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This is a short video with fun pictures that shows how our brains learn.

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You are in control of your brain and it is always capable of change and has the ability to learn new concepts, ideas, and tasks. This is called Neuroplasticity and this short video does a great job explaining how this works

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A more in depth article on neuroplasticity

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Brain Plasticity--An Overview
What is brain plasticity? Does it mean that our brains are made of plastic? Of course not. Plasticity, or neuroplasticity, describes how experiences reorganize neural pathways in the brain. Long lasting functional changes in the brain occur when we learn new things or memorize new information. These changes in neural connections are what we call neuroplasticity.
To illustrate the concept of plasticity, imagine the film of a camera. Pretend that the film represents your brain. Now imagine using the camera to take a picture of a tree. When a picture is taken, the film is exposed to new information -- that of the image of a tree. In order for the image to be retained, the film must react to the light and "change" to record the image of the tree. Similarly, in order for new knowledge to be retained in memory, changes in the brain representing the new knowledge must occur.

To illustrate plasticity in another way, imagine making an impression of a coin in a lump of clay. In order for the impression of the coin to appear in the clay, changes must occur in the clay -- the shape of the clay changes as the coin is pressed into the clay. Similarly, the neural circuitry in the brain must reorganize in response to experience or sensory stimulation.

Facts About Neuroplasticity
FACT 1: Neuroplasticity includes several different processes that take place throughout a lifetime.

Neuroplasticity does not consist of a single type of morphological change, but rather includes several different processes that occur throughout an individual's lifetime. Many types of brain cells are involved in neuroplasticity, including neurons, glia, and vascular cells.

FACT 2: Neuroplasticity has a clear age-dependent determinant.

Although plasticity occurs over an individual's lifetime, different types of plasticity dominate during certain periods of one's life and are less prevalent during other periods.

FACT 3: Neuroplasticity occurs in the brain under two primary conditions:

1. During normal brain development when the immature brain first begins to process sensory information through adulthood (developmental plasticity and plasticity of learning and memory).

2. As an adaptive mechanism to compensate for lost function and/or to maximize remaining functions in the event of brain injury.

FACT 4: The environment plays a key role in influencing plasticity.

In addition to genetic factors, the brain is shaped by the characteristics of a person's environment and by the actions of that same person.

Developmental Plasticity: Synaptic Pruning
Gopnick et al. (1999) describe neurons as growing telephone wires that communicate with one another. Following birth, the brain of a newborn is flooded with information from the baby's sense organs. This sensory information must somehow make it back to the brain where it can be processed. To do so, nerve cells must make connections with one another, transmitting the impulses to the brain. Continuing with the telephone wire analogy, like the basic telephone trunk lines strung between cities, the newborn's genes instruct the "pathway" to the correct area of the brain from a particular nerve cell. For example, nerve cells in the retina of the eye send impulses to the primary visual area in the occipital lobe of the brain and not to the area of language production (Wernicke's area) in the left posterior temporal lobe. The basic trunk lines have been established, but the specific connections from one house to another require additional signals.
Over the first few years of life, the brain grows rapidly. As each neuron matures, it sends out multiple branches (axons, which send information out, and dendrites, which take in information), increasing the number of synaptic contacts and laying the specific connections from house to house, or in the case of the brain, from neuron to neuron. At birth, each neuron in the cerebral cortex has approximately 2,500 synapses. By the time an infant is two or three years old, the number of synapses is approximately 15,000 synapses per neuron (Gopnick, et al., 1999). This amount is about twice that of the average adult brain. As we age, old connections are deleted through a process called synaptic pruning.

Synaptic pruning eliminates weaker synaptic contacts while stronger connections are kept and strengthened. Experience determines which connections will be strengthened and which will be pruned; connections that have been activated most frequently are preserved. Neurons must have a purpose to survive. Without a purpose, neurons die through a process called apoptosis in which neurons that do not receive or transmit information become damaged and die. Ineffective or weak connections are "pruned" in much the same way a gardener would prune a tree or bush, giving the plant the desired shape. It is plasticity that enables the process of developing and pruning connections, allowing the brain to adapt itself to its environment.

Plasticity of Learning and Memory
It was once believed that as we aged, the brain's networks became fixed. In the past two decades, however, an enormous amount of research has revealed that the brain never stops changing and adjusting. Learning, as defined by Tortora and Grabowski (1996), is the ability to acquire new knowledge or skills through instruction or experience. Memory is the process by which that knowledge is retained over time. The capacity of the brain to change with learning is plasticity. So how does the brain change with learning? According to Durbach (2000), there appear to be at least two types of modifications that occur in the brain with learning:

1. A change in the internal structure of the neurons, the most notable being in the area of synapses.

2. An increase in the number of synapses between neurons.

Initially, newly learned data are "stored" in short-term memory, which is a temporary ability to recall a few pieces of information. Some evidence supports the concept that short-term memory depends upon electrical and chemical events in the brain as opposed to structural changes such as the formation of new synapses. One theory of short-term memory states that memories may be caused by "reverberating" neuronal circuits -- that is, an incoming nerve impulse stimulates the first neuron which stimulates the second, and so on, with branches from the second neuron synapsing with the first. After a period of time, information may be moved into a more permanent type of memory, long-term memory, which is the result of anatomical or biochemical changes that occur in the brain (Tortora and Grabowski, 1996).
During brain repair following injury, plastic changes are geared towards maximizing function in spite of the damaged brain. In studies involving rats in which one area of the brain was damaged, brain cells surrounding the damaged area underwent changes in their function and shape that allowed them to take on the functions of the damaged cells. Although this phenomenon has not been widely studied in humans, data indicate that similar (though less effective) changes occur in human brains following injury.

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Neuroscience for Kids - Brain Plasticity

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What is brain plasticity? Does it mean that our brains are made of plastic? Of course not. Plasticity, or neuroplasticity, describes how experiences reorganize neural pathways in the brain. Long lasting functional changes in the brain occur when we learn new things or memorize new information.

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You can change your intelligence. Just like our muscles your brain needs to be worked out and challenged in order to grow!

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The optimal amount of sleep to get is 7-8 hours. Getting more or less sleep than this effects how well you think!

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Preliminary results from the world's largest sleep study have shown that people who sleep on average between 7 to 8 hours per night performed better cognitively than those who slept less, or more, than this amount.

Neuroscientists from Western University's Brain and Mind Institute released their findings today in the high-impact journal, SLEEP.

The world's largest sleep study was launched in June 2017 and within days more than 40,000 people from around the world participated in the online scientific investigation, which includes an in-depth questionnaire and a series of cognitive performance activities.

"We really wanted to capture the sleeping habits of people around the entire globe. Obviously, there have been many smaller sleep studies of people in laboratories but we wanted to find out what sleep is like in the real world," says Adrian Owen, Western's superstar researcher in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging. "People who logged in gave us a lot of information about themselves. We had a fairly extensive questionnaire and they told us things like which medications they were on, how old they were, where they were in the world and what kind of education they'd received because these are all factors that might have contributed to some of the results."

Approximately half of all participants reported typically sleeping less than 6.3 hours per night, about an hour less than the study's recommended amount. One startling revelation was that most participants who slept four hours or less performed as if they were almost nine years older.

Another surprising discovery was that sleep affected all adults equally. The amount of sleep associated with highly functional cognitive behaviour was the same for everyone (7 to 8 hours), regardless of age. Also, the impairment associated with too little, or too much, sleep did not depend on the age of the participants.

"We found that the optimum amount of sleep to keep your brain performing its best is 7 to 8 hours every night and that corresponds to what the doctors will tell you need to keep your body in tip-top shape, as well. We also found that people that slept more than that amount were equally impaired as those who slept too little," says Conor Wild, Owen Lab Research Associate and the study's lead author.

Participants' reasoning and verbal abilities were two of the actions most strongly affected by sleep while short-term memory performance was relatively unaffected. This is different than findings in most scientific studies of complete sleep deprivation and suggests that not getting enough sleep for an extended period affects your brain differently than staying up all night.

On the positive side, there was some evidence that even a single night's sleep can affect a person's ability to think. Participants who slept more than usual the night before participating in the study performed better than those who slept their usual amount or less.

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insomnia research; sleep disorder research; staying healthy; diseases and conditions; sleep disorders; insomnia; obstructive sleep apnea; disorders and syndromes

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World's largest sleep study shows too much shut-eye can be bad for your brain

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Preliminary results from the world's largest sleep study have shown that people who sleep on average between 7 to 8 hours per night performed better cognitively than those who slept less, or more, than this amount. Neuroscientists from Western University's Brain and Mind Institute released their findings today in the high-impact journal, SLEEP.

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Daytime naps have been found to help us gain and process information. These naps of course would be after school. =)

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The age-old adage "I'll sleep on it" has proven to be scientifically sound advice, according to a new study which measured changes in people's brain activity and responses before and after a nap. The findings, published in the Journal of Sleep Research, support the advice which suggests that a period of sleep may help weighing up pros and cons or gain insight before making a challenging decision.

The Medical Research Council-funded study, led by University of Bristol researchers, aimed to understand whether a short period of sleep can help us process unconscious information and how this might affect behaviour and reaction time.

The findings further reveal the benefits of a short bout of sleep on cognitive brain function and found that even during short bouts of sleep we process information that we are not consciously aware of.

While previous evidence demonstrates that sleep helps problem solving,resulting in enhanced cognition upon awaking; it was not clear whether some form of conscious mental process was required before or during sleep to aid problem solving. In this study, researchers hid information by presenting it very briefly and "masking" it -- so it was never consciously perceived -- the masked prime task. The hidden information, however, was processed at a subliminal level within the brain and the extent to which it interferes with responses to consciously perceived information was measured.

Sixteen healthy participants across a range of ages were recruited to take part in an experiment. Participants carried out two tasks -- the masked prime task and a control task where participants simply responded when they saw a red or blue square on a screen. Participants practiced the tasks and then either stayed awake or took a 90-minute nap before doing the tasks again.

Using an EEG, which records the electrical activity naturally produced in the brain, researchers measured the change in brain activity and response pre-and-post nap.

Sleep (but not wake) improved processing speed in the masked prime task -- but not in the control task -- suggesting sleep-specific improvements in processing of subconsciously presented primes.

The findings suggest that even a short bout of sleep may help improve our responses and process information. Therefore, the results here suggest a potentially sleep-dependent, task-specific enhancement of brain processing that could optimise human goal-directed behaviour.

Importantly, while it is already known that the process of acquiring knowledge and information recall, memory, is strengthened during sleep. This study suggests that information acquired during wakefulness may potentially be processed in some deeper, qualitative way during sleep

Dr LizCoulthard, Consultant Senior Lecturer in Dementia Neurology at the University of Bristol Medical School: Translational Health Sciences, said: "The findings are remarkable in that they can occur in the absence of initial intentional, conscious awareness, by processing of implicitly presented cues beneath participants' conscious awareness.

"Further research in a larger sample size is needed to compare if and how the findings differ between ages, and investigation of underlying neural mechanisms."

Paper: 'Nap-Mediated Benefit to Implicit Information ProcessingAcross Age Using an Affective Priming Paradigm' by E Coulthard et al in the Journal of Sleep Research [open access]

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sleep disorder research; insomnia research; diseases and conditions; healthy aging; sleep disorders; insomnia; obstructive sleep apnea; intelligence

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Day-time naps help us acquire information not consciously perceived, study finds: 'I'll sleep on it' proves scientifically sound advice

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The age-old adage 'I'll sleep on it' has proven to be scientifically sound advice, according to a new study which measured changes in people's brain activity and responses before and after a nap. The findings support the advice which suggests that a period of sleep may help weighing up pros and cons or gain insight before making a challenging decision.

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It is not just something that is good for your health but will also improve your learning as well as your mental health!

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While attending a three-day special education workshop, the book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, was recommended to me on the basis that it provides incontrovertible evidence that exercise can help all students-especially special education students-improve in school. At a time when recess and physical education programs are being cut for test prep, I knew this was information worth having and sharing.

Exercise Can Improve Learning

Written by Dr. John J. Ratey, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, the book explores the connection between exercise and the brain, providing strong evidence that aerobic exercise physically remodels the brain for peak performance on all fronts. Specifically, Dr. Ratey writes that exercise improves learning on three levels: "First, it optimizes your mind-set to improve alertness, attention, and motivation; second, it prepares and encourages nerve cells to bind to one another, which is the cellular basis for logging in new information; and third, it spurs the development of new nerve cells from stem cells in the hippocampus." In short, not only does exercise help the brain get ready to learn but it actually makes retaining information easier.

A suburban school district outside of Chicago is proving this point. The Naperville, Illinois district implemented an early morning exercise program called Zero Hour, which sought to determine whether working out before school gives students a boost in their reading ability and other subjects. Since introducing this program, the district has seen remarkable results in both wellness and academic performance.

Naperville's philosophy was to teach kids how to monitor and maintain their own health and fitness-a lifestyle skill with enormous long-term benefits. In fact, across the country, research shows students with higher fitness scores also have higher test scores. Physical activity has a "positive influence on memory, concentration, and classroom behavior."

Exercise Can Improve Students' Mental Health

Dr. Ratey's research also shows that exercise can be the best defense against a lot of the common mental health issues that students struggle with.

Stress

Our students face enormous stress in the classroom and in their lives, including peer pressure, work overload, and high stakes testing. Exercise controls the emotional and physical feelings of stress, and it also works at the cellular level. Physical activity is a natural way to prevent the negative consequences of stress because it can ward off the ill effects of chronic stress and actually reverse them. In addition, studies show people who add physical activity to their lives become more socially active, which boosts confidence and helps establish and maintain social connections.

Anxiety and Panic Disorders

Dr. Ratey defines anxiety as a natural reaction to a threat, but worrying when there's no real threat, to the point where one can't function normally, is an anxiety disorder. Panic is the most intense form of anxiety, and I've witnessed my students having panic attacks during tests and cooperative learning situations, or sometimes just from the general pressures of school.

Spark points out that the majority of studies show aerobic exercise significantly reduces symptoms of anxiety disorders. Through exercise, people learn to alleviate anxiety and rebuild their confidence. Dr. Ratey points out that exercise reroutes the brain's circuits, reduces muscle tension, and teaches a different outcome to an anxiety-provoking situation, ultimately setting an anxious person free from their worrisome tendencies.

Depression

Aerobic exercise is known to have a positive impact on depressive symptoms. Studies suggest that endorphins produced in the brain during exercise contribute to a general feeling of well-being. Exercise also boosts dopamine, which improves mood and jump-starts the attention span. Thirty minutes of moderate exercise a few days a week can do wonders for students who suffer from depressive moods.

ADHD

School can be an especially excruciating environment for students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) because of the need to sit still, face forward, and listen. Dr. Ratey says structured exercise-in the form of martial arts, ballet, skateboarding, or gymnastics, for example-is one of the best treatment strategies for ADHD.

The combination of challenging both the brain and body is even better than just aerobic activity alone because the technicality of those sports activates brain areas that "control balance, timing, sequencing, evaluating consequences, switching, error correction, fine motor adjustment, inhibition, and, of course, intense focus and concentration."

Read this next

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I'd highly recommend Spark to any teacher or parent interested in how exercise and the brain coincide. It will soon become clear that providing students with challenging fitness programs has numerous benefits. Starting slow, finding social support, mixing up activities, and keeping to a routine is a prescription for both brain and body health.

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Exercise and the Brain: How Fitness Impacts Learning

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While attending a three-day special education workshop, the book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain , was recommended to me on the basis that it provides incontrovertible evidence that exercise can help all students-especially special education students-improve in school.

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This is both the students and the teachers responsibility!

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Developing Control Over Attention - Having Energy to Pay Attention

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A short video on some suggested strategies to help you study and retain information.

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How to Study Effectively for School or College [Top 6 Science-Based Study Skills]

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Very interesting video that is not what it seems. Watch unitl the end and see how it relates to your life. I am not saying he is right or wrong but want you to think on it and come share your thoughts with me!

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How To Learn Anything In 30 Days | Connor Grooms | TEDxTeen

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You can learn anything you want in 30 days if you do this one thing. TEDxTeen opening music by BlackDoe Connor Grooms has built a life, and his education, by breaking limits. At only 20, Grooms is location independent, traveling and living around the world as he runs his business online, from Saigon to Barcelona to his new homebase in Medellín.