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Course: Growth mindset > Unit 2
Lesson 1: The truth about your brainReflect: The truth about your brain
You can learn anything.
Learning and practicing help strengthen and change our brains. As we make mistakes, work through problems that are difficult for us, and persevere, we build new neural pathways in the brain.
All learning can build new neural pathways, but learning things that are challenging for you can supercharge your brain growth.
Take a moment to reflect.
Answer these questions to reflect on the Truth About Your Brain and to complete the activity.
- Name a skill that you know now and can do smoothly that you couldn't do when you were born.
- How does your brain look different from when you were born, when you were learning that skill, and now?
- Share the most important thing you learned from Dr. Merzenich. Why is this learning important to you?
- What is something that you would like to learn?
- How would learning a new skill improve your life?
Congratulations, you have completed all 3 parts of Activity 1: Connect, Learn, Reflect! These activities are part of the LearnStorm 2019 program.
Want to join the conversation?
how can we grow our confident(19 votes)
Practice does not make perfect as reaching perfection is impossible if not highly difficult, but what it does do is build consistency and raise our base success rate on lets say a bad day. So keep practicing what ever it is youre not confident from math to even social skills!(23 votes)
- A skill I wasn't born with, but can do smoothly is walking.
My brain has grown a lot stronger than it was when I was born and when learning a new skill, it gets even stronger.
Something i learned from Dr.merzenich is that your brain gets stronger as you keep doing something. Its important to me because i didn't know that your brain can increase in size literally.
I would like to learn how to swim.
learning a new skill will improve my life by incresing my chances to do other things in life.(14 votes) - I would like to improve my understanding of others. Like how and why they do the kinds of things they do. It would help me more in life because I would be able to connect to them more.(10 votes)
A skill i was not born with is, i can learn how to work pretty much any tech that has to do with gaming and other. My brain is more developed but i have troubles with speaking and reading sometimes but i´ve gotten better. I found interesting with even more research that the brain changes chemically,physically,and functionally as you age.I would like to learn more about this. I would like to learn how to draw better than I do now and I would also like to learn more about gaming and technology.Well if I learned and mastered these skills I could take what i´ve learned and keep growing my skills by always learning more about it.(9 votes)
A skill I can perform smoothly is playing soccer, and I was not able to play soccer when I was a baby.(6 votes)- As a matter of fact, learning a language is something that I have done so far for improving my brain. It is a skill that I was struggled when I was born. As my mother gave a birth to me, my native language is different from the language I am studying now, English. From my point of view, I would simply say that, learning English forces my brain to pick the language up quickly, allowing me to think fast. After listening to Dr.Merzenich, learning is crucial because it can improve the muscle of the brain more rigorously and builds neural pathways for our brain. At the moment, I would like to learn economics and Chinese language. Having said that, studying new skills constructs the way I ponder things or shortly, I could say I can see something different from my old self.(4 votes)
I already know some Chinese and pretty fluent in English, learning Spanish now in high school(4 votes)
- I want to ask, how to sign language?(2 votes)
- YT people be like(5 votes)
- 1. I can read now, which I certainly couldn't as a baby
2. I feel like it became more active. As a baby, staring at letters meant nothing to me. When I was 2-5, I had to concentrate on the letters themselves and digest the reading material. Now, I can not only understand easily, I can also multitask and think of other possibilities while understanding, which make fantasy books that much more interesting.
3. I learned that getting it right isn't the important part, it's all the times you got it wrong.
4. I'm currently trying to learn some languages other than English and my native language, Tagalog.
5. I think it would improve my communication in those languages and in English/Tagalog.(4 votes) 
Reflection:
1. A skill that I can now accomplish smoothly that I couldn’t do when I was born is reading.
2. My brain has grown and the neurons inside have become more connected allowing me to read faster and more efficiently than I could when I was little and first learning the skill.
3. I think that the most important thing I learned from Mr. Merzenich is that skills I learn can help me perform better in other tasks/skills. This is important to me because I would like to further extend my performance in certain activities, I now know that I need to work on my brain too in order to extend my physical capability and performance in other skills.
4. Something I would really like to know is psychology. I have never taken a psychology class which of course leaves me curious to see what it’s all about. I want to learn this because I believe that it can help me further my knowledge and understanding of the human mind as well as help me perform better in other tasks and/or activities.
5. Improving a new skill would help improve my life by increasing my level of success. This is because when I learn a new skill the new knowledge I obtain can help me continue to learn even more branching off from that first skill I improved.(4 votes)- Something I can do better now is drawing. My brain has gotten stronger, and it has learned more about how to draw certain things like shapes. The most important thing I've learned is that you can learn how to do anything regardless of your age. I would like to learn how to animate. That would improve my life by allowing me to maybe find a job.(4 votes)