Learning, Memory & Brain Health Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Learning and Memory are connected to how we engage our senses in the world around us because our brain is beautifully wired to learn through our eyes, our ears, our hands, our taste, and our heart. Our brain learns through our senses because when we see, hear, taste, touch, or smell something, we create neural connections – we tell two brain cells to “connect”, to “talk”. The more these brain cells link together, we create a neural pathway. Soon, these links turn into chains and chains turn into networks and we have created new memories, new habits, and new beliefs. We use our senses to interpret and study the world around us and these sensory experiences become small neural connections that lead to memory and understanding. We have short-term, long-term, and working memory that function differently in our brains to help us focus, remember, and commit to learning new skills. Today, we will take a look at how we can use our senses to learn new things with just a little bit of effort. At first learning can seem hard or challenging, but by simply engaging our senses we create memories that link together new and old memories and soon become crystallized as a neural pathway that learns something new. For instance, if you broke your writing hand, you could learn with your non-dominant hand how to write because our brain’s are neuro plastic. We are learning that neurogenesis means that we “birth” new connections by committing our senses to new experiences. In fact, our thoughts and our emotions determine how important something is and then we create neural connections that lead to networks, that connects to prior knowledge, that creates a new skill. This means that when we label something as important, we are telling our brain to FOCUS, ACTIVATE MY SENSES, LINK MEMORIES, BUILD NEW SKILLS. We will discuss this and more with learning expert Jennifer Price.