This is the fourth of a 4-part series covering Dr. Taylor’s conversation with Robin Phillips about the brain. To read the other posts in this series, click here.

Robin Phillips: Can I just share a few more ingredients that go into a healthy brain?

Graham Taylor: Go ahead.

RP: Another element that should be absolutely front and center of any discussion of brain fitness is intellectual curiosity and imagination. These are really two separate skills but since they are closely related I find it useful to discuss them under the same rubric.

When I used to teach high school history, I often found myself puzzled why some students would diligently take notes about all the different historical figures I discussed in class but then as soon as the final test was over they would throw away a year’s worth of notes. Why was it that some students were genuinely interested in the material while others didn’t care and only learned for the test? We could probably think of lots of different reasons for this, but one important factor seemed to be the total lack of intellectual curiosity in some students. Continue reading →

This is the second of a 4-part series covering Dr. Taylor’s conversation with Robin Phillips about the brain. To read the other posts in this series, click here.

Graham Taylor: What would be some other examples of what you are calling ‘brain fitness skills’?

Robin Phillips: Another brain fitness skill—and this is one that I feel very strongly about—is the ability to create schemas. In a world where all of us increasingly have access to the same information, the successful people will increasingly be those who can connect the various fields of knowledge and create frameworks for integrating different ideas, fields and facts. All of our minds do this naturally to some extent since the ability to create schemas is one of the most fundamental ways the human brain organizes the vast array of data stored in our long-term memories. You see…

GT: Sorry to interrupt you Robin, but can you explain for our readers what exactly a schema actually is?

RP: Oh, sorry. Yes, the brain’s long-term memory stores information in schematic structures that provide a framework by which we simplify and find meaning in what would otherwise be a vast warehouse of disconnected facts and memories. Schemas are the networks of associations by which the brain organizing everything into meaningful patterns.  The brain often does this when we sleep, which is why sometimes the things we find confusing make more sense in the morning after a good night’s sleep.

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Have you ever had so many windows open on your computer at once that it caused the computer to freeze? It happens on my computer all the time.

The solution, of course, is to close things down. To preserve your computer’s processing power, you sometimes need to prioritize the programs that are the most important to have running.

The human brain is like that as well. Psychologists sometimes use the term “cognitive load” to describe the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory at any one time. If a person has too high of a cognitive load—that is, if the person is multitasking or if their short-term memory is focused on too many things at once—then the brain will work below peak capacity and may even freeze up.
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