ALL KINDS OF MINDS
Did you know that today, in 2010, we know only 20% of the brain?
And did you know that of that 20%, we only understand 10%?
Every year, to keep up to date, I ask three of the worlds leading experts within neuroscience how much we know about the brain and therefore the mind.
Their answers have been uniform and unchanged the past 3 years.
In fact, one of them thinks we have gone back to only understanding 10%, after an American research team discovered The Default Network a couple of years ago. The Default Network is ‘a network of brain regions that are active when the individual is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest’.
Basically the TDN is your soul. Apparently the American team has discovered a way of identifying the soul and its interactions with the brain, on a machine.
And that has sent our current understandings hurtling down the snakes and ladder.
On the positive, and to climb back up the mountain of understanding, scientists have now discovered that the human brain can improve with age. Of course it can and does. An older persons judgment is based on knowledge, experience and that important lack of need to prove oneself.
While the short term memory, where are my car keys and how come I forgot my dental appointment, may decline with age, it is the long term memory that remains unaffected, as does often the persons vocabulary, emotional intelligence and social skills.
Although we are still at the foot of that ascent to greater understanding, there is a generational improvement of intelligence, which means that someone in their twenties now may be brighter than someone of the same age several decades ago.
One key factor to that improvement is the importance of exercise, both physical and mental. Despite that, I can safely say that no amount of endorphin release will entice me to do another marathon again. My 4.36 at London Marathon in 1983 still haunts me.
Using the 20/10 % ratio as a no brainer guide line, it is logical to conclude that none of us know more than the other really and that therefore no one has the right to exclude anyone from a decent chance to a dignified life. In other words, we need to move the current restrictive norms, set with even less of an understanding of the brain, to include all kinds of minds.
The American poet Emily Dickinson, who lived and died more than 120 years ago, knew it all, already then. Her poem, simply titled, The Brain, puts everything into perspective and serves (for me) as an absolute reminder of equality.
That’s it for this week from this, way-past-middle-aged, Founder of Mindroom and mother of two.
The Brain
The Brain – is wider than
The Sky
For – put them side by side
–
The one the other will
contain
With ease – and You –
beside
Emily Dickinson 1830 – 1886
