DailyDirt: Stop Filling Your Brain With Nonsense

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

You are what you eat, and your brain reflects what you've taught it. It shouldn't be too surprising that our brains change based on what we do with them. There's some interesting science behind why you never forget how to ride a bike, and here are a few more examples of lessons our brains seem to keep forever.

• Being bilingual was once considered to be detrimental to cognitive processes, but more studies are finding evidence that bilingualism can enhance certain mental skills. Bilingual people appear to be better than monolinguals at monitoring their environment more keenly, noticing changes that monolinguals miss out on. [url]
• Children who learn how to play a musical instrument have detectable differences how in their brain responds when listening to complex sounds (even years after they've stopped playing). Some researchers claim to be able to tell whether a person has ever played an instrument only by looking at his/her brain scans. [url]
• Karate experts can deliver blows with much greater force than might be expected by simply measuring their muscle strength, and measured brain structure differences seem to explain that years of training help the cerebellum to coordinate muscle movements and deliver more forceful punches. Now let's see some brain scans for gamers who are good at QWOP.... [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: bilingual, brain, cerebellum, cognitive processes, karate, music, qwop