The Brain That Changes Itself

[SailorMom]

I'm current;y halfway through the book - excellent.

I highly recommend it to everyone here.....

 

http://www.amazon.com/Brain-That-Changes-Itself-Frontiers/dp/0143113100/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1298474481&sr=8-1

[Tiramisu]

I'm current;y halfway through the book - excellent.

I highly recommend it to everyone here.....

 

http://www.amazon.com/Brain-That-Changes-Itself-Frontiers/dp/0143113100/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1298474481&sr=8-1

 

Thanks for this suggestion. I just requested it from my library.:)

 

I can't wait to see my family's reaction to me reading another book about brains.:lol:

[peacefully]

I just placed my library request too. Thanks for the recommendation! :D

 

Kelly

[Tiramisu]

I just placed my library request too. Thanks for the recommendation! :D

 

Kelly

 

There must be something about the name Kelly (or Kelli) and an interest in brains.:)

[merry gardens]

Thanks for this suggestion. I just requested it from my library.:)

 

I can't wait to see my family's reaction to me reading another book about brains.:lol:

:lol: LOL! But my name is Mary, not Kelly.

[ElizabethB]

It was interesting.

 

You might also enjoy "The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force."

 

I actually found this one even more interesting, but I read it first, and many of the topics overlapped, so that might be part of it.

[Nature]

That looks like a great book. I requested one from the library, but it looks like a long time before I’ll get it. I’d love it if you could post some highlights from the book.

[Misty]

I can't wait to see my family's reaction to me reading another book about brains.:lol:

 

LOL.. I started telling my daughter something I had read about brains the other day and she says, "Why is that all you read about? That's something only a nerd would do." :lol:

[ElizabethB]

One interesting quote from "The Brain That Changes Itself," from page 41:

 

The irony of this new discovery is that for hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children’s brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened brain functions. Up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then in the 1960s educators dropped the traditional exercises from the curriculum because they were too rigid, boring, and “not relevant.†But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brainpower unfamiliar to us now. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 the debaters would comfortably speak for an hour or more without notes, in extended memorized paragraphs; today many of the most learned among us, raised in our most elite schools since the 1960s, prefer the omnipresent PowerPoint presentation-the ultimate compensation for a weak premotor cortex.