In the modern world, something is discovered, created and learned much more often than it happened before. Information pours on us in an endless stream. It seems that there is simply no place in memory for such volumes of knowledge. Professor Tatyana Chernigovskaya is convinced that the human brain can absorb much more information if there are proper learning skills.
The world has never been so complex and information rich. And the children who grow up in it are completely different children. When I was writing my Ph.D. thesis, there was a question of where to get the literature. Now the question is how to get rid of it. Every day, in any field of knowledge, dozens of good scientific articles are published that are not something to comprehend — there is no time to read.
It turns out that information is what is, what is not. You can’t take advantage of it. In this regard, it is not clear what to do with education. We can’t keep kids in school for 20 years! On the other hand, we cannot pretend that everything ended with Newton. Because after Newton there was a lot more. It turns out that we are deceiving children. Humanity already has far-reaching knowledge, and we hide it. So we don’t have to talk about everything. Somehow cut this knowledge. But how to cut, according to what principle? No one knows.
I had a critical period in my life when I thought: “I’m so fed up with everything: the Academy of Sciences, and all this. I will go to school to teach children. But I quickly came to my senses — I was frightened. I thought: there are 20 people sitting in the class, how do I know who they are? One of them might be Einstein, the second might be Mozart, the third might be Hitler. How dare I teach them? Many teachers are happily unafraid of this fact. They believe that they are sitting there, and they need to show something strictly according to the program of the pedagogical institute.
Go to Google if you forgot how to make sauce. This is not the place to look for serious information.
Maybe we should not pump so much information into children? Why would they, conditionally, know the table of logarithms? Or when Napoleon married Josephine? Google will answer in 1,5 seconds. But if we retreat to the other pole, we will have total amateurs everywhere. They will know nothing but general ideas, which is also bad. I, for one, don’t want to go to a surgeon who knows general ideas. I want to get to a specialist who knows anatomy well.
Maybe then it is necessary to teach children to extract information? For example, we often tell students, “Go to Google if you forgot how to make sauce. In general, this is not the place where serious information is sought. And we give a list of sites that we trust. It is necessary to teach metathings — where to get, where to look. Children must be taught to learn.
How to classify and properly package information?
I get articles about the brain all the time. Where to put them? On one computer, I have an «Other» folder, and on the other, I have an «Other» folder. And there, believe me, is a real dump, you can’t disassemble it. That is, I myself play a game with myself that I saved all this and someday I will read it. Someday. But most likely I will never do it.
The same thing is happening in our heads. Meanwhile, the amount of memory in the brain is gigantic — 300 years you can watch all sorts of nonsense, and still there will be enough space. But sorting it all out, and then finding, remembering is often very difficult, and sometimes impossible.
The brain remembers everything that it has passed by, that it has tasted, smelled, touched, and so on. The brain is not a sieve, nothing spills out of it. Therefore, one should not listen to bad music, one should not read bad books, one should not eat and drink all sorts of nasty things, one should not associate with bad people. It will all remain there, all this poison will lie there. You may not even be aware of its existence, but someday it will come out.
The brain is generally the most complex of systems, comparable to the universe. We don’t know anything more complicated than the brain. If this system works correctly, then it knows how to work. If we can see how she does it, maybe we can figure out how to organize society? Most of the things we do don’t enter consciousness at all. The brain itself decides everything, and this is insulting to us. That is, we have a monster living inside us, about which we say: “Our brain”, and at this time he laughs Homeric. Who is really the owner of whom — we to him or he to us?
We know that there are functional blocks in the brain — some are responsible for memory, others for languages, creativity, and so on. But in general, all areas of the brain are engaged in everything, and if a brick falls on your head, you will neither be able to speak nor create. And if you connect a tomograph to your head, you will see what is happening there. The brain of a simultaneous interpreter made a special impression on me. I don’t understand how they are still alive. The brain burns, blazes — everything works there, it explodes! This is an online job, very difficult, stressful, ahead of the curve.
Mirror systems
Giacomo Risolatti discovered mirror systems in the brain. They turn on not when you do something yourself, but when you watch someone else do it. It is the basis of any communication, any learning. It has already been proven that these systems are broken in people with autism and schizophrenia. They live in their own world, and they have no way to get out of it and look at the situation with different eyes.
Imagine you have a difficult conversation ahead of you. You understand that it will not be easy, but you need to win, you need to prepare for this conversation. And this means that you must think it over not only from your own point of view, but also from the point of view of your partner. If you can’t do that, consider yourself a loser. He told you: “This is alpha”, and you told him: “This is omega” — how long can you talk like that?
The ability to look at the situation through the eyes of another is one of the highest functions, which, apart from humans, only dolphins, higher primates and corvids, that is, ravens, have. Understanding the mind, the state of the other, and planning actions based on them provides a huge behavioral advantage.
People who started to sing, play music early, strongly push back their Alzheimer’s
We can say that there are people who are fast learners, and they will have such a picture in the brain, and there are slow learners. But the fact that a person learns quickly does not mean that he is smarter! All people are different, sorry for the triviality. Einstein was hardly taken to school. He began to speak late, thought hard. And this is Einstein. From the fact that he moves slowly, it only follows that he moves slowly, and nothing more.
Music lessons speed up and activate the brain
People who started to sing and play music early put aside their Alzheimer’s. Because music, if you start doing it at an early age, is a very intense workout. These longitudes, longitudes, stresses — they improve the quality of the neural network, make the brain more plastic.
Learning changes the brain
The brain with which we came into this world, and the one with which each of us will leave it, are completely different structures. In the one with which we end our earthly life, our personal text is written, no one else has it. This text changes every millisecond. Everything we now say or listen to changes our brain physically. The quality and quantity of neurons and their connections are changing. The size of nerve fibers and even the environment in which these neurons lie varies depending on what and how we learn.