Our brain, like any muscle, needs to be constantly exercised to work more efficiently. The more we understand how the brain works, the more possibilities we discover for exercising it and enhancing our reasoning, learning, and development abilities.
One of the brain study areas that has been rapidly advancing in recent years, thus gaining increasing attention, is neurolearning. The numerous conducted studies have enabled us to uncover the various functions of the brain and how its modes of operation differ from person to person.
The diverse benefits of this field of neuroscience can enhance individuals' performance in their work environment, at school, and in everyday social interactions.
Discover here what neurolearning is and how to apply its practices in your daily life.
What is Neurolearning?
This might not be a term everyone is familiar with, but in practice, it's very much a part of people's everyday lives. This branch of neuroscience, in partnership with the field of education, aims to explain how your brain functions when learning new things, seeking mechanisms that help make teaching more effective.
Thus, neurolearning is essentially considering the brain as the primary basis for the learning process in individuals, studying its functions and finding ways to stimulate specific parts of the brain so that the desired skill can be more easily developed.
Although the explanation may seem simple, the processes used are quite complex. There are many small details to consider, as learning something new always depends on synchrony among countless neural connections. Moreover, specific cognitive elements must be activated for each type of information we need to assimilate and store.
Each time you learn something new, your brain undergoes a structural reorganization, adapting the content already memorized, recalling stored responses, retrieving lived experiences, and interconnecting this data.
It's already evident that learning isn't solely reliant on effort and willpower, right? Without what experts call brain plasticity, which refers to your brain's ability to modify old knowledge and create new relationships between information, even learning the simplest things can become a challenge.
Brain Regions: What Does Each Part Process?
Given the complexity of the process of learning something new, it's no surprise that your brain divides tasks by zones. Each area of your brain is responsible for managing a specific type of knowledge. These types of knowledge are more deeply studied by Neurolearning in order to discover specific mechanisms and practices to optimize the education process.
There are four brain areas with specific responsibilities that are studied by Neurolearning:
Frontal Cortex
The cerebral cortex is that grooved part, which most people consider as the whole brain. In fact, the brain has many other parts beyond what is commonly depicted.
If the whole is the cerebral cortex, the frontal part is naturally the front portion, closest to your forehead. This part of your cerebral cortex processes immediate and concrete information, managing functions such as reasoning, critical thinking, perception, and attention.
Midbrain
This area is just below your cerebral cortex, right at the center of your skull, descending through your neck toward your spinal cord. This small portion of your brain manages your senses, including vision, smell, taste, hearing, and touch. It also controls eye movements and motor coordination.
Limbic System
It's the part deep within your brain, in the middle of everything, between the cerebral cortex and the midbrain. It's in this area that your instincts and emotions are processed, forming the connections we mentioned between what you're learning and experiences you've had. Due to this emotional-experience relationship, the limbic system also manages your memory, determining what should or shouldn't be stored.
Hippocampus
The hippocampus is actually a part of the limbic system. We've already mentioned that the limbic system, in general, plays a role in storing memories, right? Well, the primary responsible for this process within the limbic system is your hippocampus. It takes care of generating and retrieving memories, meaning it enables you to store what you've learned and access it when necessary.
How to Promote Neurolearning in Daily Life?
Learning greatly depends on the ability to retain information and new experiences. As we've seen, the main part of the brain responsible for memory is the limbic system, particularly the hippocampus. As this region is also closely tied to emotions, it's natural that learning, to some extent, is also an emotional process.
This is why one of the key recommendations of Neurolearning is to create situations for students that relate to their emotions. In this way, it's necessary to generate favorable conditions for your brain's operation to be facilitated, making the memorization of what you're learning simpler.
Of course, not everything is driven by emotion in this process. After all, there are many skills to develop, and critical thinking, reasoning, and motor coordination are located in other parts of your brain.
When designing a learning activity, it's essential to ensure an environment and tools that provide stimuli for specific connections to be made. Activities that engage multiple skills activate more areas of the brain and thus create more efficient connections to manage and memorize what's being learned.
Motor activities involving reasoning and planning, for instance, have a far greater impact than practicing these skills in separate activities.
Moreover, it's important to consider that we're social beings and that our brain also functions better in social contexts. Therefore, Neurolearning recommends that whenever possible, activities be carried out in groups to foster collaboration and discussion.
The more possibilities of solution, attempts, and hypotheses an activity generates before arriving at the final answer, the more your brain is stimulated to create new patterns and connections, resulting in more effective memorization and learning through experience.