Introduction to the Personal Brain Trainer Podcast
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An Introduction to the Personal Brain Trainer Podcast
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Welcome to the personal brain trainer podcast.
I'm Dr. Erica Warren and I'm Darius Namdaran on your hosts join us on an adventure to translate the scientific jargon and brain research into simple metaphors and stories.
We explore topics that will help you turbocharge your mind and steer around the invisible barriers so that you can achieve your goals brought to you by good sensory learning dot com educational and occupational therapy courses and remedial materials that bring delight to learning.
So welcome to this first introductory episode of the personal brain trainer podcast, it's just a short summary of what Erica and I are doing here together.
We're here to help you discover your best self, to be proud with your emotions and oil the gears of your mind, learn how to train your mind to achieve your own goals and we use lots of metaphors to help us personally digest this knowledge as practitioners in the field.
Erica's really gifted and knowledgeable about the areas of executive function and she's going to talk about stuff like visualization, the visual spatial sketch pad, the phonological loop automaticity growth mindset, all of this kind of jargon we talk through and make it digestible and understandable by being able to picture it and visualize it and apply it to our life so that you and I we can learn how to make our memory a no brainer, to be able to remember stuff, how to stay focused how to pay attention and our emotions, how to manage them and stay above those emotions and sort of direct them and control them and very much about taking education for Children and adults out of the musty old box and learning how to learn.
So, in a summary, that's pretty much what we talked about in the personal brain trainer podcast Erica I did a quick overview there.
What are your thoughts on all of that?
Yeah, I think that what we really want to do is present hacks for people so that they can manage their mind more clearly that they understand it.
You can't really manage anything unless you understand it.
So going deep into that and also having the strategies we want, strategies that people can use.
So for example, if you're not very good at remembering names well perhaps we'll do a podcast on how to remember names, different Things that we all want to be able to do in life.
We want to be able to manage our emotions.
We'll be talking about things like the 92nd rule, the 92nd role.
Is that Really an emotion is a chemical response?
This is something by Jill Bolte Taylor and she is a neuroscientist and she has determined that an emotion only lasts 90 seconds.
And if that's the case we don't have to experience negative emotions from more than 90 seconds.
And what happens is we experience them for a longer period of time because we feed them.
We're going to be talking about things like automaticity or what is that did you know that we actually do things subconsciously when we learn things automatically.
Our subconscious takes over and does things for us.
And there are times where we want to learn things to Automaticity and there are times where we don't.
There are times where we must be mindful.
We must stop and drop into the moment and it's very much about our abilities, the actual innate abilities of our mind and the different kinds of minds.
And sometimes we come from a background where often the people we work with are dyslexic or have executive function difficulties and they're called disabled whereas actually they're differently abled.
And there's a real helpfulness to look at the abilities we've got in our mind and how we can discover those abilities, strengthen those abilities, and even compensate for those abilities right?
And I think that we are really attracted to people that are similar to us.
However, the people we will learn the most from are those that are very different from us and we really want to embrace learning diversity.
Let's look at the diversity of brains that we have out there, and we want to optimize and we want to help these people be the best that they can be have the most amazing minds because hey in this world it's those minds that help our whole world grow and develop in a way that could save us in the long run.
Yeah, what we're doing here eric and I is having a conversation.
We're on an exploration ourselves.
So, I meet with Erica weekly and we have these conversations about the minds and from her purse and from my perspective and those conversations are so interesting for us that we got to the point where we've got our own podcast, different podcasts.
We thought to ourselves look we should record these conversations to make them into a podcast so other people can eavesdrop on this exploration and discover where we're going.
So, what we're doing here is we're bringing you into a journey of discovery that we ourselves are having we’re maybe only a few steps ahead of where you are. We might not even be ahead. We might be beside where you are.
We like to have accurate visual models, constructs of what we're trying to explore from the academic realm.
So, Erica will bring an academic perspective some research and then we'll get together the both of us and digest it together and say what's that like?
And sometimes we'll say it's a bit like it's like you're talking about a car and shifting through gears to become automatic at a process.
Is that automaticity or we might be thinking about working memory.
And is that like juggling or is that like an amphitheater where it temporarily comes in and and there's all sorts of different metaphors that help us more accurately understand how something works and even the process of deciding.
Is this an accurate metaphor or not.
Is a learning process about zooming in on what is an accurate representation, and you actually understand the subject better.
So that's a big part of what we do here at the brain trainer.
Broadcast and metaphors are so helpful.
They actually enable the brain to integrate to visualize.
And when we can visualize a picture really says 1000 words and having those metaphors will really help you to just as it helps us to digest the material will help you to digest the material.
More importantly, it will get you to hold onto the material so that you really have essentially a map of understanding your own mind, how to navigate it, that you know how to conduct it, that you know how to play with it, that you know how to enjoy it.
Yeah.
You know one of the core reasons to have a metaphor is it's fun, it's memorable, you learn visually and you get that Dopamine hit had some fascinating discussions about that.
One of the episodes that are coming, we're giving you this intro having recorded a number of episodes already to give you a bit of a flavor of what's coming in the next episodes and just to let you know a little bit about us as professionals.
I'm an educational therapist and I often call myself a personal trainer for the brain. For the little kids that I work with, I tell them I'm a magician because I give them tricks on how to learn better. I have done this for the last 20 years in New York and Darius and I met through a mutual friend and became fast friends.
And Darius, tell us a little bit about your expertise.
I'm on the other side of the pond, I'm over here in Scotland in the UK and Edinburgh and I am the CEO of an online training company that helps dyslexic Children survive and thrive in school by using their imagination to take visual notes instead of long lists of notes.
We teach them how to take visual notes with a mind mapping technique that we call the bullet map process.
You know, my background is in business and I've got dyslexia myself.
In many ways, my main gift within bullet map academy is to translate things into understandable ways to explain it to the Children.
You might have seen my stick shift video about sitting in a car and explaining dyslexia to people in terms of, its like a stick shift car compared to an automatic car.
There's nothing wrong with the engine, it's just a different gearbox and that sort of thing.
That's my, my main thing.
Erica is absolutely brilliant at taking the research that's out there and turning them into training materials and puzzles and games and the amount of resources you've got out there is Erica is just overwhelming.
It's amazing.
Well, thank you.
I have a website called good sensory learning where I have a lot of materials for both educational therapists and parents or even other therapists that want to really help kids optimize their potential.
But you know, I love what you're doing to Darius and you're not only working with Children, but you're also going out there into your community and helping adults tell the audience a little bit about that.
Yeah, I'm starting a different business as well, which is an app development business to help adults with dyslexia in the UK with specialized software and training for the iPad in fact, and that that's sort of a new thing that is just about to emerge in the next few weeks.
I've been doing it on the side a little bit alongside with the Children and the parents and just learning how to bring all of these techniques and tools into something that isn't too clunky.
You see I'm really passionate about it's not technology that solves some of the difficulties of dyslexia or a D.
D or executive function.
Their tools what really solves it as technique.
So, it's tech, but it's technique.
So often in this realm of brain training of developing your mind, you throw a tool at it to do list or asana or an iPad or whatever.
But it's the technique that really matters with the tool, you still need, the tools, you're absolutely right.
So sometimes these tools will make you or your brain a little bit lazy because it does things for you.
However, the techniques can help you to learn how to manage your mind and activate your brain and establish new neural pathways that can help you to really conduct your own, be the executive of your own life.
Yes, be the executive, because essentially that's what we're talking about here.
So, you've got a little bit of background about where we're coming from.
Erica and I are coming and having a conversation and you might be a parent of a child with different learning abilities, you might be a professional wanting to understand how to train your mind and basically as adults, we are here to learn for ourselves as well as for the people, we serve more about how the brain works and how we can work with the brain and train it.
So, come on this journey with Erica and I we don't know where this is going to go.
Every week we meet for an hour and just talk through things.
Okay, so Erica, I'm really looking forward to our first proper episode, which is what is visualization and how can it help struggling learners.
I'm really looking forward to doing that with you, Erica.
Fantastic.
Okay guys, see you next week.
Bye bye.
This podcast is brought to you by bullet Map Academy.
We help Children and adults organize their thoughts creatively and unlock their dyslexia as potential with the world's first online dyslexia School for study skills.
Thank you for joining our conversation here at the Personal Brain trainer podcast.
This is Dr. Erica Warren and Darius Namdaran.
On check out the show notes for links to resources mentioned in the podcast, and please leave us a review and shares on social media until next time.
Bye bye.