Have you ever thought about your brain? I mean, I know we all have one because otherwise we wouldn’t “be”. Right? I mean you have to have your brain to make your body work. You need a brain to have thoughts and feelings and movement and all those things, but have you ever thought about your brain?

I guess it’s one of those things we really take for granted. I know I do.

I remember seeing a video about a doctor Ahman, who is a psychiatrist. He says that he started studying psychiatry, and realized after a while, that they never actually looked at the brain. He started to wonder why that was. They did all these things to study the brain and learn about the brain and treat the brain and help the brain, but they never actually looked at the brain. He decided to start scanning brains. He ended up doing over 30,000 brain scans.

It’s a YouTube talk you should go find. It’s incredibly interesting what they found when they start looking at the brain.

I don’t look at the brain, but I certainly wonder about the brain a lot. This might be because I have children and I wonder what the heck they’re thinking at times, or it could be because I teach junior high now and I wonder if they’re thinking at all.

We did a unit a few weeks before Christmas about the brain and how it is formed. We talked a lot about the prefrontal cortex and how it isn’t fully formed till your mid 20s. We also talked a lot about the limbic system and how that area is super formed and ready to go when you’re just little. If you aren’t a super scientist like me (ha ha) you might not know that the limbic system is where your emotions are processed.

That’s why babies get sad and we throw fits and we are very emotional from a very young age. The prefrontal cortex is where our logic is formed, and it isn’t fully formed until our 20s. That’s why we do emotional stupid stuff for most of our Pre-20s lifetime.

It was one of those great “aha moments” in school when the kids realized the reason they do a lot of stupid stuff is because they’re emotionally driven and have very little logic happening in their brains.

Several of my kids are dirtbike riders. Now, this is not something I am familiar with it all because I have never ridden a dirtbike and my kids are not into that kind of stuff. It’s fascinating to hear them talk about, the trails they go on and the races dates in and the crashes that they endure.

One of my students comes into school pretty frequently with a headache or his eyes kind of glassy. I know he’s got some issues with concentration but after talking to him and talking about concussions in our brain unit, he told me that he doesn’t remember how many concussions he’s had. That kind of blew my mind! I’ve never had a concussion, and I only know a few people that have had concussions in my little circle of life so it’s amazing that someone would’ve had so many concussions that they lost count.

He’s not the only one that had a lot of concussions. I have kids who have gotten concussions on the dirt bikes, playing football, soccer, doing gymnastics, diving, and just falling down. One of my kids is even a bull rider in his spare time. A bull rider! He will come in and tell me how he flies in the air and how he lands and how he almost gets stepped on by bulls. He shows me videos of his near death experiences almost every week. It’s crazy to me this 13-year-old out there, risking his life just to ride some beast for a few seconds at best.

I return to my original question: do we ever think about the brain? All the things these kids do are fun and exciting and dopamine driven I’m sure, but when they come back to the real world and they have to tie their shoes or solve a math problem, or read the instructions to anything or grow up and pay their taxes or write a love note to their beloved… how are they gonna do that if their brains are scrambled in their head? This makes me think about alternative activities for the youth, and of course the safest thing as far as physical is video games which really makes me mad! I’m not huge fan of video games because I’ve had some dear family members become addicted to those. What else is there that is safe for the brain and for the mind and the spirit?

It makes being a parent or ‘guide of the youth’ a huge responsibility. When I was a kid, my mom could just kick me out the door and I could entertain myself for hours. Riding bikes, climbing trees, or just walking around the neighborhood were go to activities. Nowadays, not much is safe. Danger is around every corner.

Just yesterday, a kid at school got a concussion from getting hit in the head with a granola bar. We might need to resort to plastic bubbles around every person. Think of the new fashions we would have to invent.

I guess the safest thing to do is read a book, or a blog. I guess when you look at it like that, my blog is a really great idea. I may actually be saving lives by dumping my random thoughts onto the internet.

Talk about affirmation…

Cause I said so.