Be a scientific American

The September 1979 issue of “Scientific American” magazine had a simple but profound theme: the brain. I was in college during the late 1970s, and I had just begun my personal subscription to this popular American science magazine that summer because I decided I wanted to keep up with the latest scientific discoveries and broaden my horizons about how and why the world works the way it does. The magazine covers a wide range of scientific topics from month-to-month and year-to-year, but that special issue devoted to the workings of the human brain stood out for me as having a pivotal influence on my future career path and profession.

So, no, I didn’t become a brain surgeon or a psychiatrist or a neuroscientist. I wasn’t quite that ambitious. But I did eventually become a science teacher, and I continue to spend my days discussing, describing, and explaining to students how the natural world – especially the living world – works. And teaching and learning about science (and everything else) is intimately associated with the structure and function of human brains, which are quite possibly the most complex systems of matter and energy in the entire universe.

We can certainly see how the brain itself could be intimidating to study and understand in terms of its anatomy and physiology. You may remember from school some of the major structures and regions of the brain, such as the cerebrum (the outer wrinkly surface of your brain that performs the higher-order functions), the cerebellum (the part at the lower back of your brain that helps with controlling and coordinating movement and motion), and the brainstem (located between the lower part of your brain and the upper end of your spinal cord; among its many functions are that it keeps you breathing while you are asleep). But you might not be too familiar with some of the smaller, more specialized regions of your brain, such as your hippocampus, amygdala or hypothalamus. The good news is that our brains, like most other parts of our bodies, do a remarkable job of working rather well all by themselves, even if we don’t know much about the details of how they do it. But I encourage you to brush up on your brain! Just Google “the human brain” sometime when you don’t have anything better to do and look at the basic brain diagrams and do a little reading about how your brain works.

We use our brains every day, of course, for intentional thoughts and actions that range from simple to complex. However, our brains and bodies also run on a sort of “automatic pilot” that’s always active and running in the background taking care of routine vital functions that keep us alert and aware of our surroundings and help us make rapid, short-cut decisions about things on a moment-to-moment basis as we go through our daily lives. You might say our brains are always looking out for us, trying to keep us safe from harm and generally helping us to live our lives in a positive and productive manner. But as we and our children, grandchildren, and distant descendants travel steadily into the future, I believe we will find that we’ll need to call on our brains for much higher levels of thinking on a more regular basis.

Left to themselves, however, it seems that our brains tend to be a little on the lazy side. As teachers and students are both well aware, the brain often needs to be given a little nudge (sometimes a big push) to be able to understand certain concepts and processes found in science and math and other complex areas of study. Our physical bodies are analogous in the similar sense that we also often must push ourselves to exercise and workout, to do more than we would otherwise ordinarily do. And what pushes us to both think better and feel better? Our brain, of course. The thoughts and attitudes in our brain can enable and energize us to become stronger and healthier in our bodies as well as better capable of learning and understanding things (science and everything else) in our brain and mind.

It would probably be fair to say that over the past couple hundred years the average American citizen didn’t really need to acquire an in-depth knowledge and understanding of topics such as science and math; that has been left mostly to the so-called “experts” in these areas. Indeed, the field of science itself has been developing in a progressive and formative chain of discoveries during that time. Nowadays, however, our modern information-based civilization is rooted in a common foundation of science, engineering, and technology and demands a lot more from all of us in terms of scientific literacy as we struggle to understand the implications of complex scenarios such as climate change, pandemics and genetic engineering. As citizens of both the United States and the modern world, we will increasingly need to acquire and maintain a more scientific mindset that helps us cope with the challenges of the present and future.

I still to this day subscribe to “Scientific American” magazine and look forward to its well-written articles on many different scientific topics. And I often think back to that issue from long ago (which I still have, a bit faded and yellow) and how it inspired me to make better use of my brain so that I could someday pass along to students and others my passion for science and the benefits of scientific thinking for all Americans.