Today, we wrap up John Medina’s Brain Rules with the chapter on Exploration. During the first ten minutes of class, write your summary of the chapter and write about the things that you enjoy exploring–the things that excite your curiosity. Post your writing here as a comment. This will conclude our beginning-of-class writing assignments for the semester. Well done!
ENG1101 D371 English Composition I, SPR2015
Official site for ENG1101 D371
While reading John Medina’s Brain Rules, Exploration chapter Medina says that one of our best attributes is the ability to explore and learn at any age. We start off knowing only a few little things but then we all use the same strategy to learn more. The desire to explore never leaves our minds. No matter if we’re at school or work. All of us explore all the time whether its a desired place we wish to visit someday or even in our minds where we could think of great ideas. As babies we explored naturally by doing experiments on objects, for example when our parents gave us an object they use to say lets see what he/she will do. We did active testing through observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion without even knowing it. I’m pretty sure we all use google. Google is the #1 site used today for exploring. Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. Wow, that’s a lot of searches. Google is basically the heart to the power of exploration to find out more information about things we know or haven’t even heard of before. We are all powerful and natural explorers that’s why we shouldn’t stop exploring and always learn more.
In John Medina’s book “Brain Rules” in the chapter “Exploration” he talks about how Google takes to heart the power of exploration. For 20 percent of their time, employees may go where their mind asks them to go and fully 50 percent of new products, including Gmail and Google News, came from that 20 percent time since everyone used Google as their main source. I believe that to be really true since that’s what I do as well. Every question or curiosity I have I use Google to figure it out. Every minute on Google almost 2 million searches occur and from that you can see how many people use Google as their source to exploration. Google has been the best site for me so far to look up anything I need whether it can be from the simplest question to a question I know nothing about. It also even hired a camel to get a map view of a Desert. The biggest explorers of all of us are babies. They look at everything with curiosity and would feel and touch it to see what it is. They would automatically be attracted to the littlest of things and would go towards them to see what they are. We humans always try new things either the one that make us curious or what attracts us, and all of that is exploration.
Humans have the natural tendency to want to explore. Our interest are all different but we are all curious by nature. Medina’s final chapter speaks about exploration. Our nature for the constant need to explore is apparent from our most earliest stages. Babies are the epitome of explorers. You give a baby a foreign object and what do they do ? Lick it, touch it, throw it, etc. They are experimenting, observing whether it tastes good or not, whether it’ll break or not and seeing if it is a fun toy or not. They test what they do not understand through observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion. Much like us. Some parts of our brains stay as malleable as a babies so in the future we can continue to explore and learn new things. The biggest exploration place nowadays is google. There are billions upon billions of searches every day on this site. Personally whenever i don’t know something the first thing I turn to is google. It can be something as simple as how to spell this word correctly into something as complicated to how the world works. We humans by nature will continue to explore whether we notice it or not and this is why we continue to evolve to this day. The potential of knowledge out there is limitless.
What I like to explore is women and also different cultures and how they are different but the same. I remember when I was ten years old,I found my father’s stash of porn,it was like two big black garbage bags. As I think about it now he had a serious problem and maybe that is why I would see him with a different women almost every week. But anyway back to me at an early age I was fascinated with women. It fascinated me how they were different,but so much the same at the same time. When I took anthropology, the name of the course was “Growing Up In Japan”. It amazed me how in Japan personal space is treated differently than here in America. If you go to the movies in Japan and the theater is semi empty,if you sit far away from a person instead of close to them,this is seen as disrespect. Whereas in America it is the opposite.
In John Medina’s, “Brain Rules, Exploration,” Medina discusses how natural it is to be curious and how our minds are constantly exploring at any age, which brings us to “Brain Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers.” From the moment we are born we are little scientists, calculating¬ our environment with the scientific method- observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion. Our brains follow this method in certain parts. One area of the brain, the right prefrontal cortex, scans for mistakes in our hypothesis while the adjoining region alerts us to change our behavior. We are born with the drive to constantly learn around us. Medina speaks on Andy Meltzoff in 1979. Meltzoff stuck his tongue out to a newborn and waited for a response. To his surprise, 42 minutes later, the newborn stuck out her tongue as well, imitating him. With the newborn’s response, it shows we are capable of “mirroring” at a young age. Mirror neurons are cells that are distributed across the brain when we recognize or mimic behavior. Medina informs us that the age we believe to be “terrible two’s,” is just the age where these toddlers begin to explore hands-on. In conclusion, some parts our brains remains pliable, or malleable, as Medina states. This helps us generate neurons and learn new things throughout our lifetime.
According to John Medina’s chapter “exploration”, we have the ability to explore and learn as much as we want. There are no limited places in our brain unless we died. It seems to me that the more we age, the more we explore. Human are natural explorer. Human tend to be curious no matter their age. It is just in our habit to do so. In my life, I dream of exploring the ocean and its most dangerous places. Base on scientists who explore the ocean, we only know 20 percents of what is in the ocean, which mean 80 percents of the ocean is not explored yet. I want to be one of the persons to explore more than the 20 percents.