Today we spent almost the whole day talking about the brain. My brain hurt by the time I went home. It is kind of an interesting phenomenon when you are thinking about your thinking.
Some important information -
- Our brains dump while we sleep. See, it isn't that we forget information, it really is that our brain has purposefully decided it isn't something we need to know. Even when we think we need to know it later, we don't. Well, seriously, think about how much information and stimuli we get during each day. It is so much information, that when we sleep our brain kind of does a re-run and takes in everything it can by making connections to other things that we have currently stored in our brain. We actually only remember 1% of what we "learn" during the day. Now think about in the classroom. How could we use this information to help students learn in the classroom or help adults when they are learning on the job. This is a fact I have known for a long time, but I haven't seen many practical applications of it. I'm going to work on integrating this into what we teach teachers at Messmer.
- Your brain does regenerate neurons. When your parents used to tell you that if you drank too much or smoked you would kill your brain cells. While this may be true, new research has shown that neurons can actually re-grow. They regenerate. Great news!
- The BRAIN is a mean, lean pattern making machine.
Our discussions about the brain led to an interesting conversation about difference in men and women. Like the fact that men tend to learn in a linear, sequential pattern and women enjoy a much more analytic route to learning. Men like short (dumb) jokes. They come to a quick punch line and are linear. Women tend to like jokes that make them think and analyze. Because Peter told us this...we know it is well researched. He didn't tell us what study it came from, but...
And in communication women have more questions than men. And when women nod their head, it means they are listening deeper. When men not their heads, they are nodding to show they are in agreement.
And how about the study that occurred in Washington DC. You see an alien had landed in DC and what they found is that the aliens do have symbols for their letters. You can see pictures for two of the letters below. One of them is the symbol represents KiKi (the sound of one of the letters) and one of them is the symbol that represents Boomar. In this research study, which sound for the letters is represented by which symbol? Ok, here are the symbols...
Again, so which one is KiKi and which one is Boomar?
Well, the majority of people will identify KiKi as the first symbol because of the hard "k" sound matching the hard edges of the symbol. While this really has no application in the alien language, it is how our brain works. It tries to find connections and make meanings (even when they don't make sense). It was a cool type of activity demonstrating this!
So the final two exciting things that Dr. Jonas shared:
"Do you want me to teach you everything their is to know about statistics in 30 seconds? Here it goes... Probability." [Actually that didn't take 30 seconds, but oh well.]
"What are the 3 most important things in your dissertation?
Research
Research
Research"
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