Critical Thinking and the Brain with Andrea Samadi

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning podcast, episode #81. This episode was inspired by someone I grew up with, Alex, who sent me a DM on social media this week asking me “do you have anything I can use to help my team to learn, develop and improve their critical thinking skills?”  Since “thinking” is such an important skill, originating in the cortex, or top layer of the brain, I thought it would be a good topic to cover this week. Alex, this one is for you. For those who are new here, my name is Andrea Samadi,  a former educator who created this podcast to bring awareness, ideas and strategies to our most pressing issues  facing educators in the workplace, or parents working from home or in the corporate space, to keep us all working at our highest levels of productivity. Each episode we provide you with specific tools, resources and ideas to implement proven strategies backed by the most current neuroscience research to help you to help improve daily productivity, achievement and results. This week we are looking at thinking, specifically what we can do to improve our thinking skills. Have you recently heard yourself or someone else, say “I’m so busy, I can barely think?” or have you ever told your kids to be quiet so you can “think?” I’ve heard it and said it myself more so these days than usual, as our schedules just seem to be getting busier and busier each month with the new events unfolding in the world, with the fact that many children are going back to school “distance learning” at home, while parents are working, (and we all remember how that went in the Spring) so many of us are finding it difficult to “think, focus and concentrate” under these new conditions that require us to put in a bit more effort than we might have been used to in the past. I hope you find these strategies on thinking as helpful as I have and find ways to implement just one or two of them, to make life flow easier all of us as we move into the final half of 2020. Thinking and the Brain Before we look at strategies to improve our thinking skills, I want to dive deeper into what exactly thinking is as it happens in the brain. When you are thinking, your neurons (86 billion of them) are shooting messages back and forth. This firing of neurons uses “2/3 of your brain’s energy”[i]  and “is powered by a molecule called ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate if you can remember that from 9th grade Science class) which is generated by the mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell) which burns glucose” that gives us the energy we need to think. This means that our brain runs on this simple sugar, and if we are low on this fuel, it’s harder for the brain to work.  So, we must remember to eat, to provide the fuel our brain needs to think, and rest. But eating and rest are only a part of the solution. There’s much more that we can do to optimize the power of our thinking brain. We have mentioned in previous episodes (#23 Understanding the Difference Between Your Mind and Your Brain)[ii] about ways we can strengthen our brain and thinking with the power of “the unfocused” mind.  In previous episodes, we did hear this point mentioned by some of the top thinkers in the world. Bob Proctor, on episode #66[iii] mentioned this fact when he pointed out that at the beginning of Earl Nightingale’s “The Strangest Secret” program, Earl talks about the famous Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Albert Schweitzer who recalled being asked by a reporter “what’s wrong with man today?” and Dr. Schweitzer thought about it for a minute, and then answered “They simply don’t think” which makes sense to me, because I know that life runs smoother when I can take the time I need to think. Eric Jensen also talked about the power of taking breaks in relation to learning in episode #79 when he said he asked Dr. Terry Sejnowskji, a leading scientist from the Salk Institute who co-authored the book called Learning How to Learn.[iv]  Eric asked Dr. Sejnowski about t