Cognition

10. Cognition

Brain Science:

We now are going to add all these synapse, dendrites, Neurons, networks, pathways and whatever else happens in the brain together to form cognition. Cognition is a term referring to the mental process involved in gaining knowledge and comprehension. Some of the many different cognitive processes include thinking, knowing, remembering, judging and problem solving.

Maybe you have heard the expression about a person’s brain.… “He is not firing on all four cylinders” … meaning he /she was not capable of thinking. The correct statement would be… “He is not firing on all four trillion synapses.”

 During the cognitive process your brain literally lights up with flashes of networks and pathways firing almost simultaneously to perform specific functions. These processes include attention, language, learning, memory, perception, and thought. Your healthy brain looks like this:  

Suffice it to say, your brain is in a constant state of change. Cognitive processes affect every aspect of life. Every day your cognitive processes change: Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

Brain facts:

    •    Consciousness turns out to consist of a flood of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome, after the fact, and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

    •    Your brain has two hemispheres. Each sphere operates simultaneously. Even though they physically appear to be identical they are not. The hemispheres constantly share information back and forth. Each side shares and comparing events through pathway action between hippocampus, and  memory in the cortex.

    •    In 1981 Dr. Roger Sperry won a Nobel Prize for showing that the two spheres of the brain are not copies of each other, but actually perform different duties.

    •    Contrary to what you might have been taught in the past, your brains ‘two sides –right and left- are intricately codependent. Psychologists have used the idea of differences of the two hemispheres to conclude that you predominately think from one side our the other. They further concluded that the dominate side determined your personality type. But brain scanning technology has revealed that the brain's two hemispheres most often work together intricately. So your personality is much more complex than a left or right.

So What:

·         So despite what you have been told, you are not left brained or right brained. You are totally unique. You have millions, billions and trillions of neuro parts fighting it out everyday to be you. Every day you can change what you think and therefore everyday it is possible to be a different person. Therefore, with a healthy brain, we can be all we want to be. We just have to convince the millions and trillions of things in our mind that we want to. It ain’t easy but we can do it.

·         Before we get into cognitive decline, we next are going to look at how someone’s brain repaired itself in 1848.