brainworldmagazine.com

Kate Davis-Muffett, age 4, stared at the police cars in front of the National Zoo, in Washington, D.C., as she and her mother, Tricia, passed by. What’s going on in your child’s brain at this age (2 to 4 years old) The neuromotor development of the brain in a child who is 2 to 4 years old depends on familial as well as psychiatric factors. At this age, says Dr. Ali, a child’s brain is in the preoperational stage, where mental strategies include: • Egocentrism: The child hasn’t reached the place where they can understand that other people view things differently than they do.

In 400 B. C., Hippocrates recognized that epilepsy was a brain disorder, and “he refuted the ideas that seizures were a curse from the gods and that people with epilepsy held prophetic powers,” writes Dr. Orrin Devinsky in “Epilepsy: Patient and Family Guide,” the third edition of the definitive handbook for epilepsy. A lot of people have epilepsy and it’s not widely known,” says Dr. Scott Hirsch, primary neuropsychiatrist at the New York University Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. Devinsky may not be a celebrity, but the professor of neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine has published more than 250 articles and chapters in more than 20 books on everything from the origins of brain delusions to “Embarrassment as the Aura of a Complex Partial Seizure. But his mentor in medical school, Dr. Norman Geschwind, the father of modern behavioral neurology in America (as well as the creator of the term behavioral neurology), attracted Devinsky and countless others to the field.

The Art of Choosing,” Columbia University professor Sheena Iyengar thoroughly analyzes the concept of choice, something that she has been pondering since a very young age. Being presented with more choices can actually delay the decision-making process, as shown in Iyengar’s jam experiment, where shoppers purchased more jams when the number of choices was reduced from 24 varieties to six. But often we have friends and family who know us in ways we don’t know ourselves,” says Iyengar. Iyengar continues, “ We do a better job at picking activities that make us happy, and at spending time with people who make us happy.

When we know we have constant access to all that bit-and-byte style stuff like phone numbers or your iTunes Store password, can we relegate it to the networks and hard drives of the world and leave our heads clearer for deeper creative thought? Of course, there’s a reason why memory works the way it does, and it’s completely different from saving a document on a computer or sending contact details to the cloud. So it might be that using the networks and search engines of the world as our “external hard drive” is just an extension of the pen and paper, the printing press, or any number of other recording technologies we’ve used since the rise of language. We’re happy to relegate simple stuff to computers and cell phones, but few of us would volunteer to have the memory of our child’s birth or our first home run digitized and removed to make more space in our long-term memory — even if we could carry it around on a USB stick.