{"id":5048,"date":"2019-10-14T08:00:51","date_gmt":"2019-10-14T13:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/braindevs.net\/blog\/blog\/?p=5048"},"modified":"2019-10-10T06:55:53","modified_gmt":"2019-10-10T11:55:53","slug":"what-students-want-to-know-about-brains-and-learning-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/what-students-want-to-know-about-brains-and-learning-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"What Students Want to Know about Brains and Learning, Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently wrote about a conversation I had with high school students in Japan. What questions did they have about brains and learning? What answers did they have?<\/p>\n

In that last post<\/a>, I wrote about the more school-centric questions that students asked: “what is the optimal amount of time to study?” I also noted their welcome skepticism: “does studying the night before a test really do nothing?”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, lots of their questions pushed the boundaries of our knowledge. Several, in fact, pushed the boundaries of the plausible.<\/p>\n

What Can We Know? What Can We Do?<\/h2>\n

How many signals does the brain send throughout the body in a second?<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, there’s a question you don’t hear every day.<\/p>\n

The answer is: I have no idea. In fact, I can’t imagine how we’d start answering that question. We’ve got BILLIONS of neurons (say, 85 billion for a round number guess). Each one makes something like 10,000 connections with other neurons.<\/p>\n

How many signals do they send to each other? How many signals do they send to the body? The mind delights in (and boggles at) the calculations.<\/p>\n

How much of your brain can you lose and survive?<\/em><\/p>\n

Hard to say, precisely.<\/p>\n

Here’s an article<\/a> that will blow your mind: a man whose ventricles were so enlarged that he barely had a brain left. And, he more-or-less did just fine.<\/p>\n

If you don’t believe me, check out the images. I mean: WOW.<\/p>\n

Does your gut health\/what you eat have a significant effect on your brain?<\/em><\/p>\n

Every day I see more research on this topic. In brief: YES.<\/p>\n

You’ll often hear the gut called “the second brain.” I suspect we’ll see lots more news in this field over the next decade.<\/p>\n

Can I transfer my brain into a computer?<\/em><\/p>\n

I have yet to meet the neuroscientist who thinks so. Given that the brain is roughly as complex as the universe, I suspect it will take a while for us to so.<\/p>\n

Unless, of course, students keep asking high-quality questions like these. In which case, we’ll have the job done by next Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

High school students have questions. We have (some) answers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":5049,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-5048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lb-blog","tag-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5048"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5051,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5048\/revisions\/5051"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}