I was studying genetics in the United States when a friend commented on the questions he was asking himself in neuroscience. Graduated in biology at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), she was enchanted by the new universe and dove in head first.
He soon came across a question that, at the time, didn’t have a good answer: if humans don’t have the biggest brain of all, why are we more intelligent than other species? Are we an exception to the rules of biology? Or, in fact, did we not know the rules about brain formation?
“That’s what led me to study how many neurons different brains are made of. Starting, in fact, with the legend that we only use 10% of the brain”, he says in CasaFolha, the .
“We use 100% of our brain all the time”, he says in his course called “The potential of the brain”, in which he talks about discoveries from his research in neuroscience and explores, in a practical and didactic way, topics such as anxiety, depression, well-being, happiness and learning.
One of the questions she discusses is whether we can become smarter. “And I’m already saying that we can, yes,” he says.
already brings together 16 courses from great personalities, such as filmmaker José Padilha, , and former minister Pedro Malan, .
The platform includes new content every month. This month, for example, there was the debut of neuroscientist Álvaro Machado Dias, with classes. On the 30th, it will be , with triathlete Fernanda Keller.
In , Suzana explains the innovative method she developed to count neurons and how she discovered that humans have 86 billion of these fundamental brain functioning units, and not the 100 billion that was previously assumed.
His research also showed that what is most relevant is not the total number, but rather the number of neurons present in the cortex – the area of the brain capable of storing memories, making new associations and creating simulations about what could happen from a certain behavior.
“This ability to carry out internal simulations of possible futures is, for me, the essence of intelligence”, says the neuroscientist, who is a columnist for Sheet.
“The cerebral cortex gives us the ability to have behavioral flexibility. The ability to act not in the way that sensory stimuli dictate, but in the way that matches projections for the future […]. In other words, intelligence is the flexibility to act in favor of those future states that we desire, that we find important.”
This, however, is a capacity, not a skill — it needs to be acquired through learning. Just as we have the ability to use language, but we are not exempt from learning it.
It turns out that, as the brain operates at the limit of its capacity, it needs to manage energy consumption, in a short blanket logic: to learn some skill, it is necessary to transfer more energy to a certain area of the brain and less to another.
From this observation come some tips that Suzana teaches at CasaFolha. The first is to pay attention to what you are trying to learn. “When you pay attention to something, it means you divert more resources to that and less to everything else your brain continues to do.”
Another tip is to have some form of positive feedback to validate learning. Along the same lines, it is important to adjust the difficulty level of what you are trying to learn. Too difficult becomes frustrating, but too easy is not stimulating — in both cases, the brain thinks the payoff is not worth it.
“The magic point of motivation is that 50% point, where your effort has exactly as much chance of working as it does of failing to do what you wanted.”
In her classes at CasaFolha, the neuroscientist says that these tricks can be used both to learn specific things and to learn how to stay flexible and learn how to learn.
“The best thing we can do for our own learning is to learn to give ourselves more learning opportunities,” he says.
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