Brain Fnntion, What Brain Function?
Brain power seems to be on my mind this week. I read an article about brain quirks, which described nine different ways in which your brain works that are counter-intuitive. Actually mostly I’m surprised that my brain works at all, and it never works in the way that I think it’s going to.
The kind of facts that they came up with were things like the brain has a short term memory maximum capacity between five and nine items. This is complete news to me. Without a written list I have no short term memory, and on a bad day I forget the list.
A really interesting one was that we all have two nervous systems. One is involved with excitation, and the other with inhibition. Now here I really think they’ve got confused. I believe this is about marriage and the sexes. Before marriage, the male nervous system is concerned with excitation, and the female with inhibition. After marriage, they cross over. Well, actually this probably means they’ve probably got it right then.
The third item I noticed was that long term memory shuts down during sleep. I absolutely agree with this for females. During sleep I remember nothing. But I think they have probably missed something for male partners, whose long term memory shuts down not only during sleep but also during conversation with their female partners.
So there we have it. Our brains have a life of their own, nothing to do with us. We can therefore abdicate all responsibility for the product of their activity, and function entirely on instinct and emotion – something that women are aware of, and men do but deny vehemently.
June 16th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
I don’t know about married couples, but reading this made me think of the differences in my two young boys: my oldest, who is 8, seems to have strong inhibition mechanisms (just today, during his third summer of swimming lessons, he feels he really can learn how to swim; he even readily dunked his head underwater, even without plugging his nose, on his own free will). His 6-year-old brother thrives with excitability, and using the swimming correlation, has long readily jumped under water, with no such worries of drowning, choking, etc.
Nonetheless, the point is that the two nervous systems work together to bring about thought, action, movement, etc. I searched for a non-scientist blog or article to gain a better understanding, but fell short. I did find this interesting blog about golf studies: http://puttingzone.blogspot.com/2008/03/top-down-versus-bottom-up-golf-science.html. Apparently, the nervous system, including this inhibition/excitation thing, is of central concern to serious golfers.