Use It Or Lose It: A Good Brain Pruning

To begin, Kolbert appeals to experts of neurology and psychology to reinforce the main idea of her essay. Utilizing specialists' theories create a sense of authenticity, and in turn, assures the reader what they are reading is reliable. She calls upon Frances Jensen, a neurologist,

This video is about The Behaving Brain; it explains how the brain and amnesia work. According to the video, neurons duties are to receive information from other cells, process this information, and transmitting it to the rest of the body. This is done by traveling through dendrites, to the soma, to the axon, to the terminal buttons. Constant nerve flow helps regulate our metabolism, temperature, and respiration. It also enables learning and the ability to comprehend. The brain is connected to the brain stem, which is connected to the cerebellum, which is connected to the limbic system. The limbic system is made up of the amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, and thalamus. The cerebrum is the largest part of the brain, where things are

1. During teenage years, the human brain is in a very delicate state of development, and when the brain is damaged during delicate stages, it is more difficult to repair. Damaging a brain in progress is like leaving bricks out of the foundation for a house that is in the process of being built. One cannot fix the foundation of an already built house, and if they try, they will only weaken or destroy its remaining integrity.

In the book, “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain,” David Eagleman challenges many ideas that we might have about our identities, mindset, perception and how they all come together to affect our actions and beliefs. Eagleman talks about how our brains work with our bodies to perceive our everyday life and tasks. He explains that the brain is a three- pound organ that takes control of our daily actions and alters our way of thinking and performing certain tasks. He states that it is easier for our brains to perform tasks like ride a bike or drive a car without thinking too much about it. In his book, he also talks about how the brain does not perform or think the same way someone else's brain might. The brain can automatically do a certain task without you even realizing it and is even able to make up a response when you don't remember exact details of a past event. This book has challenged many ideas that we may already have, or known about ourselves, and raises many questions about how our brain works to perceive and analyze information.

I agree with Fran Liebowitz. Embarrassment is a powerful human emotion. Without embarrassment, people would live their life, going around doing stupid stuff and not really having any thought on how the stuff their doing is out of line. Bryan Stevenson brings up this point when he mentions “…no accountability” on page 114. Embarrassment, along with good conscious and good morals, is how people hold themselves accountable for their actions. Without embarrassment, there really is not any accountability.

Research on brain development shows that during the teenage years there is a massive loss of brain tissue. According to the article Startling Finds on Teenage Brains “Brain cells and connections are only being lost in the areas controlling

judgements, language and control our social behaviour is processed in the frontal lobe. Due to the

From the “superpredator” scares of the 1970s up to the 1990s successes in brain research, It was believed that the brain was resistant to change after we entered adulthood. During these early times in brain studies, it was commonplace to hear about how the elderly aren’t able to change with the times. The belief that, “when you grow up you won’t change,” was one of the many frustrations of that time period, and even had countless songs dedicated to these neural setbacks (American Idiot by Green Day). Previously in 1890 however, a man named William James published a book called the principles of psychology.

For decades, the human brain has been one of the most complex organs found in our body. Scientists all around the world are always trying to find new information as to how this special organ works and all the affects it has on people. The brain has its own way of developing and changing as it grows, and many scientists and researchers find that as the brain grows in our teen years, there are a lot of reasons behind embarrassment and brain pruning.  Embarrassment is a feeling of self-consciousness, shame, or awkwardness caused by hormones, while brain pruning is extra neurons and synaptic connections that are eliminated in order to increase the efficiency of neuronal transmissions. Each text discusses a different relationship between behavior and the brain, which are embarrassment and pruning. Two major differences between embarrassment and brain pruning are what goes on in the brain that causes these activations and the age at which they occur.

I find that how there are so many types of memory lost in Chapter 8 pg 374. To understand the nature of memory changes, one must consider they our memory is a traditionally viewed in three differently sequential components which are Sensory Memory, Short -Term Memory (also called working memory), and Long-Term Memory. It’s funny how both sensory memory and short-term memory show virtually no waking in middle age, where as on then other hand Long-term memory declines for some people. From what I’ve read it sounds like our memory declining in middle age for us are relatively and most can be compensated for it by various cognitive strategies. In order for us to recall information we often use Schemas which are organized bodies of information stored

My best friends invited me over for pizza and a friendly game of cards and the Broca’s area, which deals with language and speech; the hippocampus, that plays a crucial part in memory; the hypothalamus, partly controlling my body’s endocrine and hormone- producing system and the occipital lobe allowing me to see all that goes on around me, all are parts of my brain which was involved during the evening of eating pizza, socializing, and playing cards with my friends.

Pruning is a gardening term which means to trim a tree or cut away a branch, when referring to the teenage brain development this is the same exact process only that the brain is a self sustaining gardner providing the service of trimming down dormant parts of the brain or bring arise of new neurological connections. A leading research who was interviewed in the video by the name of Dr. Jay Giedd supports and elaborates on this concept even further by stating, “ Those cells and connections that are used will survive and flourish. Those cells and connections that are not used will wither and die” (Frontline, 2002). Applying what the research exemplified throughout the video and comparing it to my own teenage brain development there are in fact

Does brain equal behavior? Some people have argued that they have difficulty saying it does because they find it hard to believe that our individual, tangible brain controls emotions that many consider to be intangible, such as being in love. This paper will discuss the role that the brain actually plays in love- why we are attracted to certain people, why we feel the way we do when we are around them, and whether or not this is enough to say that in the case of love, brain does equal behavior.

Human behavior has been a mystery to scientists and psychologists for years. What causes humans to act the way they do? Is it learned by experience, or inherited from prior generations? The human brain is a complex machine driven by numerous intangibles that influence our thinking process directly and indirectly.

Chapter 2 is centered on the early attempts to identify the brain’s components of emotions. Key researchers that are discussed are a Cornell neuroanatomist, James Papez, and aforementioned physician and neuroscientist Paul MacLean, who worked at Yale and the National Institutes of Mental Health. Together, this pair of researchers conducted seminal medial temporal lobe lesion experiments. The resulting idea was that the emotional brain is composed of a set of interconnected structures in the core of the brain. MacLean dubbed these structures as the “limbic system”. The function of the limbic system and it relationship to emotion was widely debated by many researchers.