Question: why did you want to study the brains

Paul Matusz answered on 5 Nov 2018:

Frankly, I never liked neurons and brain parts during my biology classess. Why? Because the teachers were not explaining well why and howthey are important to us understanding how we learn, how we work, how we develop. It is during my psychology studies when I really appreciated the brain and what we can learn about learning (haha 😉 when we measure brain activity. So – there is a certain way in which the brains process objects. In a simple experiment in psychology, we can record how fast someone made a response of pressing a button to give their answer; or how accurate they were in responding. If we are texting if presenting information to remember in multiple senses is better compared to when you present it just in vision – for example, “tell me if this image of cow was presented to you before” and we add a “mooing” sound to the image of the cow. Then , if we record brain activity during this experiment, and we see that memory is better for audio-visual information than visual information, we have ways to analyse the brain activity to test if our participants benefitted from the audio-visual information because they saw the cow more easily or because the image and the sound helped to focus on the idea of a cow more easily (and so remember it better ) . I wrote a blog post on how we learn in everyday situations, like classroom, where information stimulates many of our sense – have a look https://bold.expert/learning-occurs-in-multisensory-environments/ . On that blog there are many more interesting posts about how we learn and how studying the brain is useful to understand these processes better. 🙂

So basing on what we *know* and by recording the activity of the brain during our experiments on learning, we use this knowledge and these results to limit what we are thinking is happening in our experiments. This way our theories are more accurate. That’s why I think studying the brain is so important – because they create our seeing, our attention and memory skills and so our behaviour!