The Amazing Brain :Know Your Brain

What is a ‘thought’?

A‘Thought’ an idea or opinion produced by thinking or occurring suddenly in the mind.

Where these thoughts are coming from?

Why are we thinking?

Is it possible to pause thinking while living?

The subject was always surprised me from the very begin of my life. Oh, I mean one the day when I started realizing about my thoughts.

Welcome to new series …..

The Amazing Brain

The Amazing Brain 

Talking about brain is always a complicated subject. The more and more we started learning about it, it become more and more complicated.

In this series we would rather try to explain about it in more simpler way. Like a story, so that everyone can enjoy and understand and start thinking about thoughts. 

But your participation, suggestions and feedback is very very essential for us to improve the quality of our contents. Please enjoy reading.

Do You Know ?

Our brain is faster than the fastest super computer in the world.

 It is quite faster than what we think.

Scientists believe we all carry 80 to 100 billion nerve cells or about as many as stars in the milky way.
Number of nerve cells in our brain = Number of stars in the milky way 

Illustration of Nerve cells In Brain

Human Brain Vs Super Computer

In a recent brain stimulation experiment, the super computer took more than 82,000 processors and 40 minutes to stimulate 1 sec. activities of brain.

How much data our brain process in a second?

We have about 100 billion nerve cells.

Each nerve cell is connected to a minimum of 1000 other nerve cells.

One neuron fires an average of 200 times in each second. The simple calculation is

100 Billion Neurons X 200 Fires per second X 1000 connection each =20,000,000,000,000,000 bits of info transmitted per second.

20 million billion bits of information move around your brain every second. 

That a very quick introduction to brain. We will explain each of it more scientifically in later additions. 

Now we will take you to some very interesting discussions.

Do you ever compare your child with your neighbor's  or your friend's child.

And you might have noticed a lot of difference in their abilities.

This is very interesting topic , keep reading , how the brain develops?

The Development of Brain

• Our brain begins to mature even before birth. It continues to mature throughout most of life.
•  The brain does not mature at the same rate in each individual. 
• It is important for parents and teachers to understand that the maturation of brain influences learning readiness.           
• Instructions above or below the maturity level of a child’s brain is not only inappropriate, it can also lead to behavioral problems. Inappropriate behaviors like avoidance, challenging authority, and aggression towards others can be explained by a failure to match instruction to the brain maturity level.
• The normal development of brain varies widely within the same age and the same grade. So there is no point of comparison of brain power in children. 
• Take an example of class room with children’s of same age and grade. The age for entrance into a particular grade is not necessarily linked to brain maturity for all children.
• Healthy brain likes to learn, and children learns best when they exposed to variety of ideas, experiences, skills and materials. 
• In the early years, children like to explore and learn using several sense or multiple skills at the same time. 
• Activities that pair both motor and auditory skill can encourage the development of both pathways.
• A child who has difficulty with writing and other fine motor skills benefits from lacing cards, mazes and tracing. 
• These activities actually help students develop the visual-motor areas of their brains. 
• When a child talks through a difficult visual problem, it can help him/her learn. In other cases, a child whose language skills are delayed may benefit from tasks that don't require language

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Brain Activity development 

Be aware that brain systems do not all develop at the same time or at the same rate.
A child may show advanced development in one area and be delayed in another.
 For example, a child may read early but be physically clumsy. Brain development also does not occur in a straight line.
Some skills may develop earlier than other skills.

Also, precocious ability does not necessarily last. It is possible for a child to be accelerated in reading or verbal skills in kindergarten but show average ability by third or fourth grade.

Don't assume that a child has a disability just because his/her learning is delayed. Be aware that the development of cognitive and other skills is often uneven. 

Don't assume that delays a child is showing today will get better over time. If a child does not improve his/her progress, it is important to gather more information and then refer the child for further evaluation if indicated.

Don't adopt a one-size-fits-all approach. It is required to have different skills and activities for different students within a grade. Some of this variability works because of the different life experiences of children and some works because of differences in brain maturity. But, for either reason, variety is a good thing. 

Don't place children in groups based solely on age. For some children, learning to read is a struggle. Many are not ready to learn to read until they are seven years old, while others are ready at age four. (This may be particularly true for boys.) Social maturity does not correlate with other learning skills. Both social and learning characteristics need to be addressed separately to determine appropriate placement. 

Don't judge ability based on physical appearance. It's very important not to judge children based on their physical appearance. Children who are taller and/or more physically mature may not be cognitively advanced. And children with cerebral palsy often have average to above average ability despite significant problems with motor and speech production.

The Nerve cell In Details

Concluding Remarks

Baby Genies

Now we are concluding our first part of 'The Amazing Brain'. Hope it helps to trigger some thoughts in your brain. Please do share your thoughts with us.

We are concluding with 2 Myth Busters

Myth 1: You can train certain parts of the brain to improve their functioning.

Fact: This has been an attractive and sometimes lucrative idea for many entrepreneurs.
 However, it is not possible to target a specific brain region and teach just to that part of the brain.
The brain is highly connected. Neurons in the brain learn remember and forget, but they do not do so in isolation.
 Skills need to be broken down into their component parts and these parts can be taught.
However, we do not totally understand how this learning takes place nor do we know exactly "where" in the brain that learning is stored.
Evidence from victims of stroke and head injury show that injury to the brain of one individual may not result in the same loss in the brain of another person.
 Brains are like fingerprints — although there are commonalities, there are differences that make each brain unique.

Myth 2: You are born with certain abilities and these do not change over time.

Fact: At one time, people believed that the brain developed into its full form by the age of three, and that what developed afterwards was just a matter of refinement.
In fact, we now know that the brain is plastic — it changes with experience and development. 

Evidence shows that rather than ending development at the age of 5, or even 12, brain development continues into one's twenties.
 For some adolescents, the maturation of the frontal lobes may not end until age 25. For others, frontal-lobe maturity may be reached by the age of 18 or 19.
 For this reason, some adolescents may require additional time before they are ready for college, while others are ready at an earlier age.

Hope you all enjoyed reading this. 
Please do share your suggestions and thoughts and help us to improve. 
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The Amazing Brain :Know Your Brain

8:52 AM brain, featured, life science

One gene may drive leap from single cell to multicellular life

All together now: yeasts can evolve to form snowflake-like multicellular shapes (Image: Courtesy of Jennifer Pentz, Georgia Tech)

The leap from single-celled life to multicellular creatures is easier than we ever thought. And it seems there's more than one way it can happen.

The mutation of a single gene is enough to transform single-celled brewer's yeast into a "snowflake" that evolves as a multicellular organism.

Similarly, single-celled algae quickly evolve into spherical multicellular organisms when faced with predators that eat single cells.

These findings back the emerging idea that this leap in complexity isn't the giant evolutionary hurdle it was thought to be.

At some point after life first emerged, some cells came together to form the first multicellular organism. This happened perhaps as early as 2.1 billion years ago. Others followed – multicellularity is thought to have evolved independently at least 20 times – eventually giving rise to complex life, such as humans.

But no organism is known to have made that transition in the past 200 million years, so how and why it happened is hard to study.

Special snowflake

Back in 2011, evolutionary biologists William Ratcliff and Michael Travisano at the University of Minnesota in St Paul coaxed unicellular yeast to take on a multicellular "snowflake" form by taking the fastest-settling yeast out of a culture and using it to found new cultures. And then repeating the process. Because clumps of yeast settle faster than individual cells, this effectively selected yeast that stuck together instead of separating after cell division.

The team's latest work shows that this transformation from a single to multicellular existence can be driven by a single gene calledACE2 that controls separation of daughter cells after division, Ratcliff told the 15-19 June Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago.

And because the snowflake grows in a branching, tree-like pattern, any later mutations are confined to single branches. When the original snowflake gets too large and breaks up, these mutant branches fend for themselves, allowing the value of their new mutation to be tested in the evolutionary arena.

"A single mutation creates groups that as a side effect are capable of Darwinian evolution at the multicellular level," says Ratcliff, who is now at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta.

Bigger is better

Ratcliff's team has previously also evolved multicellularity in single-celled algae calledChlamydomonas, through similar selection for rapid settling. The algal cells clumped together in amorphous blobs.

Now the feat has been repeated, but with predators thrown into the mix. A team led byMatt Herron of the University of Montana in Missoula exposed Chlamydomonas to a paramecium, a single-celled protozoan that can devour single-celled algae but not multicellular ones.

Safety in even numbers (Image: Jacob Boswell)

Sure enough, two of Herron's five experimental lines became multicellular within six months, or about 600 generations, he told the conference.

This time, instead of daughter cells sticking together in an amorphous blob as they did under selection for settling, the algae formed predation-resistant, spherical units of four, eight or 16 cells that look almost identical to related species of algae that are naturally multicellular.

"It's likely that what we've seen in the predation experiments recapitulates some of the early steps of evolution," says Herron.

Neither Ratcliff's yeast nor Herron's algae has unequivocally crossed the critical threshold to multicellularity, which would require cells to divide labour between them, says Richard Michod of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

But the experiments are an important step along that road. "They're opening up new avenues for approaching this question," he says.

One gene may drive leap from single cell to multicellular life

11:47 AM life science, medical science, new technology