Excerpted from How Does the Brain Think?
Have you ever wondered how your brain creates thoughts or why something randomly popped into your head? It may seem like magic – but actually the brain is like a supercomputer inside your head that helps you think, learn and make decisions.
Imagine your brain as a busy city with lots of streets and buildings. Each part of the brain has a specific job to do, just like certain areas of a city or certain buildings serve different purposes. When you have a thought, it’s like a message traveling through the city, passing from one area to another.
The neuron is a key player in the brain – these are tiny cells that send and receive signals and messages so they can communicate with each other. Your brain has somewhere between 80 billion and 100 billion neurons. Neurons tend to group together to form neural tracts, which would be like the streets and highways in the city analogy. When you have a thought, neurons in your brain fire up and create electrical impulses. These impulses tend to travel along similar pathways and release tiny chemicals called neurotransmitters along the way.
These neurotransmitters are like the construction crew that builds the roads, making it easier for the messages to be delivered. You can imagine it as a dirt road, but as more traffic – that is, neuron signals – travel the dirt road, the road gets upgraded to a paved street. If the traffic continues, it gets upgraded to a highway.
As you learn new things and experience the world around you, these connections grow stronger. For example, when you are learning to ride a bike, you may be unsteady and find it hard to coordinate all of the different muscles along with your ability to balance. But the more you practice, the more the neurons controlling your muscles and your ability to balance fire together, which makes it much easier as you practice. Neurons are wiring together and forming neural networks.
What you repeat over and over again is what you learn. Neural networks are created and then strengthened the more times they communicate together. Scientists have a saying in this field: “Neurons that fire together wire together.” Certain thinking or behavior patterns can be chalked up to this kind of repeated synchronized activity. What are YOU continuously repeating in your Life? Good and growing, or harmful and destructive?
You are conscious of only a very small portion of the information your brain takes in. It is constantly receiving input from your senses – sights, sounds, tastes, smells and touch. The brain also stores memories, which are like files in a computer that you can access whenever you need them. Memories help shape your thoughts and influence how you see the world. If you remember a fun day at the beach, it might make you feel happy and relaxed. If you smell an apple pie, it may remind you of your grandma’s baking. These thoughts are triggered because these pleasant associations have been formed in your brain, and through repetition, strengthened over time. What thoughts are you constantly reinforcing?
Creativity is another superpower of the brain. Your brain can come up with new ideas, stories and inventions. Have you ever experienced a “eureka” moment when a brilliant idea pops into your head out of nowhere? That’s your brain’s way of connecting the dots and coming up with a solution.
Sleep is really important for your brain to process information from the day and to allow it to rest and form new connections. Eat healthy foods and exercise. Just like a car needs fuel to run smoothly, your brain needs nutrients and oxygen to function at its best and to boost your thinking power.
Keep in mind that whatever you are consuming – what you’re eating or what you’re watching, listening to or reading – has the power to influence your brain.