Preliminaries 15
for experience to fix into long term memory with all of that sleep). We’ve omitted one that is crucial,
however. That isyour brain!
Your Brain and Learning
Your brain is more than just a unique instrument. In some sense it is you. You could imagine having
your brain removed from your body and being hooked up to machinary that provided it with sight,
sound, and touch in such a way that “you” remain^7. It is difficult to imagine that you still exist
in any meaningful sense if your brain is taken out of your body and destroyed while your body is
artificially kept alive.
Your brain, however,isan instrument. It has internal structure. It uses energy. It does “work”.
It is, in fact, a biological machine of sublime complexity and subtlety, one of the true wonders of the
world! Note that this statement can be made quite independent of whether “you” are your brain
per se or a spiritual being who happens to be using it (a debate that need not concern us at this
time, however much fun it might be to get into it) – either way the brainitself is quite marvelous.
For all of that, few indeed are the people who bother to learn to actuallyusetheir brain effectively
asan instrument. It just works, after all, whether or not we do this.Which is fine. If you want to
get the most mileage out of it, however, it helps to read the manual.
So here’s at leastoneuser manual for your brain. It is by no means complete or authoritative,
but it should be enough to get you started, to help you discover that you are actually a lot smarter
than you think, or that you’ve been in the past, once you realize that you canchangethe way you
think and learn and experience life and graduallyimproveit.
In the spirit of the learning methodology that we eventually hope to adopt, let’s simply itemize
in no particular order the various features of the brain^8 that bear on the process of learning. Bear
in mind that such a minimal presentation is more of ametaphorthan anything else because simple
(and extremely common) generalizations such as “creativity is a right-brain function” are not strictly
true as the brain is far more complex than that.
- The brain isbicameral: it has twocerebral hemispheres^9 , right and left, with brain functions
asymmetricallysplit up between them. - The brain’s hemispheres are connected by a networked membrane called thecorpus callosum
that is how the two halves talk to each other. - The human brain consists oflayerswith a structure that recapitulates evolutionary phylogeny;
that is, the core structures are found in very primitive animals and common to nearly all
vertebrate animals, with new layers (apparently) added by evolution on top of this core as
the various phyla differentiated, fish, amphibian, reptile, mammal, primate, human. The
outermost layer where most actual thinking occurs (in animals thatthink) is known as the
cerebral cortex. - Thecerebral cortex^10 – especially the outermost layer ofitcalled theneocortex– is where
“higher thought” activities associated with learning and problem solving take place, although
the brain is a very complex instrument with functions spread out over many regions. - An important brain model is aneural network^11. Computer simulated neural networks provide
us with insight into how the brain can remember past events and process new information.
(^7) Imagine very easily if you’ve ever seenThe Matrixmovie trilogy...
(^8) Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/brain.
(^9) Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/cerebralhemisphere.
(^10) Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebralcortex.
(^11) Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuralnetwork.