You are reading this book because you want to become a better learner. Well, then, congratulations. You already possess the most important attribute that will help you at it: your interest. Being interested is the first step to sustaining the impetus to adopt the systems and strategies suggested here. As long as you remain interested, no drawback or obstacle can prevent you from walking the downtrodden path towards the objective of becoming a better learner.
Interest gives birth to motivation and persistence. Your interest will push you to take the hard road instead. You may have noticed that in this book, most of the discussions were centered on almost everything about the brain, the theories, old assumptions, the latest findings, and the continuing body of studies that neuroscientists, psychologists and social science researchers relentlessly pursue.
The brain is a physical thing. It could have been simple if it were not for the fact that the brain is you. If your body is all intact and breathing, but you’re considered to be brain-dead, then there’s not only the loss of mobility but the loss of communication, associations, and all the components of living.
You are no longer the person that is in this world, the one that is thinking and feeling. Your heart may keep your body physically alive, but without the brain, then there’s no consciousness, and when there is no consciousness, there’s only nothing. The “you” is no longer a being.
Despite the fact that much of our knowledge about the brain has been growing and much of its complexities unfolded and unraveled, there are still several puzzles that continue to perplex the minds of the curious. Scientists have come to understand the neurons, perceived the electrical signals and dissected every cell and tissues in the brain.
They came to know which regions of the brains are activated when we speak, when we store information, when we learn something new, when we feel anger, grief, happiness, excitement, so on and so forth.
But there are still some things that we can’t quite yet explain in detail. How do we study and dissect these emotions and meanings that we associate with our sensory perceptions? How can we objectively study emotions and thoughts? More importantly, what are the components in the brain that are responsible for invisible forces such as motivation, will, and all the other meanings and emotions that we feel and think? What is it behind the brain? What is consciousness? Is there a brain behind the brain?
Because of the growing body of new discoveries that have been unearthed about the brain, certain individuals in the scientific community are almost always, or perhaps absolutely, convinced that the brain shapes us.
They say it with such conviction that it’s almost like a religion. We are the master of our soul and the captain of our ship, but the makeup of our brain seems to have a much larger influence on the choices and decisions that we make. We are controlled by the unconscious parts of the brain, when we move, when we do something out of instinct, from our first baby cry and until we grow old enough to open our mouth to speak mama.
Science tells us that all these are automatic mechanisms that our body does out of conscious efforts. A classic example of this our-brain-shapes-us theory is a finding in a 1970 study where men ranked women with dilated eyes as the most attractive. Their conscious brain did not notice that the woman has dilated eyes, and yet all of them chose the same woman. The conclusion made was that unconsciously, the unconscious part of the male brain knows that dilated eyes are a sign of sexual readiness.
Well then, that makes sense. If everything that we think we choose is in fact dictated by our brains, then this free will that we thought of as invisible seems to have a little role in how we shape our life after all.
Think it over again. There are anecdotes that even science consider about people who managed to treat their brain injuries by their determination, even inborn disorders that seemed permanent. They are living proof of what science calls neuroplasticity, which science itself has discovered.
So what was the force behind that ability of individuals to get past the barriers of their physical makeup? Is it the chemicals and electrical charges and other activities that happen in the brain? Or is it the will?