Today, we are concluding our reading of John Medina’s Brain Rules by taking a look at the “Exploration” chapter that you read before today’s class. Besides simply summarizing today’s reading, I would like you to discuss why this chapter is so important to the work that you are doing on Project Two now, and the work that you will be doing in all of your classes at City Tech as you work your way towards a career. We will discuss this during the first part of class.
13 thoughts on “Beginning of Class Writing: John Medina’s Brain Rules, “Exploration””
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
We have to explore in order to obtain knowledge. Without exploration how can we know what’s right and what’s wrong. In addition exploration is what further the mind to be more sophisticated. In John Medina Brain Rules exploration chapter he said, “All babies gather information by actively testing their environment, much as a scientist would.” Based on my own experience I would usually see my little baby cousin try to put any he can find in his mouth. At first I just thought my little cousin is weird and like to put things in his mouth, but after reading John Medina exploration chapter, I realize that what my little cousin is doing is testing out what is eatable and what’s not. My little cousin helped show that as humans, no matter what age, we are made to explore and to find new experiences with then stimulates the mind. Another quote that caught my attention was when John Medina said, “Companies such as 3M, Genetech, and Google allowed employees to use is 15 to 20 percent of their workweek to where their mind ask them to go.” I found this interesting because believe it or not most inventions and theories are made through exploration. For example the Wright brothers was fascinated in how birds was able to fly, so the exploration of finding out how birds was able to fly made them be able to create the modal of the first airplane. John Medina Brain Rules help expand on many interesting topics that I never knew. Even by reading this book enriched my knowledge on life. After the book I tried to expand my thinking through exploration. The way I use exploration to expand my mind is by going to places I never been before, reading a variety of books, and listening various genres of music.
Every day our brains explore many different things in the environment. No matter what age you are wether it’s a newborn infant, toddler, young adult, or senior citizen, our bodies try to do different things and is still exploring. In this chapter Medina states how we are powerful and natural explores. I agree with this because when babies are born they explore everything around them. They touch, taste, smell, and more. Medina said that babies are models of how we learn. This is done by testing our observation skills, experiment skills and our conclusion skills. In a research that was done, it showed us how our brains are wired to help keep us learning while we get older and make many different connections. After reading this book I realized that it would help me in a variety of ways. And example of this would be if I get stress, I can go back and read that chapter and after I finish I could find away to let that stress go.
According to John Medina in his exploration chapter of Brain Rules, everybody has the ability to become lifelong learners. However, our peak or interest of exploring new things is when we were still infants. From the moment we are born to specifically 18 months old, we have the ability to imitate, analyze, and to realize already. We were already kind of like scientists and constantly performing experiments to gain information/knowledge temporary until we get bored of it. This chapter is so important to the work we are doing on chapter two by showing us that performing an experiment and exploring a field of interest by obtaining and analyzing data just like scientists. Also that we will continue to learn more and more from the classes at city tech and in our line of work while obtaining the skills and assets we learn from repeated actions and then innovating these skills or ideas to become better and faster at efficiently completing the task
In John Medina “Brain Rules” exploration chapter, he talks about why people have the need to explore. He explains that the reason why we explore is because we as human have the need to get information. Without exploration we wouldn’t have known about a lot of great things today like the foods we enjoy and the materials we use. In the book John Medina said, “All babies gather information by actively testing their environment, much as a scientist would.” Based on my own experience, when I was about 2 years old I would always try climb up high areas and hurt myself trying. After a while I learned how to grip surfaces properly and gain access to higher places. When John Medina said, “Companies such as 3M, Genentech, and Google allowed employees to use is 15 to 20 percent of their work week to where their mind asks them to go.” I found this fascinating because believe like a lot of inventions and ideas are made through exploration. For example a man by the name of Alexander Fleming was looking for a way to destroy bacteria called staphylococci. After he made a mistake he eventually notices the bacteria was dying and continued to look into it, that’s how we got Penicillin. John Medina Brain Rules help expand on many interesting topics that I either never knew or knew only a little. Even reading this book has helped improved my knowledge and understanding on life. After reading this book I am going to try and expand my mind through exploration even further. The way I use exploration to help my mind is by going to places I never been before, experimenting with different projects, and listening various types of music.
In the “Exploration” chapter in John Medina’s Brain Rules, we are told that we were born with the instinct to explore and satisfy our curiosity. As babies, we are really curious and we methodically experiment on the things we are curious about to see what it’ll do. Even as babies, we hypothesize, make an experiment and come up with a conclusion. This is because we have a crazy curiosity that needs to be satisfied. This might explain why babies usually put things in their mouths first because they are testing to see if its edible and what it may be. Same goes when kids smell their foods first before trying it just to explore and test to see what it might possibly be. In this chapter, John Medina said, “Companies such as 3M, Genentech, and Google allowed employees to use is 15 to 20 percent of their work week to where their mind asks them to go.” This is really amazing because when these companies let their employees explore and to wander in their curiosity, they can get more achieved and maybe come across things they would have never come across otherwise. Its amazing how these companies incorporated the way the human was built to enhance the company’s employees’ minds. I think that schools should incorporate this and instead of a study period, we should be given a time to explore to ours heart content. For example, if we were to do architecture, we should dedicate a good amount of time for kids to just surf the web or even explore the concrete jungle to hypothesize and learn the way we were made to learn.
Exploration is key for our brains’ development. It is the way our brains learn how to navigate our surroundings by actively interacting with it. Medina lays out the example of babies learning about their environment. They are hands on, touching whatever they can see in order to know whether it is hostile or safe. Our prefrontal cortex is responsible for processing this information. We can also imitate behavior that we have explored.That shows that us humans are made to naturally explore our surroundings. This can happen at any age, since whether you’re 8, or 80 you never know everything, since surroundings change with time. Overall, the book was very interesting, ad each chapter linked to each other, sine whatever we learn in one chapter. For example, this chapter is directly correlated to sensory integration, where you obviously need senses to examine your surroundings, to explore. Sensory integration is also linked to the memory chapter where sense such as sight and smell are important to linking memories to something.
Exploration is probably one of the essential building blocks to human learning. This exploration leads to curiosity within individuals. And in some cases, this curiosity can end up being something groundbreaking. In the final chapter called “Exploration” in John Medina’s “Brain Rules, John Medina talks about just what exactly exploration is to the intellect of the human being, as well as some more in depth information of how exploration works. The way I interpreted what John Medina was referring to when it came to “exploration” was curiosity. John Medina utilized the brain of an infant to display what exploration really is. Babies analyze the environment around then not by just looking around, but by testing what is around them through their sensory tools. They would touch what ever may be around them, rip and tear it apart, bite it, and throw it. This isn’t however them being rebellious, this is how they conduct their own kind of scientific research. The chapter also says that the more a baby would grow, the more of the brains secrets get revealed each year. Not only that, but it is said that their is a portion of our brain that stays as malleable as a baby’s brain , in order for the brain to continually learn new things, create new neurons, and make new connections . It is because of this, that we will never get tired of learning. This constant desire to learn and explore new things is what I see as the unique curiosity of the human being. I feel that because of this unique trait that we possess, is no wonder that we are the dominant species in the world today.
During my trip to school i finish the book ” Brain Rules” by John Medina, He conclude his book with a really interesting chapter, The exploration chapter. In this specific chapter he describe the last rule, Rule # 12 ” we are powerful and natural explorers” He stated the chapter by saying babies are the best example to used to describe how and why does the human being does things and learned them as well in terms of exploration. Medina used babies as an example because as we can see when we have a baby around, they try to tasted, eat, touch and look every single thing they can find in their way and calls their attention, by doing this the are learning by experience what can do eat, touch, smell, etc and what they should not. Medina also mention that an adult doesn’t grew 100%. Many of the baby neurons that let us keep learning new things toward our lives. This topic connect to project #2 because as we through the paper and the different readings we may go and search, and from them learn new things, Explored different sources that may teach different things make us curious and let us to go diaper . It is not just about research it is also about testing and experimenting different situations and abilities that you may want to explore and make sure that you learn from it.
In John Medina’s final chapter in Brain Rules “exploration” he talks about how humans are born with the thirst for knowledge and how it’s almost like hunger or the need to sleep. He describes it as a drive and something that we see early in on like in babies. We see babies play with things and it might just look like they’re playing but they are proving essential concepts that they will need in their adult life to survive. For example one of these concepts is object permanence which is the fact that although one might not see something it doesn’t mean it’s not there or that it has disappeared. The reason this is essential is because if a predator hides in tall grass it does not mean he is gone like in the example John Medina talks about. This chapter could apply to the work I’m doing now in City tech because a lot of the assignments require that curiosity in a certain topics like research papers but also into things that interest us in life.
In this chapter John Medina explain the final brain rule, number twelve. He starts off by telling us about an incident about his son and how curiously got the best of him. Although he was repeatedly told not to touch the bee he still did it. He then went into more detail and starts to explain how baby is the starting point to our exploration. He said as baby we are born with a great desire to learn and we do this best by actually testing it. Babies brains are model to learn and they do it through observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion. That is why our brain always has the temptation to learn new thing, even as an adult part of our brain stay as malleable as a baby so that we could create neurons and learn new things. This process will happen throughout you lives. It may be harder to do it as we get older but the ability to do it will still be there. Exploring is a wonderful thing it is what gets us to where we are today. If it wasn’t for explorer we would all be living at one place in the world thinking they is nowhere to go and that’s all we have. But because of our amazing brain and it capably of exploration we didn’t just explore our own planet we went to explore others.
At the day we were born as infant, we have the idea of exploring the unknown. Exploring is the method for every individual to learn something new. The idea of exploration is so important that it had happen in our entire lifetime, without out us even knowing about it. Exploring is anything that enable and aids you to learn, such as traveling, researching, experiment, or trying new things out. Our ancestor, were able to reproduce and become the best species in the world because of exploration. We were able to learn from our mistake and teach our kind to prevent our mistake. An example, will be us facing a dangerous animal, to only remind us to prevent ourselves from fighting them later in our future or finding a new sources of food, crops and water to live on. Thus making us superior the other species. We will never outgrow the desire to know what we want to know. If we follow this mentally it could greatly motivated us to be more productive at out elder age.
The exploration chapter of John Medina’s “Brain Rules” focuses on a babies curiosity to discover new things along with how our brains continue to learn as we age. Many scientist study babies to learn the way they learn and discover such as their abilities to repeat and determine. Medina goes on to mention how our brain is wired to keep learning as we age. Our brains still contain regions that are as malleable as a baby’s, but we loose about 30,000 neurons per day as we age. We later find out that the adult brain still continues to create neurons within the region of the brain dedicated to learning. Your brain can then later retain the ability to change not only its function but it’s structure in response to your experiences. This chapter is important to the work that I’m doing on Project 2 and work I will be doing in my classes at City Tech as I work my way to career because it also requires me to explore. In order to successfully finish project 2, I need to do a lot of research about my major and future career but it’s not because I have to. I not only need to do this but I wanted to because I was curious as to what was required of me along with what I will receive in return.
In John Medina’s, “Brain Rule” he talks about brain rules number12 ”exploration”. Medina discusses in depth the exploration of young children and how important it is to the brain. Medina conducted an observation on his own kid and concluded that a 2 year old desire to explore is tremendous.Whether the environment is dangerous or not they would still want go explore the whatever is causing that danger.This is true because medina’s child was stung by a bee. Regardless of the incident he was fascinated by it all , the pain and the bee it self. I understand his curiosity, since I used to like exploring new areas, games and technology. Today I am still curious about learning new ways to use technology and the wonders that it can do for people. A complex device like a computer or camera can help their user to productive things. The computer can help you organize or type documents need for your field of work. The camera can help release stress by take amazing photos that no one can copy, since time never stops.In Addition , when is was six years old I developed the passion for cars. I was so fascinated by their looks and performs. This feeling drove me to play video games about cars just to feed my desire to learn about car brands.