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| Category: Continuing Education |
Date published: March 30, 2009 |
Got Genes?
Speed Read
Do you believe statistics quoted by politicians, economists, and scientists treat research figures with respect? Scientists will admit their miscalculations and move on. The rest of us resist change because our comfort-zone, the status quo, and homeostasis (equilibrium) have survival value. Change equates with danger.
The four most ignorance-producing words in any language are:
"I already know that!" It shuts your mind like a bank vault. You post an out-to-lunch sign on your Neocortex with that phrase, and inhibit brain growth. I thought I knew some facts about genes, but they changed them on me.
You don't have to be a scientist or need to prove how smart you are to stay open to learning. My research tells me the clich? - use-it-or-lose-it - is realty based about your brain, as much as cardiac arrest is about your heart.
Check it Out
Google this one: cognitive reserve, Yaacov Stern, Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. Gist: You can reduce the risk of Alzheimer up to 60 percent by being a lifelong learner. Coda: There is growing scientific belief that ongoing knowledge acquisition can increase your longevity up to a decade. Got a better offer today?
Did you read the latest research Americans stare at tv or the computer monitor a total of eight (8) hours daily? Most of us don't work that many hours.
Charlie Darwin's Best Quote
"It is not that the large who eat the small, it is the swift that ingest the slow. It is not the strongest nor the most intelligent species that survive, it is the one most adaptable to change."
Genes
1. The simple roundworm c. elegans has 20,000 genes, and that is a hard number since 9.19.2008. Nobody ever nominated c. elgans for a Nobel.
Just remember that statistic. You see science, has consistently placed the gene at the focus of life, while mostly sandbagging the learning value of our environment as in nurture, not nature.
2. For the past 15 years scientists have used 100,000 genes in the human genome to explain human nature. By 2008 research on the human genome has revised the correct number to approximately 25,000 genes.
Maybe the roundworm should be treated with more respect. Some scientists use between 26-38,000 genes, but 90 percent of scientists agree humans have about 75% less genes than was scientifically certain until 2008. Further, they're not so sure about the dominance of the genome to preprogram humans.
3. "Genes Don't Control Human Behavior", according to Paul R. Erlich, Stanford University, Evolutionary Science professor. Over the past 50 years scientists have argued over Nature or Nurture, genetics or the environment.
The lazy man's answer has been a 50-50 partnership. Fact: it is 75 percent in favor of experience - the environment - social and cultural forces.
Genes do not rule your destiny - they preprogram just 25 percent of our predispositions of personality.
Genes are too busy assembling complex human organs (DNA) with their 25,000 genes, and have no time to run all the cerebral cortex brain activities like planning, memory, emotions and language.
4. Our brain is the only organ requiring vast amounts of physical and cultural information from the environment to successfully survive through adaptation.
5. The amount of non-genetic information used by your brain is 100 times that of our genome capacity (broadband). It is not human nature (our genetically endowed proclivities) that can solve our economic challenges, the deteriorating environment, and lousy movies.
It is will-power (volition/conation) and knowledge-instruction-and feedback that will save us, and they are located in our Neocortex.
Science is now certain genetic evolution does not determine how humans act because we do not come into this world preprogrammed with fixed neural networks.
Neuroplasticity
6. Neuroplasticity is our ability to change the structure and function of brain through experience in our environment.The proof is fMRIs (functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery).
Human experience continues to want to make improvements for the next generation. That's the reason for evolution. Our brain comes prepared to learn any one of 6500 (hard number) spoken languages, and to survive in desert heat or tundra ice. It is our volition (free choice) that motivates whether we will learn.
Conscious v Non-conscious
6. Our consciousness has a broadband capacity to process 16-40 bits of information per second. It is measured in cycles per second, Hertz.
Compare this to our non-consciousness, which processes 11 million bits of information per second. Did you know that you have 62 thousand miles of blood vessels to run your brain and body? No mistake, 62,000 miles. If you had to wait for your consciousness to handle respiration, cardiac rate, blood pressure, and language, we would all be living with our relatives the c. elegens roundworm.
Coda:
a) When we attempt newness our genome registers a complaint through our amygdala (emotional center) and sends us fear, anxiety and stress.
b) Do newness anyway and accept the fight-or-flight signals. It will go away. But what we resist - persists. You have cognitive reserves.
c) You can reprogram your amygdala (home of fear and danger) to permit change only by showing newness is not a threat. Do not permit your genome to run your experiences. Take the path less traveled.
Endwords: Would you be more competitive if you could read and remember three (3) books, articles and reports in the time your peers could hardly finish one? Ask us how.
It takes Knowledge-Instruction-Feedback.
What if these new skills of language and memory could get you an extra decade of life? Ask us how.
Speed Read
copyright © 2009
H. Bernard Wechsler
www.speedlearning.org
hbe@speedlearning.org
1-877-567-2500
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