For today’s class, you read two chapters from John Medina’s Brain Rules: “Vision” and “Music.” Post your summary of these two chapters as a single comment to this blog post before Monday, November 2.
16 thoughts on “Beginning of Class Writing: John Medina’s Brain Rules, “Vision” and “Music””
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Being nearsighted is the hardest challenge in my life. Without my glasses I can barely see, meaning, I can’t see if a bus is coming, see someone calling me a block away, or even see the board in class unless I’m in front. Vision is probably one of the most important sense someone can have. The mind however controls what a person is really seeing. According to John Medina Brain Rules vision chapter we are not 100% seeing the actuality of the real world, but what the mind thinks the real world is. If this was not true there wouldn’t be words such as hallucinations existing. Everybody mind have their own visual representation of the outside world which shapes who we are. For some their visual representation is about 95% true of what a person really seeing, but never 100%, or to some there visual representation is way below standards seeing things that is really not there. The people that is below standards usually start to hallucinate see things such as a ghost, a dead person, or an animal. This is when your mind have been damage or have a mental deficiency making a person think that there are things that is really not there although the eyes is seeing it not there. One disorder that causes that is the Charles Bonnet syndrome. People who suffer from that frequently see at a dinner table their family members even when they are not truly there. Visual memory also play a key role. The combination of vision and memory helps a person know dangers and things to stay away from. This is important to mostly babies and young children because for example if a baby see a pointy object and then get hurt by it , then it will taking in that sight of the pointy object and know to stay away from it . I’ve heard that the best music to listen to is classical music. After hearing that all I listen to when studying was classical music, and piano covers. To me classical music helped me studying better. In John Medina Brain Rules music chapter it is said that although music does not improve in IQ level it do improve in academics. Because musicians are able to see the change in pitch or pattern of a sound they are able to do better in test scores then non-musicians. They are able to pay attention better, maybe that’s why females like musicians more. Improvement in skill using music goes far deeper than actually listening to music. When study show improvement in skills by using music, they don’t mean putting on headphones, and listening to song but actually playing an instrument or being a true musician.
For both the vision chapter and the music chapter, they both talk about how they help improve brain skills. In the visual chapter it is said that most of us people are better at seeing thing then hearing it being spoken to verbally. Medina stated that that our brains are better at remembering pictures than listening someone speak. Picture are worth thousands of words just by looking at it and remembering it. Vision is said to be the dominant sense. It takes up to half of the brains resources. What we see is what the brain wants us to see. On the other hand, in the music chapter, when people listen to music, it is said that it helps improve intellectual skills in many different things. Music is like an energy booster. When I work out I listening to music that has a lot of adrenaline and keeps me going, not something that makes me loose focus and makes me tired. A study I found interesting was how music has created and affect on children, infants, adults and teenagers.
In John medina’s “Brain Rules” Vision and Music chapters, Medina talks about how both your sense of sight and your sense of sound can influence the way we learn and the benefits they has for your brain. According to the vision chapter John states that “vision is by far our most dominant sense, taking up half of our brain’s resources. However even though all of that energy and resources go towards helping your sight, not everything you see is going to be clear. According to John Medina vision isn’t always 100% accurate, even though you see with your eyes your, mind controls what a person really perceives. Everyone has their own visual representation of the world which can shape what they learn and experience. Memory can also play a main role, the combination of vision and memory helps a person to remember dangerous situations and to stay away from. For example if a someone sees an sharp object and then get cut by it, then the next time they see a sharp object they know to stay away from it. According to the “Brain Rules” music chapter, it is said that although music does not improve in IQ level it can improve in academics. John also explains that music (more specifically classical music) can help people with your able to study; this is because musicians are able to see the change in pitch or pattern of a sound they are able to do better in test scores then non-musicians.
John Medina’s chapter on music talks about the effects music has on the brain. He analyzes some theories that were initially thought of common knowledge and disproves some while he proves others. One of these theories is that listening to Mozart ai in learning. He gives statistical evidence in the form of “r” values. The “r” values are what mathematicians and scientist use to gauge how well things are related. They range for -1 to 1 where the better things are related the closer they are to 1. Medina showed that the relation between music and math’s “r” value was .11 and the relation between music and english was .16. These “r” values are positive, yes, but doesn’t really have any significant impact to the scores. However, Medina does say that those who study music are better performers in school than those who just listen to is. He states that musicians perform better because they are trained to pick up on slight variations on words and sights that others cannot readily spot. Many thought that just by listening to music you aid in your educational development but it turns out, based on Medina, that the real key it to actually play music.
Every individual in the world is fortunate enough to have their vision. We don’t see with our eyes, we see with our brain. Everything we see is a hallucination, even at this every moment, this is because our brain actually likes to makes things up. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because our eyes are meant to be like this way. Our vision is very important that its trump our other senses due to the fact we learn better at looking at pictures, than we learn when we write or hear something. Our vision is so dominant that it takes up half our brain resource, in order for it to function correctly. That is why, when you hear the quote a “picture has a thousand word” is true. We use our vision to analyze the picture from every detail of it and what we see, we learn or remember it better. Another key component that can improve our learning ability is by listening to music. By just listening to music it boost our cognition greatly. Not only does music improves our learning ability, but it greatly improve our ear sense to listen to sound at a noisy background. This is possible from formal musical training that anybody can do. Music training aids our social cognition by being able to detect emotional information in a person speech. It also improves our social skills, by giving us the cognition to communicate to others. Both vision and listening to music can help improve our learning skills and analyzation skills.
I honestly thought that all senses were equally as important to function in our daily lives. We even discussed how smell is key for bringing back memories. According to Medina, sight, or vision, is the most important sense. It also uses the most resource from our brain. It uses, in a comparison sense, half of the brain to process its information. The info from our eyes go through a lot of steps in order for it to become sensory info. What we see goes through our retina, then to our visual cortex, and then the data from motion and color combines to what we see. We end up seeing a simulation, not a 100% reality. In the end, no matter how key we thought other senses are, if we can’t see what we’re doing, and our sight doesn’t link to what we smell or feel, that trumps all other sensory info. Moving on, we also read the Music chapter. Personally, music helps my mood and helps me focus a lot more, and up to the day I read the chapter, I thought that was some kind of placebo effect. It turns out, the benefits are real. It boosts cognitive domains. It also helps with vocabulary, memory, and sensory motor skills. Knowing this, we can find a good reason to listen to music on the train, your spare time, or even when you’re studying, in some cases.
Both our vision and the kind of music we listen to has an affect on our brains. In both the Vision and Music chapter, John Medina describes how our vision works, along with what it does to our brains. As well as describing the various affects that music has on our brains. According to the vision chapter, we do not see with our eyes, we see with our brains. It is further stated that vision dominates all the other senses of our brain. The reason for this has to do with visual processing being the dominate sense of what each of us as individuals perceive the world to be. However, what we tend to see isn’t one hundred percent accurate. The process of vision also has to endure many different steps in order to allow us to actually see. Due to the fact that vision triumphs all of the other senses of our brain, it is no wonder that most people tend to learn best from pictures and other sources of visual learning. When it comes to music according to the Music chapter, music is something that can’t be universally defined. This is because there isn’t a mutual agreement as to what music really is. All we really know is that music has a keen way of altering ones mood, and can even bring back ones memories of the past. Music can also be utilized to improve multiple intellectual skills such as vocabulary, picking out sounds in noisy environments, ones working memory, and even sensory motor skills.
Rahat Ahmed
Prof. Ellis
English
11/1/15
Vision
In this chapter called “Vision” Dr. John Medina state that “we as humans don’t see with our eyes.We see with our brain. This particular chapter really had me thinking because after reading it, I was left with a lot of questions to ask. For one I always thought that the reason why we have our eyes is so that we can see visual things through it. According to Dr. John Medina “Visual processing doesn’t just assist in the perception of our world. It dominates the perception of our world. Vision trumps all other senses. We as human are incredible at remembering pictures. We might not be as strong when it comes to remembering information but our vision is good enough remember pictures. I also think that vision Is my personal strongest sense simply because I have really good visual memory.
Music
In this chapter called “Music” Dr. John Medina state that “Music light up the human brain”. I believe music can instantly change a persons mood from good to bad in a blink of an eye. Music helps the human brain clear itself and go into a zone where everything seems at rest. I personally can’t live without music because. music has become a part of me ever since I was a kid. The only thing in the world that can cheer me up whenever I am down is simply music. Music can’t be universally defined because everyone has their own personal opinions on it. According to Dr. John Medina music improves our learning ability because.
In the “Vision” and “Music” chapter in John Medina’s Brain Rules, we are told how we interpret and how vision and music affect our brains. First off, vision plays a big role because vision triumphs over all the other senses. I say this because if we were to hear a piece of information, we would only remember 10% of it whereas if we were shown a picture of it as well, we would remember about 65% of it. By just looking at a picture, you can increase the memory by a whopping 55%. There are also many different pictures that we interpret. We would easily remember pictures but when it comes to text, we’d have a harder time. This is because text are like small pictures that we would have to interpret whereas a bigger picture is easier to interpret. Knowing this, we can make presentations more memorable by adding more pictures instead of a slide filled with text that people will most likely forget. To add on to memory, music plays a big role as well. When we listen to music, we can easily remember things and it gives us a calming sensation. To boosts our memory, hearing things over and over again can boosts our memory due to the fact that our brain is reintroduced to these things over and over again.
In this chapter John Medina talks about how vision works. He starts off by saying that we see with our brain. He then went into more detail and started to show how our visual systems don’t work like a camera. He said that seeing seems effortless, 100 percent of the time trustworthy, but that’s not the case. The process of capturing vision is not as simple as it seem, it is a very complicated process that only takes fraction of a second to happen. That’s thanks to our brain and how fast it could process information. Our eye only capture the vision, that’s why vision is a dominant sense, it takes up half of our brain resources. Like the other four senses, the data we capture is then broken up and sent to different part of the brain to process and then recollected as what we see. Vision is important because of the fact that it helps us with memory. By seeing something by picture and not only by words, it helps us remember it more efficiently.
Music is proven to help us in many different ways. We all have our own different type of music and our own ways of listening to them. Personally music help me to deal with stress, it calm me down and help my mind to relax. I also use music to fall asleep. Music has done a lot for me and that’s because I love to listen to every beat of it. Music is also said to help with emotion. People who listen to music are better of detecting emotion. I agree with that because music has a lot of emotion wrapped up it.
In the vision and music chapter of John Medina’s Brain Rules, it states that, “We do not see with our eyes. We see with our brains.” (183) This is extremely intriguing as our sense of vision tricks us or convinces our brain how one thing seems to be another thing when it is actually not. Another interesting point in the vision chapter is that we are all currently hallucinating now and that we make things up. The two black holes in our field of view is normal, but our brain uses this area to calculate what is most likely there. Lastly, vision trumps over all the other senses as it takes 50% of our brain to comprehend the visual information coming from our vision. While one interesting point in the music chapter is that it makes people feel alive or energetic. Also that it may also rekindle some old memories in the elderly. I typically listen to music with no lyrics, but instead have a nice electrical rhythm. If a song or music I hear that is particularly good, then I get addicted to it and what to hear it over and over without being bored. Also that only a few songs now and then casually gives me the chills and goosebumps and mesmerizes my brain in that moment to go off on a wild imagination rampage.
The chapter “music” base on John Medinas book ” brain rules” said that we don’t really have a definition of music that describes what does the music to us. Now in days thanks to different research that had been done by different scientist, which lead us to a music therapy. This therapies lead to the first story that Medina relate to us, This man had a diagnostic that he had a . According to the book he was a happy and cheerful person before he was diagnosticated with this trauma, but now that he is in a health center he seems to be a death body with no motion and totally sadness in him. What music therapy did for him was remind him the old times he used to be a musical, and remember how happy music made him, that the same memories from the past brought him happiness to the present. It was also under research that music could help student to have better grades in their test, all what they have to do was hear relaxing music and what they supposed to learned for it have more possibilities of stay longer on your mind than when you do it with out it.
In John Medina’s “Brain Rules”, he introduces the brain rules number nine “vision”. Medina discuss the mistake some people make when they compare their eyes with a camera. Medina mentions that our eyes pick up things very differently than what we can describes. our eyes pick up light and shapes. When light shine over items or living things the colors that we see from any of those is the color that stands out to our eyes .This creates what we see ,but if light is not present then we see the dark true. The true is that we not able to see without light. I honestly fear science more now. I am afraid because our brains make up things . Vision is very complex to explain. I when camping once during high school. we arrived to camp site at 6 MP in afternoon and set the camping tents little after. I saw centipede crawling on the ground and I started to freak out. When the sun set down we play manhunt in the dark and all I thought about was the insect , since it was very difficult to see. I thought I saw one everywhere I tried to hide at. My mind started to play tricks on my me.
In John Medina’s “brain Rules”, he also introduces the brain rule number ten “music”. Medina talks about music and helpful it can be to students.He describes that music has no definition and people react differently toward it. In addition, medina mentions that simple listening to music does not make you smarter or improves anyone’s IQ. In the other hand, music makes people energic and babies in enjoy it. However, taking music lessons and learning to play a musical instrument can boost a person’s IQ according to Medina. This why taking music clubs or bands from school or colleges is bad idea. I never really thought of music as way to boost my intellect , but in previous a chapter of this book medina describes that while listening to music and studying if anyone would take an exam and someone plays that some song they were more likely to remember what they study.Music to me is art , singers deal with normal things just regular people do. They express their situations through theirs songs and hope fans would feel better if they are going to through the same events.
In John Medina´s “Vision” chapter he talks about how vision is the most dominant sense in the body taking up half of the brain’s resources. That is why it’s easier to remember something that you might’ve seen than something you might’ve heard. Not everything we see is completely accurate though because the way our brain works is like a simulation. Everything that we see is inputted by our brains so we may see things that are not really true but that is how we perceive it however. We will see things the way the brain wants us to see it. For the “Music” chapter it was believed that music made you learn better. It turns out that playing an instrument is actually the better way to learn because people who can play an instrument tend to be better at picking up signals and details. Medina also stated that music can affect our mood and the way we feel. Music releases different chemicals in our brains that make us feel different emotions.
In The Vision chapter John medina talks about our eyes and explains how our visual system doesn’t work like a camera. he also mentions that we don’t see from our eyes, we see with our brain. John medina says that our eyes is not 100 percent trustworthy to show a complete visual of our world. he also mentions that our visual environment is a fully analyzed opinion of what our brain thinks is out there. he shows us how our brain likes to make things up and that the brain is not 100 percent faithful to what our eyes stream to it.
In the next chapter “Music” john medina talks about our ears and how listening to musing can boost our cognition, and helps improve studying. He mentions that there is no definition of the word music and that there is no universal agreement of what exactly music is. he says that music training can’t improve iq points, math scores. In my self experience i found that depending on what type of music i listen to a certain emotion will rise up. that being said when i listen to rock and they start screaming, anger rises inside and it explodes outwards but it isn’t the type of anger where I start cursing everyone and end up pissed at people, it’s the type of anger that i really can’t think of a way to explain or maybe it has no definition but my brain defines it in its own way.
The vision chapter of John Medina’s “Brain Rules” focuses on how vision is our most dominant of the senses and it alone takes up about half of our brain’s resources. As we intake information from our eyes, the brain processes that information by recombining it from where it was stored in the different regions of the brain. As the information begins to elevate, it then collapses into two streams of processed information known as the ventral stream and the dorsal stream. The ventral stream recognizes what an object is along with the color that object possess. The dorsal stream recognizes the location of the object along with whether that object is moving or not. Medina later states how our eyes have blind spots within the optic disk. The optic disk is a region in the eye where retina neurons gather together to start traveling into the brain. The music chapter of John Medina’s “Brain Rules” focuses on how music can affect an individual throughout their entire life. He starts off the chapter with neurologist Oliver Sacks as he exposes a depressed and lifeless old man to music once again. The man, Henry Dryer, is suddenly filled with joy as the iPod plays through the music. Medina goes on to mention how music can impact us on an academic level too. People who are exposed to music training at an earlier age have been proven to have better skills in reading, math, along with a higher IQ. Musicians were also proven to be better listeners and could pick up the emotional status of an individual better than a non-musician. This improves both communication and social skills.