Uncategorized Archives - The Brain Bunch

28Jul2021

Filling in the Gaps – Your Creative Brain

Our world is full of colors and creative interpretations of life. Whether it’s perspective on artwork, mathematics, or even simple daily objects – our brain constantly uses its creative cognitive thinking, allowing us to view the different perspectives that are comprehensible to our brains. Let’s take a look at how this creativity in the brain develops.

Creativity isn’t a single process, with a simple mechanism. Creativity is something that changes per person. To put this into perspective, think about your version of an amazing looking cupcake. Strawberry frosting, rainbow sprinkles, and a cherry-on-top perhaps? Each person’s perspective on this cupcake would be different, because the factors that you are adding to make this cupcake look so good is none other than your very own creativity. Creativity can come from various factors, and is one of the most complicated human behaviors.

Contrary to popular belief, where various individuals believe that creativity only comes from one select part of the brain – the human brain actually does not have one single creative center. In fact, all parts that you are about to learn about all contribute to your creativity. Without one region, the rest cannot function to properly perform the creative process. Let’s start with the frontal cortex. The frontal cortex region of the brain is responsible for various processes of creative thinking, and is also known as the hub of creativity. Think about it like the base of your creative and wide-spread thinking!

Next comes the hippocampus. This region of the brain is best known for storing information and memory in a safe way, allowing you to recall most essential needs with a quicker method. According to frontiersin.org, “In the creative process, similar to remembering experiences by pulling together different parts of the experience, the hippocampus may be used in imagination to pull together ideas in ways that you have not thought of in the past.” Two other regions that contribute to your brain’s creativity include the basal ganglia, as well as the ‘white matter’. The more the well-connected and proper functioning brain, the better and more creativity you get during your day to day life!

So next time you ever need or feel your creative juices flowing throughout your brain, just remember the hard work that your brain does to keep these creative functions healthy.

Author: Vinuta Ramakrishnan

Middle SchoolThe Day-to-Day BrainUncategorized

28Jul2021

Dementia and Alzheimer’s

Most people believe that dementia is a disease but it actually is used to describe the decline of a person’s mental ability. Dementia incorporates related diseases such as Parkinson’s, vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s (most common form of dementia).

The brain is packed with around 100 billion neurons which are all interconnected, scientists call this a ‘neuron forest’. This means that it is very easy for signals to take place between nerve cells (aka neurons). When neurons are attacked or destroyed, they cause memories to fade, the inability to think properly and difficulty in expressing feelings. This can then lead to diseases such as dementia.

Neurons don’t regenerate unlike other somatic cells so Alzheimer’s (which is a disease that destroys the brain’s neurons) can affect all areas of the brain. Certain groups are more susceptible to dementia, these include people who smoke, people who have diabetes and people who have obesity. This doesn’t mean that those individuals will necessarily develop dementia but it means that they have a slightly higher risk.

There are ways to combat dementia such as sleeping well, eating healthy, reducing stress, exercising and playing challenging games such as sudoku or scrabble.

Alzheimer’s disease is thought to be caused by an abnormal protein build up in and around brain cells. Amyloid is one of the proteins involved, and deposits of it create plaques around brain cells. Tau is the other protein, and deposits of it form tangles within brain cells.

Although it’s not known exactly what causes this process to begin, scientists now know that it begins many years before symptoms appear.

As brain cells are damaged, there is a decrease in the chemical messengers (called neurotransmitters) that are involved in sending messages, or signals, between brain cells. Acetylcholine levels are notably low in the brains of individuals who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease.

Different parts of the brain diminish throughout time. Memory is frequently one of the first areas to be impaired. Different parts of the brain are affected in more rare forms of Alzheimer’s disease. Rather than memory impairments, the earliest signs may be issues with vision or language.

Author: Christina Brown

High SchoolUncategorized

28Jul2021

If Only : The Never-Ending Scene of Regret

Words and actions are something you can never retract. Try picturing this : you just walked out from your friend’s house, with your head down in disappointment and embarrassment. Your words have hurt your friend more than you’ve ever hurt anyone, and you truly didn’t mean to misuse your words like that. Your mind keeps thinking back to what you said, and you just wish that you could somehow go back in time to retract your actions. Does this sound familiar to you? If so, you’ve experienced the terrible sense of regret.

Although many people try to forget about their regrets in the past, it’s definitely not an easy task. As you continue to ponder about why your brain reacted in such a hurtful or negative manner, regrets are considered to be bad decisions that someone has taken. When you continue to fill your mind up with these negative thoughts, it is known as counterfactual thinking. According to google, “Counterfactual thinking is a concept in psychology that involves the human tendency to create possible alternatives to life events that have already occurred; something that is contrary to what actually happened.”

As obvious as it may seem, there is a clear difference between regret, and disappointment. Though it might seem rather confusing at the beginning, experiences definitely teach an individual how to act based on their decisions and situation, whether it is positive or negative.

But how would this relate to the brain, you might ask? When you have a sense of regret, regions that are sensitive to your individual emotions activate in great amounts. Specifically, the orbitofrontal cortex (an area of the prefrontal cortex) as well as the amygdala (a core fear system in the brain and body) have a greater sense of activation when you have a feeling of regret, when compared to disappointed or depressed emotions.

In addition, the sense of regret is only caused because of a bad/poor decision you might have taken. In other words, this depressing sense develops when you have two or more choices that you must choose from, and your brain gets overwhelmed during your train of thought. When your brain decides to take the more effortful option : rejecting the option that was originally given to you in your decisions. This process of overwhelming decisions in your brain involves a particular area of the basal ganglia in your brain. This region takes part in making your decisions, and plays a major role in the sense of regret.

Next time when you have various paths of decisions that you are allowed to take, remember to truly think about what you, your brain, and your heart would desire : you definitely would not want to deal with regret.

Author: Vinuta Ramakrishnan

Middle SchoolThe Day-to-Day BrainUncategorized

14Mar2021

Waking Up Your Sleepy Brain

Yawn!! You slowly open your eyes to see the bright sunlight glaring at you. Your alarm clock just woke you up from a deep sleep, giving a reminder that you have a big day ahead of you. As you wake up, you follow your routine and get started on your day. If you think this everyday activity of waking up may seem rather simple, get ready to have your mind blown with the amount of science involved behind waking up your sleepy brain!

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Middle SchoolThe Day-to-Day BrainUncategorized

2Mar2021

The Science Behind Dreams

Throughout the ages, people have pondered the significance of dreams. The Greeks and Romans were convinced that dreams had prophetic powers but it wasn’t until the end of the 19^th century that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung came up with some of the most widely-known theories to date.

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High SchoolUncategorized

1Mar2021

Our Brain Through the Ages

Throughout our extensive history, humans have evolved; minor changes in the genome of one became more widespread throughout the population over time, eventually leading to advantageous, groundbreaking changes in human structure and function. Similarly, research in neuroscience has uncovered the extent of the extensive change that the human brain has undergone; the overall trend is that it has grown larger, leading to an increase in human intelligence and capability.

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High SchoolNeuroscience AchievementsUncategorized

17Feb2021

Pants on Fire

We’ve all heard the phrase ‘Liar Liar, Pants on Fire’; it’s a common, charming phrase often
found in the children’s vernacular, used primarily when one has caught someone or suspects
someone to be lying. Maybe you’ve even used it once as a kid yourself — or adult, who am I to
say?

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Brain TricksHigh SchoolUncategorized

16Jan2021

The Brain’s Steps to Reading

The following blog is an honorable mention in the Brainy Blog Competition.

For the past 6 months most of us have been stuck indoors. Many of us have used this time to pick up new hobbies, or continue hobbies that got swept to the side due to a busy work or school schedule. Well, I fell into the latter category.

Over the past 6 months, I’ve read over seventy books! This might seem like an overkill, but I absolutely love to read.

There are many reasons why I read so much. One reason is that I enjoy conceptualizing ideas and thoughts through the eyes of different people from the words they write. Another reason is because I know that reading utilizes multiple parts of the brain and requires a degree of focus and memory to be done fluently, with full comprehension of what is being read. It is a great way to exercise the brain, similar to the way you exercise your muscles at the gym, keeping our brains active and alert.

An article published by Harvard University called “Reading and the Brain,” by Scott Edwards breaks down the process of learning to read that starts from the time that we’re born. Edwards described how babies start processing sounds and developing phonological skills, the ability to discern the sounds of a language, as they grow into toddlers. He described how the act of reading requires the brain to recognize words, recall the meaning of those words, understand the context of those words in a sentence, put the ideas formed by those sentences in a paragraph, and comprehend the information given by those paragraphs into a story or narrative. These many many steps in the reading process are why reading takes several years of practice to be done fluently and is a definitive way to work your brain.

Many of these steps require different parts of the brain. Scientific American published an article called “The Reading Brain,” outlining the functions of different parts of the brain in regards to reading and language. Tanja Kassuba and Sabine Kastner, the authors of this article, described the occipital, temporal, and parietal lobe in the brain’s left hemisphere as parts of the brain that contain a person’s wordbox. The wordbox was defined in this article as the part of the brain that connects the brain’s visual system and language regions. This section of the brain takes the shapes and lines that form words from our brain’s visual system and delivers them to the brain’s language regions, where those shapes become words with a given meaning that can be interpreted.

As we read, our brains connect our memories and experiences to the ideas set in each sentence, using them as a foundation to put together a scene in our heads. It’s amazing how every language we learn requires so many parts of the brain to function. This is a great example of how many different parts of the brain work in tandem. So whenever we read, our brain comes alive with the various signals that are working together to interpret the lines and shapes we see and give them a meaning, a life, and a story.

Author: Rebecca-Renee Lorente

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