 |
| But then, Caesar from 'Planet of the Apes' is too smart |
Michael M. Merzenich is
famous for many experiments with monkeys. In one he trained a monkey to touch a
spinning disk with a certain amount of pressure for a certain amount of time.
The monkey was then rewarded with a banana pellet reward. The monkey’s brain
was mapped before and after the experiments. What happened has huge
implications. The overall area of that particular map in the monkey’s brain got
bigger. This makes sense as more brain resources are being dedicated to the
more frequently carried out tasks. The individual neuron’s receptive fields got
smaller – more accurate – and only fired when small corresponding parts of its
fingertip touched the disk. So there were more accurate neurons available to do
this task.
Here’s where things get
really fascinating. Merzenich found that as
these trained neurons got more efficient they processed faster. This means that
our speed of thought is plastic. Through deliberate, focused repetition our
neurons are being trained to fire more quickly. They also don’t need to rest
for as long between actions. Imagine how much more powerful and effective you
would be if you could think quicker. It doesn’t even stop there, the faster the
communications, the clearer, so more likely to fire in sync with other fast
communications ultimately making more powerful networks. More powerful networks
or messages make it more likely we’ll remember something.
[Source: Make Your Brain Work (2013) by Amy Brann.
Pg. 24]
So if you want the benefit of faster thinking capacity
and the ability to recall things easily in the future,
then you need to pay conscious attention to one thing
at a time.
Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)
No comments:
Post a Comment