The Brain's Food

In “Inside The Brain” by Ronald Kotulak, there is a section that talks about stroke and spinal cord damage. And a paragraph goes like: “The suicide reaction—its scientific name is apoptosis-begins when a damaged or dying neuron releases massive amounts of a neurotransmitter called glutamate. Glutamate is normally one of the most import chemical messengers in the brain. But when too much glutamate is present, the NMDA receptors (“doors” on cell surfaces) are jammed open. Sodium floods in, causing the cell to swell. Calcium rushes in and smashes at the cell’s genetic controls, producing enzymes that eat away cell’s internal support structure and destructive molecules, called free radicals that chew away its membrane wall.”

Therefore, the cure to prevent cerebral damage is to develop drugs that block NMDA receptors being jammed open when stroke or spinal cord damage happens. However, it is not easy to let outside chemicals to wade through the brain-blood barrier, a self-protective way for the brain cells. Now neuroscientists and neurologists have come up some drugs that can “fool” neurons to let drugs go through their protective wall and further fix the damage.

I think it would be very interesting to find out whether an adult has some unknown impairment in the brain when learning a second language. The conventional thought is adults are not like children in terms of language acquisition. In some respects, it is proved that children learn a language differently from adults, especially in terms of cognitive development. However, I think adults might suffer some minor cereal impairments and are not aware of them. Therefore, rote memorization or repetition is not going to elevate an adult’s learning unless the problem is solved first in the brain.

I also love the phrase “The brain’s food is education”, which indicates everyone can train his or her brain and keep it in shape regardless of age. Learning new things can trigger new synapses between neurons and makes a person become smarter. Who wouldn’t want to be cleverer? There must be hope for all of us if we want to maintain a healthy brain, let alone acquiring a second language efficiently.

My preliminary approach is to monitor adults’ brain activities when being exposed to foreign language learning. The fMRI or PET scanning should reveal that perhaps there is something abnormal in the brain. Then we can precisely help subjects with the right methods to reinforce their neurons so as to acquire language more effectively, and not just learning via the conventional way without taking the cerebral problems into account.