The human brain, its features and capabilities — 8 tips on how to help your brain

A bit of history: in 1941, in the village of Kisegach, Chelyabinsk region, on the shore of a quiet lake, a military hospital of restorative medicine was established. Fighters who were wounded in the head were brought here. Their wounds somehow affected and damaged the structure of the brain. There were simultaneously conducted research and rehabilitation of wounded soldiers, each of whom became for the doctors another puzzle that required more and more new knowledge about the brain parts and functions.

Here is just one example. Lieutenant Zasetsky was wounded in the parietal-occipital area of the brain. After his examining, A. Luria was a little bit confused: the wounded young man was full of strength, but he picked up the right words with difficulty, forgot how to write and read, and the picture of the world that surrounded him crumbled in front of him into many separate, unrelated elements . But at the same time - the absolute preservation of willpower, the desire to live and develop, experiencing the feelings in all their fullness and expressiveness!

This and similar cases have helped scientists to make the most complete picture of how the human mind works and to understand the inexpressibly extensive compensatory capabilities of the human brain.

However, perhaps the most important was the successful experience of recovering hundreds and hundreds of fighters and returning them to normal life.

Such a "boring" gray-white picture

In front of the doctors there lies the brain of a person taken out of the cranium. What do they see? The gray-white picture is almost dull because of its colorlessness - grey cortex and gray-white subcortex. But the moment you find out some scanty facts about this most amazing organ of the human body, it becomes clear that the brain in its mystery and complexity may well compete with the cosmos.

Judge for yourself:

• The human brain consists of one and a half billion nerve cells;

• In case of destruction of any part of the brain, another brain structure is capable of taking over its functions;

• Patterns of brain development allow us to make a conclusion about what functions a person develops more successfully than others, and which ones lag behind in their development from the concept of “norm”.

Tip 1

You cannot improve what you do not understand. Read about the work of the brain, strive to understand the principles of its work. Determine for yourself the important directions of development of your cognitive abilities and study the patterns of their development.

The three main services of the brain

If we combine everything that our brain diligently does for us, then we will get 3 of its main fields of activity:

1. maintenance of energy tonus - regulation of metabolism, the work of the endocrine glands, ensuring growth and development;

2. receiving, processing and storing information from the outside world;

3. programming, regulation and control of human activity.

All this is very much like the work of a complex computer. Indeed, the human brain, its features and capabilities reproduce all the laws of the complex management of information flows. Or is it computers that are created in the form of the brain?

Take at least the energy block. Strictly speaking, it does not even resemble the brain structure - it is loose, even watery, located somewhere very deep inside. But in general - this is perhaps the most ancient part of the brain, localized in the hypothalamus.

Without it, the brain loses its energy supply, and the tone of all brain processes decreases to an inoperable level.

A number of reasons for the unsatisfactory performance of the brain are thus related to the fact that in different contexts they are called differently, for example:

• metabolic disorders in the body;
• disorders of fat metabolism;
•  violation of the pituitary gland,
• diseases of the endocrine glands.

Everyone has heard the phrase "a surge of adrenaline" - this is precisely the case when a hormone known as adrenaline is released into the blood by the adrenal glands that produce it. The result is a powerful emotional outburst, actually an explosion of emotions! This is how the brain's energy block responds to the hormonal shift.

 the first service of our brain is directly related to the health of our body. So to help your brain means, among other things, to monitor your metabolism and the functioning of the endocrine glands, ensuring and maintaining the healthy functioning of the corresponding organs.

The brain solves "puzzles"

Do you know the conditions under which the brain "falls into a dream"? This happens when the flow of external signals decreases dramatically. The energy block kind of integrates the metabolism in the body and the external signals entering it. And if there are no signals, then there is no tone.

But then the brain receives signals about objects around. Brain catches:

• colour,
• form,
• distance,
•  the size,

but still only as unclear blurry images. In order to recognize them, it is necessary to skip these signals to a fundamentally different level, or else, from the “primary visual cortex” they must fall into the “secondary visual cortex”.

An electrode that touches the primary cortex will cause only flashes of images in a person - sparks, lines, circles, lightning ... And by touching the secondary cortex, it will generate quite recognizable pictures - faces, objects and even whole plots.

Not all images fixed by the primary cortex are processed by humans to a level at which they can be recognized. Is the phenomenon of intuition related to this? We cannot clearly explain our forebodings and vague predictions, but at the same time we realize that they carry some important information for us.

Tip 3

Develop figurative thinking! Learn to operate with images, pictures, received in psychology the name of "representations". Help your brain take full advantage of the hidden resources of the secondary visual cortex.

The main work associated with

• recognition of the picture of the world,
• naming of objects (and, therefore, with speech),
• synthesis of an integral model from separate scattered puzzles

is performed by the "tertiary visual cortex". It is its merit that our brain builds for us a complete image of the surrounding world, where we

• we see how different objects are placed and connected with each other,
• we can track their movement,
• determine their location and compare with each other.

And most importantly - we can give titles to objects and, thus, transmit our personal pictures of the world to each other. Tearing away the word from the object that it designates, we form abstract words, word-concepts.

We hear the word "apple", and each of us understands what subject we are talking about. But, if you look at the models of the world of different people, we will find that everyone saw “their” apple:

• big or small,
• green or red...

The stronger the word is attached to the image, the lower the level of conceptual thinking is, so, the more difficult the abstract judgments are. Such as, for example, solving complex mathematical equations.

Tip 4

Develop your conceptual construct and train your abstract thinking! You now know that this is a function of a completely different area of ​​the brain. The secondary and tertiary cortex each carry their own load, so the development of one does not guarantee the successful development of the other.

Speech is necessary for a person not only to exchange information with other people. Talking, listening, receiving new information from others, expressing our own position is only a visible part of what our speech provides for us.

The tertiary cortex and the two most important brain centers — Broca’s motor speech center area and Wernicke’s sensory speech center area — do much more important work for us. They help us think! They are the words that organize our inner world. We describe everything, that we perceive, in the brain with their help. The outer world is material and independent of our worldview, and the inner world we build for ourselves. And the more funds for this there are at our disposal, the more precisely, in more detail, there will be a model of the world created by our brain.

You do not want to endlessly repeat the favorite phrase of not very successful students “I am like a dog: I understand everything, but I can’t say”?

Then pay attention to the following feature of the brain: the different brain centers are responsible for the perception of speech and pronouncing. They even are separated from each other: motor is in the occipital zone, and sensory (perceiving speech) is in the temporal cortex.

Reading and listening, you download, which means that you train only the center of speech perception. And It does not mean that you can then easily reproduce what you read and hear. Reasoning like “If I found out, I can tell you about it” is nothing more than a common illusion. The motor center of speech, which has not been involved all this time, will not work like this, for no reason, and will not help you to retell what you know brightly and colorfully.

Tip 5

If you want to reproduce easily new material, replete with unfamiliar scientific terms and difficult expressions for you, practice to retell what you read and hear!

Brain creating and controlling

If there were not this third brain unit, we would only be able to respond to the environment and our needs:

• hungry - looking for food,
• cold - wrap up,
• scary - take a run.

But man is an active being. And this happens due to the brain structures located in the anterior regions of the cerebral hemispheres, which are responsible for programming and controlling our actions.

Two facts speak about the importance for a person of active voluntary activity, its programming, organization and self-control:

• brain areas responsible for the active organization of activity are formed much later in life than any other;
• 1/3 of the entire mass of the brain is responsible for only for these three functions.

So, a person opens up such opportunities of the brain that make him the master of his destiny in the broadest sense of the word.

By the way, the preservation of these particular sections allowed Lieutenant Zasetsky to subsequently re-master all the cognitive functions that were lost due to his injury. This is where he had a strong desire to recover, and a crave to discover the world for himself again.

Weak will and laziness, life in a reaction mode, behavior on a reactive type - all these are only the results of personal qualities. The brain has nothing to do with it, if there are no functional disorders or lesions of its frontal lobes. Training voluntary attention, purposeful behavior, and perseverance are powerful assistants to your brain - a creative and controlling organ.

Tip 6

Practice your perseverance, develop an active attitude towards life, try not to lose curiosity, love of discoveries and readiness to learn new knowledge over the years!

The registration of the electrical potentials of the brain revealed the following pattern: each mental activity leads to the fact that in the frontal lobes a lot of synchronously working sections immediately start to get excited. Habitual work, which does not contain any new intellectual challenges, is a bad helper in maintaining effective brain activity throughout a person’s life.

Tip 7

Want to "stir up" your brain - find a mental task for it. Solving a crossword, planning your actions, comparing and making an informed choice, you develop the ability of the human brain to cope with mental work faster and better.

And finally, another important fact: all three blocks of the brain work in the closest interaction. It is possible to break them only either artificially, doing this for scientific purposes, and creating conditional descriptive models for the functioning of each unit for this, or this may occur due to deep functional disorders. In the life of a person who is healthy and developing normally, the whole work of the brain is a single synchronized work of many brain structures simultaneously. To train the abilities of your brain in such a way to become smarter, more rational, more attentive than many others - this is a very real and productive way for every person.

Tip 8

Take advantage of the training capabilities of the Wikium website. Exercises are built in accordance with the patterns of our brain described above.

So if you pay attention to these tips for brain development, you will definitely become better in brain physiology .