• Question: What topic at school is best for the brain ?

    Asked by Keir to Adrian, Iroise, Joe, Rachel, Ria on 8 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Iroise Dumontheil

      Iroise Dumontheil answered on 8 Nov 2016:

      Do you mean best to make your brain works well? There isn’t anything particular I can suggest, because basically our brains adapt to perform whatever we want them to perform, through practice and repetition. So if you want to have a brain that is good at maths, then you need to do lots of maths, if you want to have a brain that is very quick at reading and knows a lot of vocabulary, then you need to read a lot, etc.

    • Photo: Ria Vaportzis

      Ria Vaportzis answered on 10 Nov 2016:

      Without being certain, I could argue that the best topic would be a topic that would get you out of your comfort zone. So if you’re good at maths then maths is within your comfort zone, and would pretty easy to grasp. However, if you’re struggling with maths then trying to make sense of maths could potentially be beneficial for the brain as you have to work harder.

      I stress that there’s no conclusive evidence for this, as I haven’t researched the effect of school subjects on the brain. However, in my research we found that when we taught older adults to learn using an iPad (that was out of their comfort zone), 10 weeks later they performed tasks faster than before being trained to use an iPad.

Comments