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your amazing brain |
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impulses to chemical flows. But to Dr. Diamond all these elements
together simply prove the great untapped potential of the human brain.
We ask her what message she would
communicate about the brain if she could talk individually with every
person on earth. And her reply comes back clear and succinct: "I'd
let them know how dynamic their brains are. And the fact that they can
change at any age, from birth right to the end of life. They can change
in a positive manner, if one is exposed to stimulating environments. Or
they can change in a negative manner if they do not receive
stimulation."
To her, humans' ability to
communicate is a key element that separates us from other species. And
especially our ability to communicate in so many ways: in speech,
writing, pictures, songs, dance, rhythm and emotion.
Not surprisingly, scientists are now
finding out what many societies seem to have known instinctively for
thousands of years.
Over 2,000 years before Christopher
Columbus sailed across the Atlantic to "discover" the New
World, the ancestors of today's Polynesian societies sailed the much
bigger Pacific.12
They navigated by the sun, the moon and the stars - using what Professor
Gardner would today call spatial or visual intelligence. Not
surprisingly, when his researchers tested Solomon Islanders they found
the part of the brain dealing with "spatial intelligence"
highly developed.
Those same Pacific explorers, with
their fantastic navigational feats, would probably have failed a modern
"intelligence test" because they never developed a written
language. Even today Polynesian youngsters from their earliest years
learn through dance, rhythm and song.
Language itself sets up different
patterns in your brain - and different patterns in your culture.
If you grow up in China or Japan,
you learn to write a "picture" language - and this is largely
learned through part of the right-hand side of your brain.
Grow up in one of the Western
"alphabet" cultures, and you learn how to take in information
through all your senses but to communicate in linear writing.
The English language, for instance,
has about 550,00013
words, yet each one is made up of variations from only the 26 letters of
the alphabet. Communicate in alphabet languages, and you will largely be
using a section of the left-hand side of your brain.
Contents
Page Preface
Introduction
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