Neuroscience: We are 'BLESSED' to learn
By understanding more about how the brain works, we can create the optimal conditions for learning – and ensure we retain what we’ve learned more effectively. Discover here why we are 'BLESSED' in our ability to learn (and some tips that come with the acronym!)
As someone that has the privilege of spending my days reading the latest neuroscience and then working out how to apply these to real life situations, I have been lucky to have developed techniques that help me learn effectively.
Many of the strategies that I use to learn have come directly from my reading, and so I would like to share some of these here.
The first thing that I’ve found really helpful is the knowledge that my brain is a learning machine that has evolved to acquire and store new information that might be useful to me.
Believe you can learn
Research has demonstrated that we store new knowledge and skills in networks of cells (neurons) in the brain.
It is not just the individual neurons that are important to learning but also the connections between them. Each of the billion neurons in your brain can make connections with as many as several thousand other neurons. Importantly, these connections are not fixed. As many as one in ten of these are lost and replaced on a daily basis.
This means that, each day, our brains have the capacity to partially rewire our neural networks in order to store new information. If you always do what you have always done, the network will remain the same and the capacity to learn will be wasted.
Since I believe I can learn, I think about what I will learn each day in order to use the capacity of my amazing brain for learning.