Train your brain

I wanted to post these two videos because it is easy to see that there is a distinct difference in the way it is framed for the audience that it is addressed to.  The first one that features Sam Wang is a 3-minute talk about the resilience of the brain; or how fast the brain can get back to a normal happiness state after a tragic event.  It is a talk that is very easy to understand and doesn’t get too in depth about how’s or why’s of the topic, just a little bit to spark the interest of the audience (something discussed in section 4.1 of the book!!).  

The movie would not import into my blog directly so here is the link.

Sam Wang on Happiness and the Brain

The second video features Richard Davidson.  He is apparently very well known in the neuroscience community because when I typed in ‘neuroscience and happiness’ into Google, he came up on most of the articles and videos.  His talk is framed very differently, it is directed to an audience with a much higher level of education because it was harder for him to keep my attention for this significantly longer video.  I would suggest just watching the first 30 seconds or 1 minute of his talk to see that although he uses a lot of higher-level jargon, he is very animated and makes you want to understand what he is talking about.  I want to look more into the “social and emotional education” that he is talking about and do a post about it later.  I also thought it was cool that he starts off by mentioning the brain’s ‘plasticity’ (aka resilience) just like Sam Wang.