Brain Parts

I loved teaching my classes about the human brain. They, in turn, loved hearing about brain parts and how they worked. 

A Year Four student remarked after one session: 

‘I never knew, until today, that a hippocampus was a part of my body.’

If you’ve brought a daydreaming child’s attention back to an activity, you’ve run up against the hippocampus.

It’s the part of our brains that lets in new memories and finds the right place for them. But, if it’s out the window watching the janitor mow the lawn, well … you know the rest. 

The amygdala is the part of the brain that controls emotion. If spread out in a flat space, an entire human brain would take up two pages of a broadsheet newspaper. The amygdala is almond-shaped and accounts for about 0.3% of the brain’s volume. 

It works with the hippocampus to process learning and encode it into memories. The amygdala takes control when we get angry. Have you tried reasoning with an angry student? Not easy, right?

 An angry student won’t recall much of a day’s learning. A sad student will encode memories differently from a happy, contented one. 

An angry (who me?) teacher will find it hard to communicate meaningful information. Similarly, a sad one. A happy, contented one? 

Could you guess where this is headed?