| |
 How Does That Work?
Celebrate Brain Awareness Week by Learning about Your Incredible Brain
Brain Awareness Week is March 12-18, so this is a great month to learn more about the brain. The Dana Alliance for Brain Intiatives has provided this information to help you understand what goes on inside that head of yours!
 Did you know that scientists believe that exercising the mind keeps it strong and may delay brain diseases? That means that it is important to keep the brain active. Do mind exercises, puzzles and games, solve problems and make things!
Try this! Do each of the following in order.
1. Imagine a place youd like to be. Maybe its riding the crest of wave, or skateboarding down a halfpipe. Lying on a sandy beach? Create the
image of that place in your mind and hold it there for a minute or two.
2. Listen to the sounds in the room around you. What do you hear? Really listen and see how many sounds you can identify.
3. Silently tap your fingers, one tap, one finger at a time, in order. Then reverse the order of tapping. Then tap each finger twice, in order, then in
reverse. Then three times....
4. Starting at 100, count backwards by 7s.
5. Remember some event from your past. The first time you rode a bike all by yourself, your grandmother baking cookies.... Put yourself back in that place and recall everything you can about it: Who was there with you? What were you wearing? What were you feeling?
6. Now pinch yourself. Pick a tender spot on the inside of your elbow, and pinch the skin just hard enough to feel pain.
In doing these six tasks, youve made a good portion of your brain work. Even something as simple as tapping your fingers in order needs a lot of working together by millions of nerve cells through the brain in perfect timing to make the signals that tell your fingers to move.
If you had been lying inside a PET or MRI scanner special machines that let scientists take pictures of the living brain as it works the scans would show distinct areas of your brain lighting up as you did each task. Tapping your fingers in order would activate groups of neurons in at least distinct areas of the brain:
the prefrontal cortex, where the brain makes the conscious decision to do the task;
the premotor cortex, where you create the instructions for doing the task;
the motor cortex, a sort of relay station that sends those
instructions on to the arm and hand muscles that move the fingers and
the cerebellum, which watches over the whole process and adjusts your actions as needed in response to outside cues, such as where your hand is in relation to the desk.
All this takes place in a mere fraction of a second. Not such a simple task after all!
Task #1, visual imagery, lights up the visual cortex in the back of the brain, as well as pathways leading to it from the eyes along the optic nerve. Identifying individual sounds around you sets off the auditory cortex and related areas. Counting backwards by 7s is a
complex thinking task and uses the brains center for higher thoughts in the prefrontal cortex.
Remembering something from the past will likely turn on the hippocampus, an inner-brain structure used in memory, as well as other areas of the brain that relate to this type of memory. For example, remembering the first time you rode a bike, a motor task, will light up the motor area of the brain, and the smell of Grandmas cookies would activate the olfactory center.
Lastly, when you pinched yourself, pain receptors in the nerves of the skin sent a signal back to the brain to alert it to the location and strength of the pain and to start the corrective action if necessary (stop the pinching!). If the pain was great, the brain might release endorphins, natural hormones that block pain signals.
As you can see by this brief explanation, the brain is very complex! Learn more at www.dana.org/kids.
This information provided by The Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, a nonprofit organization committed to advancing public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research. www.dana.org.
|
 |
