Welcome to Its Mental Health
How Your Brain Can Form Mental Maps To Learn
from: Martin MakThe brain has the ability to recall many things in detail. For instance, if you are sitting at your desk right now and if you close your eyes, you'll find that you'd be able to find your calculator or pen. Sometimes, unconsciously, you can even find yourself reaching out for such items when you need them unconsciously, while you are consciously thinking of solving a problem or making an important decision.
People who become blind as adults will find themselves impeded by their inability to use their vision to sense their environment. They cope by relying on their memory of how things are placed. Their mental maps then become suddenly very important to them. Blind people have to re-create the world around them in their heads by using their other senses to help them make sense and navigate their environment with new sensory data.
The blind are able to use their imagination and their memory to get around on their own. For example, when they move around town, they are no longer able to navigate according to familiar landmarks, buildings or street signs. Instead they must find new tags to help them find their way around, such as the aroma of freshly brewed coffee from a nearby cafe or the aroma of freshly baked bread from a nearby bakery. Using their other senses, they can feel underfoot of a stone or gravel path or the noise coming from a nearby subway, train track or traffic at a busy junction. Soon the familiar pathways will become routine - like the visual "maps" of normal sighted people.
In a similar fashion, people have been using mental maps to help them memorise large amount of information. Such memory techniques help students develop their study skills. In fact, anyone can use memory mapping to help them improve their memory and accelerate their learning. Such memory training has found favour by many people to improve memory in work, play and in school and with constant practise, can also keep the mind sharp even in old age.
For a long time, neurologists and scientists have tried to determine the area of the brain where spatial orientation is located. Recent findings show that the hippocampus, a part of the cerebrum inside the temporal lobes, could play an important role when it comes to orientation. The hippocoampus is part of the limbic system, which is considered to be the control centre for the assessment of information and is the seat of short-term memory.
A British neurologist, named Eleanor Maguire conducted research into the question of where the human sense of orientation is located. She chose London cab drivers for her study. The cabbies, in their distinctive black taxis, are famous for their ability to find their way to almost any location in London. To find out which part of the human brain is especially active during the cabbie's navigation, Eleanor Maguire used computers to make the blood circulation of individual sections of the brain visible. During the test, she first blindfolded the drivers, then asked them to try to reconstruct certain routes in their minds. While the were describing the route in their imagination, the computers picked up intense activity in the right-hand rear sector of the brain - the seat of the hippocampus. This section seems to perform much of the work when it comes to reading mental maps. Eleanor Maguire received an unusually clear research outcome. It is quite rare for scientists to succeed in defining a brain section to such a specific area. That's because under normal circumstances, several sections in the brain participate in complex thinking process.
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