Sunday, August 5, 2012

W3-National Geography, Test Your Brain part 1 of 3 (PAY ATTENTION)

Brain is the most critical and important part of our body that plays a vital role in our daily lives. Brain controls all the nerve system that making sure that we do something according to the mind. Brain collects data from surroundings and understanding, then transmit it into information by sensory feedback. The feedback can be verbal and non-verbal. For example, a car approaching with estimated speed 100 km/h and headed directly into your path. Firstly, we look at the car and our eyes act as a camera and the brain tries to adapt into the situation. Meanwhile, neuron of brain stimulates the brain itself to an fixed information that the car is very fast and headed into the way. Then, the brain stimulates our body to respond, evade the speeding car away. That is the result of the brain produces feedback in terms of non-verbal action.

Generally, the brain was divided into two part. The parts are the left brain and right brain. As you can see the picture below describes what is the functions of this two part of the brain.


It is hard for people to use both sides of the brain simultaneously. The brain has limited power, only 12 Watt. The figure is less than the refrigerator lights. But, the 12 Watt of power also differ us with other creatures in this world.

Our brain is highly active organ that contains millions of neuron and other gen that helps us in daily life. The main priority purpose is to think, which means paying attention on anything that our brain wanted to. But, attention is limited. As stated before, the brain only can generate 12 Watt of power. The figure bring a hard wire in our situation, especially involving decision making and others. Experts and popular figures like David Copperfield, Dan Simons and Apollo Robbins agrees that brain only can focused at one thing for one time only. If we challenge the fact, there will be some little things that we will miss. It is not involving our health or anything, but can really make us more paranoia.

There is certain people can manipulating our brain ability to focus. These man are called 'Magician'. This people really understand how is human brain work and how human brain thinks. Magician like David Copperfield and Apollo Robbins are the person who really demonstrate how our mind could thinks and how they can use our mind against ourselves.



This two figure really understand how our brain can work and regularly demonstrate or use it for everyone granted. They really enter into our mind when we were incompletely focused in the situation. They drawn our attention into another with a simple tricks, and still we were got tricked by them. There are two type of attention that are in our brain. The two type of attention are 'Top-down attention' and 'Bottom-up attention'.  Top-down attention is a decision making attention which we frequently use in our daily life. Bottom-up attention is an attention that using something (e.g: materials and distraction) just to grab or drew out our focus or attention.

The two type of attention is trigger by our brain, more specifically by our prefrontal cortex and sensory cortices. Prefrontal cortex helps in advance decision making and planning or in other words to think critically. Sensory cortices however stimulates brain's neuron and making our brain to grab focus and attention. Other than attention, our brain can do multi tasking works. But, it is really hard and need serious effort to achieve it. Based on the documentary, multi tasking effort could deactivate our focus and certain parts of our brain. It is because our mind can only read and understand one thing for one time only. Our brain attention is limited. The games shown in the documentary really demands our concentration and focus in order to understand what is the trick on that particular games. Always a distraction happen. For example in game #9, the penguin passes by and losing all of our counts on that dancers. Other than that, game #5 when Copperfield ask what we have to do and demands us a great concentration and multi tasking ability.


Our brain also can react very slow when something unfamiliar happens. For example in game #10. Our brain implies the common things and when something differ happen, we could react, but it will be slower than the usual.

Other than attention and multi tasking, our brain can easily adapt or confused. In other words, it is confusion or hypnosis. Experts in the documentary really demonstrate how our brain can work that way. Hypnosis can shut down certain area of our brain and make it temporarily disappear. For example, the brain 'concept of four'. The respondent totally did not know that is number four after the doctor tells her about concept of four. This practise is really an art of deception. For example, this spinning circles. Actually, the circle was not spin, but our mind are push to think and implies that this circle actually spins.



Basically, our brain is a great organ that really well work in our daily lives. But, in order to make it work well in any part of situation, make sure we are completely aware and give a great attention. After all, that is why our brain really made of, to think critically and greatly gives attention in anything.

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