writer would you be. Romantic? Detective? Dramatic? Fictional? Have you ever thought about starting a blog and share your thoughts with the world?!
If you need to improve your speech, arrange some nights out with your friends or have them over for dinner! What a best way to work on your language skills than talk all night with some of your favourite people?!
If you need to improve your calculus, forget the calculator when you need to know how old a person is, or join in a voluntary teaching maths group, or do the baker's maths mentally! Whatever you feel more comfortable with.
As you can see, during adulthood, we need stimuli that make us interested and motivated in something.
The adult human already feels safe, he already feels that he belongs to that specific species; now he needs to fulfil his individual needs: have a career, have a family, have children, have a "white picket fence house"... The adult human now needs to understand what makes him get out of bed every morning.
Now the brain is only trying to improve itself so the adult can achieve those goals in the most efficient way. Finding the motivation in any area is the key to make the most out of our brain!
More, during the early stages of our growth, relationships shape our brain completely and it can only develops itself within relationships; as we grow up into adulthood, we start separating us from the close relationships we had so we can be able to make our own decisions, but those relationships are always important on the decisions we make.
If you check the examples I gave, some of the activities are better done when we are in a group, a group of significant people if possible. So, besides motivation, we need meaningful relationships!
Read the first part here! You can read more here! All the contents are my own thoughts or interpretations I made from scientific articles! Feel free to share this contents as long as you quote my name!