The Connection of the Mind and Body in Learning
Learning is a person acquiring new knowledge or skills through studying or being taught. How does this happen? Where does this learning take place? Most people assume all learning takes place in the brain, those people aren’t wrong, but they are not entirely right either. Learning is a complicated topic that requires the entire body to be looked at in order to get the slightest understanding of how it works.
The information center, or as more commonly referred to as the brain is where information acquired by day to day living is stored. If the brain is part of a person and not a computer chip, then how does it store information? The brain is made of billions of cells. These cells are called neurons and each neuron contains hundreds of thousands of receptors. Information transferred between neurons is done electrically through chemical neurotransmitters. The point where communication occurs is called the synapse. Neurons that fire together wire together. That’s the basis of how we learn. This also helps explain muscle memory and how doing something over and over makes it seem almost second nature. Humans make new, functional brain cells daily from birth to death. In fact, it's our ability to generate new brain cells that accounts for the brain's plasticity--its ability to continue to learn and update its database. (Weiss, n.d.)
The heart produces the strongest electrical signal in the body - - 60 percent stronger that the electrical output of the brain. (Weiss, n.d.) Like the brain the heart transfers information using electrical signals, in fact the whole body does through the central nervous system. The heart produces these electrical signals to be used throughout the body. It ...
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...the learner needs a goal for the information, what they want to do with it. If the learner prioritizes the information as important then they will think about it more. A lot of times information is learned and just forgotten because the learner had no use or desire to keep the information, but if the learner needs the information and thinks about it every day then there is a higher probability that the learner will have actually memorized it.
The body is an amazing thing. Connections reach from the brain to the toes and something learned on the toe can be used in the mind. The heart is the power plant for the body and learning couldn’t take place without it, learning couldn’t take place if any of these parts weren’t there. For all the amazing things the body, heart and brain do to help humans learn it is always up to the person if and how they are going to learn.
How does the left brain and the right brain impact learning? It’s simple, it works together to get an equal connection through the corpus callosum to function our bodies . The brain is a wonderful organ. It’s the motherboard in our bodies, it organizes everything. It controls our thoughts, our actions and our commands. In this paper, I will be talking about how the brain impacts learning from both side if it and the functions each side has to offer.
brain is a very complex part of the body that has everything to do with daily life and the ability to learn. As many people do not understand there are two parts of the brain and each works completely different in how one will learn and retain information. Why is the brain such a complex system and has the ability to adapt to every situation. We are going to be looking at the Left and Right side of the Brain and how each hemisphere works from the time you are a child and starting to receive information and the brain as a whole. We will also be looking into the Right side of the brain and how it learns faster as the Left side retains information. There has been a lot of research and case studies on the brain and how different people from different back grounds learn based on ethnic groups such as the American Indians and how they learn different with their brain.
Some would choose to declare that every human being is both a body and a mind. Both being gelled together until death, than having the mind go on to exist and the body being lifeless. A person lives throughout two collateral histories, one having to do with what happens to the body and in it, and the other being what happens in and to the mind. What happens to the body is public and what happens to the mind is private. The events which reply to the body consist of the physical world, and the events of the mind consist of the mental world.
Human beings are thought of as a combination of mind and body, and it is assumed that there is a union between them. Although the mind and body may or may not correspond and interact with each other, it is scientifically unclear whether it is true that they both affect each other. René Descartes, a famous French philosopher who gave grand contributions to the mind body problem, viewed the mind as distinct from matter, and so laid the groundwork on the controversy for interactionism, which dictated the mind and body were separate. Furthermore, the different sectors of the medical field and dualistic theories propose that the mind and the body are relatively distinct.
The nature of mind and body has been debated constantly, but the answer has always been present in our own minds. In Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, two extremely different characters, Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay, are presented, and much quarreling has arisen over their being representative of the clash of the mind and the body, and if so, which is which. Sydney Carton is symbolic of the mind and Charles Darnay of the body. The mind, Carton, and the body, Darnay, are one being who react to situations adversely; but where the body is physical, the mind is philosophical, and the mind gives life to the body.
The brain has many functions in which it helps process and understands information. One aspect of the brain is its memory. Memory is there so information can be used to understand what is happening around someone. The function of memory is somewhat of an enigma to many scientists. How does the brain store and retrieve such information and at such high speeds? Although it is hard to conceive the actual machine working behind memory scientist have been able to figure out the physiology behind this process. The brain is composed of millions of neurons. Communication between these neurons is by using nerve impulses from the axon of one neuron to the dendrites of another. This is called a synapse. All impulses are transmitted by a chemical substance, which is called a neurotransmitter. Scientists have not been able to explain the actual processes that occur within memory. They cannot explain why people can remember something's and not other or why some learning strategies are better then others. It turns into more of a guessing game using analogies to explain what happens. Memory has been compared to the way " we rummage our house for a lost object." That is the way the brain works in terms of memory. The confusing part is how one can store it retrieving it and even use it to decipher harder more complex problems. In one early theory memory is broken down into two areas. These areas are primary memory and secondary memory. Primary memory is said to not have to be retrieved. It was never lost and it is what is seen in present time. Secondary memory is a place where everything can be stored, but the difference is secondary memory has to be retrieved and cannot be used like primary me...
In the article, “The Critical Importance of Retrieval For Learning” the researchers were studying human learning and memory by presenting people with information to be learned in a study period and testing them on the information that they were told to learn in order to see what they were able to retain. They also pointed out that retrieval of information in a test, is considered a neutral event because it does not produce learning. Researchers were trying to find a correlation between the speed of something being learned and the rate at which it is forgotten
In everyday life it appears that the body is overlooked in its relation to the mind. This notion of body and mind separation is not something that necessarily sits well with people. The debate can sit on either scientific knowledge or religious beliefs. Currently this is what we deal with when this sort of debate occurs. With the various belief structures prevalent in humans we can’t assume argument is stronger than another.
Cognition refers to the process required for acquiring and comprehending of knowledge, this involves the use of high-functioning parts of the brain such as memory, perception, recall and attention. As speculated by cognitive psychologists, scientists and approaches, the process of cognition is defined by an interface between our internal learning processes and sensory processes, which can be also referred to as top-down and bottoms up processing. . These processes occur consciously and unconsciously and help us as individuals to function. Memory plays a big role in cognition and is described as our ability to learn new experiences as well as recall and retain past occurrences (Webster 1992), it is required for everyday learning, thinking and recalling of information in the mind, as without memory we would be learning things anew every day, even though we carry out the same routines daily. Therefore, our experiences turn into memories and are stored in our minds, but how does this process work?
The mind has an incredible power. We see it as we go through our everyday activities, constantly displaying the wonders of logic, thought, memory and creativity. Yet, can the mind be more powerful than we know? Is it possible to reduce or even eliminate pain, illness and disease by using the natural powers it possesses? Can the mind heal?
...nd getting the information when necessary. A significant thought is information processing, which takes place in a sequence of steps. The information processing theorist’s method of learning is primarily by way of the study of memory.
Overview This paper will discuss the mind-body connection and its relevance to health care professionals and to the public. It will explore the history of the mind-body connection, as well as state research that has been done on the subject. The reader will gain an understanding of the various techniques used in mind-body therapy, as well as their effectiveness. What is the Mind-Body Connection?
The Theory of Mind-Body Dualism is the view that there are two different kinds of things or substances that make up human beings: a physical body and a non-physical mind or soul. “Many dualist believe that a materialistic account of the mind is insufficient to explain everything we want to about the nature of mind and that the mind can be ‘embodied’ or ‘disembodied’” (Mind Body Dualism 1 Notes). Two famous arguments that breaks down dualism a little is The Argument from Conceivability says that the mind can exist without a body like a “disembodied mind” and the body cannot exist without a mind. And The Argument from Divisibility saying the mind cannot be identified with body because the body is divisible while the mind is indivisible.
Even though we all know that we cannot exist without oxygen, most of us do not realize how important the amount of oxygen is to our heart rhythm and our heart rate. When we are anxious and worried due to physical, emotional or spiritual pain and stress, we tend to breathe more quickly and shallowly than when we are relaxed. Our heart rate variance becomes super chaotic and incoherent, affecting the quality of our brain function.[]
One of my favorite quotes from Stacey Green states, that if we don’t make learning relevant to our students, then they just learn the answer from the test and forget when it is done. (Vaques, Sneider and Comer page 2) When students learn because of memorization and are not engaged and interested in what is taught, the information becomes a victim of your short term memory, where as when it is