Kick It Around

Let’s kick around some more stuff about learning. First, here’s an important one: your brain will never fill up. You shouldn’t worry about it overflowing. You can keep packing learning in there for the rest of your life.

Your brain, the nifty organ that it is, keeps finding room for more. Not only that, it joins old learning with new learning. It does that by connecting one brain cell to another. A picture of one cell called a neuron (new-RON) is at the top of this post. Of course, it is much, much smaller than the picture.

It has to be: you have over 80 billion of them inside your head. See the little branches at the ends? Each one can join to another neuron. That neuron connects to another, and so on.

Scientists now realise that our brains don’t work like computers. Computers store information really well, but we store it way better. We store memories as pictures. If I say the word ‘Dog,’ your brain will hold up a picture of one. Okay, that’s pretty neat.

While we’re on neat stuff, try this. That four-legged thing you’re sitting on? It’s a chair, right?

A computer will remember that object as a chair. But what if one of the legs was broken off? Your brain still recognises it as a chair. A computer will have a hard time with it because it has stored information that chairs have four legs, not three.