Want more brain power? Get lost! Literally

Much is being made in education these days of "brain-based learning," which is the idea that teaching should reflect scientifically proven principles about how the brain works. This is in contrast to traditional teaching methods, which seem to assume that students' brains are pretty much asleep in school.*

These scientifically proven principles about how the brain works are:

1. We humans use our brain to learn things. Probably most of us at least SUSPECTED that maybe our brains were involved somehow in learning, but now brain scientists, using very expensive equipment that probes the brain regions while subjects are involved in learning a task, have pronounced definitively that yes, the brain does help us learn.**

2. The brain develops more learning capacity by making more neuronal connections. One way the brain accomplishes this is when you learn something new or try something different, like taking a new route to work. The brain cannot, in this case, rely on its old routes, and must forge new ones, making more synapses and building alliances and passing GO and collecting...

Ahem.

Of course, there is bad news as well.

3. If pathways in the brain are not used, they die off. This explains why, for example, some men can remember every detail about every football game in the last 937 seasons, but forget their children's names. Or even that they HAVE children.

Aware that too many of my personal brain pathways may already be dead-ends, in an effort to salvage what I still have I diligently set about one morning to follow a different route from the subway to work.

And promptly got lost.

Very lost.

My brain had to work very hard to figure out where it was supposed to be, much harder than I expected, and -- even though this is not addressed in the brain literature -- I believe I racked up some serious bonus points in my little Build-the-Neuron-Connections game.

In keeping with principle 2, I must practice my new behaviors over and over until the pathways become established. Then it's off to find a new behavior to make new pathways. So if you see a bewildered-looking female trudging around a city, it's just me, building neurons.

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*Which has also been scientifically proven, at least for subjects other than recess.

**Most of us, anyway.