BEAUTIFUL BRAINS CONNECT BETTER
How much brain do you need to have a mind? How many neurons does it take to operate machinery? How and why do our brains interact with beauty? And why does art make our brains superior? And how can we feed and nurture our brains to make them serve us better?
These are the kinds of questions being asked and studied by today’s leading edge scientists. Advances in neuroscience, nutrition science, and psychology, are proliferating, as advances in knowledge and technology piggyback on top of each other, intelligently following Newton’s “shoulders of giants” principles.
Today, and for this coming week, BeautifulNow will focus on beautiful brains, as we explore them through the lenses of mind/body, art/design, nature/science, food/drink, place/time, and soul/impact.
There are four key components of beautiful brains:
Nutrition:
Recent animal, epidemiological, and clinical studies have explored the impact of diet on brain health and performance. For example, DHA, the omega-3 fatty acid, found in fatty fish and other fatty proteins, is a key in supporting brain health throughout our lives.
Physical Activity:
Of course, it is logical that a fit body helps to support a fit brain. Physical activity not only keeps things like fat and cholesterol in check, but it improves your brain chemistry and electrical operations. Blood flow, for example, encourages the the growth of new neural connections.
Mental Activity:
Research, conducted over the past few years, has largely indicated that keeping your brain active as you age, keeps your thinking sharp and strong. For example, exercising a specific cognitive function, improves that function.
Social Connection:
Evidence supports that having a rich social network can not only expand the brain and make one smarter, but can also reduce stress and depression.
All four elements come together to make limitless minds out of our 3-pound brains. It is all about chemistry and connectivity.
Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks, is the latest short film and accompanying TED book by Webby founder, Tiffany Shlain, of the Moxie Institute. It explores a concept called "neuroplasticity," which describes how our behavior, experiences, and environment can alter the neural pathways and synapses in our brains, thereby changing them, continuously, throughout our lives.
Video: Connected the Film
Equally fascinating, is how Shlain compares the neuroplasticity of brains with that of the Internet. She describes how the Internet is like a global brain. And it is rapidly evolving and expanding, much in the same way a child’s brain develops.
Shlain’s brain has been focused on how human brains work since she was a child. “My dad was a surgeon,” she explains. “He came to a parent career day at my school with a human brain in a bucket. Guess I’ve been fascinated with the brain ever since.”
This week, Shlain was one of 100 leading edge thinkers included in, what was, arguably, the most intelligent flight in history. UnGrounded, the first-ever innovation-lab-in-the-sky, was fueled through a partnership, including British Airways, Decide Now Act (DNA), and the United Nations. A BA plane, packed with these exceptional brains, took off from Silicon Valley and flew to London to attend the DNA Summit, a global social change conference. During the flight, Shlain, and her fellow creative brainiacs, brainstormed about how to best face challenges that will affect our next generation of global innovators, namely the misalignment of available talent and available opportunity.
Shlain’s curiosity about connectivity and the brain was beautifully expressed in her 2011 award-winning documentary film, Connected, which began to explore how the the linked pages of the Web mimic the neural connections in the brain, as well as how our increasingly connected society has developed, what she calls, “interdependence.”
Using cutting-edge research from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University and the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at University of Washington, along with wisdom gathered from interviews with leading thinkers such as Internet co-founder, Vint Cerf, and best-selling book authors, Howard Rheingold and Steven Berlin Johnson, Shlain makes the case that we can nurture and strengthen both our collective and individual brain power, by sharing lessons we are now learning about how both neurons and networks develop.
Our human brains are composed of about 100 billion neurons. The key difference between a child’s brain and an adult’s, is that an infant begins with very few connections between these neurons, while an adult’s brain contains the sum of hundreds of trillions of connections made through the process of living life and learning. When the Internet was born, it had a negligible number of links, whereas today, as a result of billions of people clicking around on over 650 million websites, and over a trillion pages and even more Google searches, the number of connections is too mind-boggling for our evolving brains to fully grasp.
Photo: Courtesy of Lincoln Research Blog
While comparisons between the brain and the Internet have been made before, Shlain, delves more deeply into biology and child development to make her case. And she presents a groundbreaking proposition: We can all be a whole lot smarter and more effective if we broaden the reach of digital media to include the two-thirds of the global population who still do not have access to the Internet. In essence, she advocates growing our global brain by adding another 2.4 billion human brains to the mix.
So what can we do now, to optimize our own brains’ connectivity? An obvious choice is to expand our touchpoints with an ever widening diversity of new learning, activities, and experiences. Everything from meeting new people, to going new places, to trying new things exponentially increases our neural connections. Even the most mundane, or even bad things improve us. Writing bad poetry, as Garth Sundem suggests in his book "Brain Candy: Science, Paradoxes, Puzzles, Logic, and Illogic to Nourish Your Neurons"
Beyond growing the capacity and improving the flow in our brains, how can we improve the higher levels of our brainpower? We can make better choices about what we read and experience, both online and in the physical world. Imagine if we add beauty to the criteria of what we include in our quest. TEDx Orange Coast 2013 will explore Beautiful Minds from around the world, and we can’t wait to unwrap their treasures. In the meantime, we can reshape, not only our brains, but our world as a whole, just by paying more attention to beautiful things happening in the world today. Good thing you’re here right now, at BeautifulNow.
