Cognitive Neuroscience Researcher John Harmon on ”Our Brain and Mind Under Pressure”

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast for EPISODE #170 with John Harmon, an independent researcher who's developed a new way to define the mind and map it to the brain, called the MA (Memory Activation) Method. This cognitive neuroscience tool enhances CNS (Central Nervous System) medicine, natural language processing, cognitive computing and most of applied neuroscience.  John’s goal aligns directly with ours on the podcast—to enhance humanity’s understanding, appreciation and use of the human mind, and its manifestation in the brain. Watch this interview on YouTube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCjPIikAISU  Learn more about John Harmon here https://www.neuralnetworkbiomarkers.com/  See past Neuroscience Meets SEL Podcast Episodes here https://www.achieveit360.com/episodes/  On Today's Episode You Will Learn: ✔︎ How to get comfortable with not knowing everything when it comes to neuroscience, the brain, and learning. ✔︎ John's Core Research translated so we can all understand how our brain maps to learning something new. ✔︎ The importance of belief with our goals, and with anything we want to accomplish, like health, or eliminating pain. ✔︎ What we need to know about how our brain works under pressure (throwing a football in a game) or taking a test. For those who are new here, I'm Andrea Samadi, author, and educator from Toronto, Canada, now in Arizona, and like many of our listeners, have been fascinated with learning and understanding the science behind high performance strategies in our schools, our sports, and workplace environments. My vision for this podcast is to bring the experts to you, share their books, resources and ideas to help you to implement their proven strategies, and take the fear out of this new field of educational neuroscience. My hope is that this podcast will bridge the gap between the science, theory and application. I picked the perfect guest to do this today, because he will agree with me that this topic is not easy to explain conceptually. This is the reason why I record these podcasts using video so that I can add images to explain the concepts discussed that we might at first glance think of as difficult and dismiss them. But they are important and I hope that we can learn them together. It’s been a few years that I have followed John Harmon’s research through LinkedIn, where we connected, and I noticed that he often comments and what I call “plusses” an idea or takes it to the next level with his understanding. I started to read his comments in my early days of learning this field, because it helped me to see things through a new lens, from someone more immersed in the field than me, but when learning anything new, it takes effort. This is when you know that true learning is taking place. Whatever John would write, I would have to stop and really think about what he was saying. Here’s an Example: Neuroscience News Posted an article recently called Single Neurons Might Behave as Networks[i] and someone commented on their LinkedIn post[ii] “Why wouldn’t they behave as networks?” and I could agree with his train of thought as I have done a few episodes talking about Brain Network Theory[iii] and how we need to now think of the neural networks in the brain versus single parts of the brain, or neurons operating individually. Someone else chimed in to give their thoughts saying “isn’t the discovery here that a single neuron can function as its own self-contained network?” and John Harmon plussed this comment by providing his thoughts of his take-away of the article where he offers “the article as I read it talks about individual neurons and their function in the context of a larger network activity” and that “if a neuron doesn’t function as part of a network, then it’s a noisy neuron—ie. It doesn’t contribute, or is a part of, any stored mental process (perception, recognition, meaning, executive control, goals, language, attention, intention