The Key to Building Better Brain.
The Key to Building Better Brain.
Everything we learn comes to the brain through our senses.
However, the brain has built-in obstacles to sensory information input.
It is an amazing organ, but it cannot process the billions of bits of information that bombard it every second.
To deal with the barrage, it is equipped with filters to protect itself from input overload and focus on the data most critical for survival.
How your child’s brain responds to environmental sensory data determines what information gets his attention.
Only selected information passes through his lower brain filter (the reticular activating system, or RAS) to enter his thinking brain.
The RAS is particularly responsive to novelty, surprise, color, and unexpected/curious events when selecting which sensory input to allow into the thinking brain.
Once information makes it through the first filter, there is a second filter in a part of the brain called the amygdala.
The amygdala is part of the emotion-processing limbic system network.
How well your child stores the sensory input that makes it through the amygdala filter is greatly influenced by her emotional state when she receives the information.
When stress is high, the amygdala diverts the information to the reflex automatic system, where non-thinking reactions, such as fight/flight, dominate.
When the amygdala is in a safe state and emotions are positive, the information is passed on to the reflective, memory-making, and thinking networks in the brain.
There is something that helps sensory input make it through these two filters a chemical neurotransmitter called dopamine.
When learning is associated with pleasure, dopamine is released.
This surge increases focus, helping the brain stay attentive.
As a parent, understanding how information enters the brain to become knowledge and long-term memory is a powerful tool for enriching your child’s brainpower.
Using brain-friendly strategies empowers your child to respond to the most useful sensory input from her environment and turn that data into retained knowledge.
There are two essential brain processes and three main brain systems that are keys to building better brains.
The processes are:
- Patterning
- Neuroplasticity
The three systems are:
- Reticular activating system (RAS)
- Affective filter in the amygdala
- Dopamine
The Reticular Activating System (RAS).
It is also known as the Brain’s Sensory Switchboard
The RAS is the attention-activation switching system located at the lower back of the brain (brain stem).
It receives input from the nerves that converge into the spinal cord from nerve endings in the arms, legs, trunk, neck, face, and internal organs.
The RAS sets the state of arousal and vigilance of the rest of the brain.
It is the RAS that selectively alerts brains to changes in their environment that impact their survival sounds, sights, and smells that may indicate danger or signal opportunities to find food, mates, or shelter.
In humans, the RAS has evolved to become responsive to more than just the basic needs for survival in the wild, but it is still a filter that is most attentive to changes in our environment.
The RAS is key to “turning on” the brain’s level of response and alertness.
The RAS’s response to the sensory information it receives determines the speed, content, and type of information available to the “higher” brain.
Although millions of bits of sensory data bombard the RAS every waking second, this filter limits access to about two thousand bits per second.
In successful learning,
Children are stimulated to pay attention to important information by getting the attention of their RAS.
Listening to lectures and doing drills and worksheets are not novel or engaging experiences, so they do not contain the sensory stimulation sufficient to power information through the RAS’s brain filters.
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The Amygdala
This is where Heart Meets Mind
The sensory information that children receive the things they see, hear, feel, smell, or touch stimulates the intake centers of their brains beyond the RAS.
The areas most active when new information first enters the brain are the sensory cortex areas in each lobe of the brain.
Each of these regions is specialized to analyze data from just one sense (hearing, touch, taste, vision, and smell).
This input is identified and classified by matching it with previously stored similar data.
The sight of a lemon, for example, connects with the visual cortex in the occipital lobes.
The feel of the lemon is recognized by the somatosensory (touch) centers in the parietal lobes.
This sensory data must then pass through the brain’s emotional core, the limbic system, especially the amygdala and hippocampus, where emotional significance is linked to information (sour taste is yummy in lemon sherbet but yucky in unsweetened lemon juice).
On receiving sensory data, these emotional filters evaluate its pleasure value.
That decision determines if the information is given further access to the higher brain, and if so, where the data will go.
When the brain perceives a threat or the child feels stressed, these brain filter centers go into survival mode and divert the sensory data away from the thinking brain and into the automatic centers (fight/ flight).
Because there are usually no tigers in our homes, children don’t need the same threat-filter response their prehistoric predecessors did.
Yet those filters still exist in human brains and can be activated by the type of stresses children experience in some classrooms.
Bullying, attention difficulties, confusion, or boredom may trigger these filters, blocking the absorption of sensory input related to learning.
The fight/ flight response is engaged because the stimuli are perceived as negative experiences, and learning becomes difficult.
If your child is frustrated, bored, or confused because she already knows how to multiply fractions but is doing yet another worksheet multiplying fractions, or if she’s confused by the difficult vocabulary words in the story the class is reading, her amygdala responds to those stresses by taking up much of the brain’s available nutrients and oxygen.
The brain then goes into survival mode.
The high activity in the amygdala blocks the entry of information to the thinking brain and memory.
This is why learning strategies that reduce children’s anxiety are important:
They lower the affective (emotional) filter in the amygdala and allow information to reach the thinking centers.
When your child is stressed, the amygdala directs information to the reactive, non-thinking brain. Your child is relaxed, comfortable, and interested, the amygdala directs the information to the reflective, thinking brain.
When you understand the functions of these filters, you can also use them in positive ways.
If learning experiences are associated with pleasure, connected to topics of interest, or related to satisfying goal achievement and other positive experiences, sensory data will be considered valuable and permitted entry into the higher, thinking brain.
With well-planned learning activities that sustain attention and interest without producing frustration, confusion, or boredom, these filters can be recruited to help the brain focus on the sensory information of the learning activity.
Next to the amygdala in the limbic system is the hippocampus.
It is in this consolidation center that new sensory input is linked to previous knowledge and memories of past experiences retrieved from memory storage.
Positron emission tomography (PET) scans show that when children are given new information, their brains activate their stored memory banks.
Their brains are seeking relationships or connections between the new information and stored memories of past knowledge or experience.
When new information is consolidated with prior knowledge, the newly coded relational memory is now ready for processing in the frontal lobes and long-term memory storage.
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Dopamine (Working to Prime Your Child’s Brain)
Dopamine is one of the brain’s most important neurotransmitters.
Some of the other neurotransmitters in the brain include:
- serotonin,
- tryptophan,
- acetylcholine,
- and norepinephrine.
These neurotransmitters are brain chemicals that carry information across the spaces (synapses) that form when one nerve ending connects with another.
During the last trimester of fetal development, the brain creates thirty thousand synapses per second for every square centimeter of cortical surface.
The brain releases dopamine when an experience is pleasurable.
As a pleasure-seeking organ, the brain also releases dopamine in expectation of rewarding, pleasurable experiences.
This has several advantages.
Dopamine release increases attentive focus and memory formation.
When dopamine is released during enjoyable learning activities, it increases children’s capacities to control attention and store long-term memories.
Learning activities that can induce the release of dopamine and create pleasurable states in the brain include physical movement, personal interest connections, social contacts, music, novelty, sense of achievement, intrinsic reward, choice, play, and humor.
The dopamine released during these activities is then available to increase attention and focus.
Internal motivation is valuable in goal setting and persevering with homework, studying, and focusing in class.
Especially when the goals are related to personal interest, children will build on their strengths and enjoy the dopamine-pleasure response from their goal-directed achievements.
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