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VALERIA GREK

@mindbrainedu

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🧠 Educator
exploring the mind, decoding the brain
cognitive neuroscience

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I see brains everywhere, you? 🧠 taken in San Francisco, California by @mindbrainedu

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5 hours ago

“Brains are the new tits.” - Dr. Endurance from Resilience Department taken in Los Angeles, California by @mindbrainedu

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a day ago

What a privilege it is to be alive.
To see. To feel. To think. To move. To experience the world.

My fascination with the complexity of the human body, and the nervous system in particular, has no limits.

Though life often has its own way of reminding you that being here is not something to take for granted, the body has its own way of surprising you with just how much it can endure, adapt, and overcome, even when you don’t know whether it will.

I can’t believe I’ve made it up to this point.

To being (and feeling!) very alive! 🥂

P.S. In memory of the one and only Gunther von Hagens @gunthervonhagensbodyworlds . @thetechinteractive , thank you for the unforgettable experience. taken in San Jose, California by @mindbrainedu

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4 days ago

Research shows that metacognition is more powerful than IQ in many real-world contexts.

IQ tests give a score that predicts certain outcomes, like academic success or job performance in structured roles, reasonably well. Indeed, they do a good job of measuring the reasoning and problem-solving skills they set out to measure. But that isn’t the same thing as measuring a person’s potential.

The idea isn’t that IQ is useless—it provides the foundation giving you power, but it doesn’t automatically mean you’ll use that power wisely, adapt when things change, or avoid dumb mistakes.

Research shows that metacognition adds unique value beyond raw intelligence, driving better creativity, adaptability, complex problem-solving, and long-term success in life. It acts as a multiplier. Strongly linked to the prefrontal cortex (the area involved in self-reflection, planning, and self-regulation), it gives you an internal “observer” or control system for your brain. Instead of running on autopilot, you step back and ask: “Is this thought helpful? Is my current approach effective? What should I change?”

Metacognitive skills can even compensate for cognitive limitations and remain a powerful predictor of real-world performance.

#metacognition #iq #intelligence #neuroscience #learning

References:

-Brown, A. L. (1987). Metacognition, executive control, self-regulation and other more mysterious mechanisms. Metacognition, motivation and understanding

-Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive–developmental inquiry. American Psychologist

-Nelson, T., & Narens, L. (1990). Metamemory: A theoretical framework and new findings. Psychology of Learning and Motivation

-Veenman, M. V. J., Wilhelm, P., & Beishuizen, J. J. (2004). The relation between intellectual and metacognitive skills from a developmental perspective. Learning and Instruction taken in Montreal, Canada by @mindbrainedu

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6 months ago

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” — Michael Jordan

[Even the stray hair on my hoodie has grit — it held on the entire video. :D]

Why do some people achieve more than others? Searching for the secret to success is one of the central goals in the field of psychology.

Grit in your brain primarily relies on 3 interconnected networks:

- Prefrontal Cortex (where your forehead is) — your brain’s “CEO.” It handles self-regulation, planning, and goal-setting, overrides short-term impulses, and reflects on mistakes and failures — that moment when you ask yourself, “What could I have done differently?” Higher grit is associated with more efficient PFC activity, meaning the region works smarter, not harder. (Wang et al. 2017)

- Anterior Cingulate Cortex (deep behind your forehead) — your brain’s “willpower muscle.” It evaluates effort vs. reward, monitors errors, and pushes you to persist rather than give up when things get hard. Higher grit is associated with stronger ACC function during effortful decisions. (Touroutoglou et al. 2020)

- Striatum (deep inside your brain) — your brain’s “motivation and reward hub,” deeply involved in dopamine pathways. It keeps you motivated even when progress is slow. Gritty people show stronger connectivity between the striatum and prefrontal regions.
(Myers et al. 2016)

The great news is that because these are plastic networks, deliberate practice builds them. Strategies like setting meaningful long-term goals, embracing discomfort regularly (e.g., deliberate practice in skills, exercise, or learning), and reflecting on progress can greatly improve connectivity and efficiency in these regions over time. This is why grit and resilience are skills that can be cultivated, not just innate traits.

P.S. To my mama who’s taught me never to give up❤️

@angelalduckworth

#grit #growthmindset #neuroplasticity #resilience #perseverance taken in Montreal, Canada by @mindbrainedu

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5 months ago

by @mindbrainedu

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7 months ago

In the 1950s, Henry Molaison had brain surgery to treat severe epilepsy. Though his seizures got dramatically better, what shocked doctors was what they described as “a very grave, recent memory loss.” It turned out Henry’s memory loss was a double-edged sword. He didn’t just lose his past — he was no longer able to imagine his future.

Another patient, Kent Cochrane, who lost his memory after a motorcycle accident, once described thinking about the future as “being in a room with nothing there and having a guy tell you to go find a chair — and there’s nothing there.”

These two cases revealed something fundamental: the ability to remember the past and the ability to imagine the future are deeply connected. Lose one, and you lose the other. And strikingly, both activities light up the exact same regions in your brain.

Your brain doesn’t store memories like a photo album. It uses them as raw material — reconstructing, recombining, simulating — so you can navigate what hasn’t happened yet.
Your mind is a time machine. It can only build tomorrow if there are pieces of yesterday!

#memory #neuroscience #remembering #learning #forgetting

References:
-Corkin, S. (2013). Permanent present tense: The unforgettable life of the amnesic patient H.M. Basic Books.
-Schacter et al. (2012). The future of memory: Remembering, imagining, and the brain. Neuron.
Scoville, W. B. (1954). The limbic lobe in man. Journal of Neurosurgery.
-Tulving, E. (1985). Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychology.
-Tulving et al. (1988). Priming of semantic autobiographical knowledge: A case study of retrograde amnesia. Brain and Cognition. taken in Montreal, Canada by @mindbrainedu

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5 months ago

You literally live inside your own interpretation box because your reality isn’t simply given to you — it is constructed by you.

Looooooong before fancy MRI machines allowed us to see inside human heads, in “The Republic”, Plato described prisoners chained in a cave, seeing only shadows on a wall, and mistaking those shadows for reality: what we perceive is not the world itself, but our mind’s version of it. That’s ~380 BC, people!

Modern neuroscience confirms it. The reality you “see” is not what’s there — it’s your brain’s best guess at what’s there, based on an internal model of the world constructed from everything you’ve ever lived through. This process is called predictive coding: instead of passively taking in information, the brain self-organises around minimising the mismatch between its internally generated predictions and the actual sensory inputs it receives. It constantly generates expectations about what comes next & learns when they are confirmed or challenged. Your brain is not a passive receiver. It is a prediction machine.

And here’s what makes this deeply personal: individual differences in internal models formed through experience shape visual analysis in idiosyncratic ways: no two people’s models are identical.

Your brain is not showing you the world. It is showing you its model of the world.

P.S. Just as perception of the world can be mistaken, perception of the self can be mistaken too: the experience of being you — your body, identity, emotions, and sense of presence — is something the brain actively constructs. It isn’t a fixed thing that exists independently of the processes that create it.

#neuroscience #perception #selfawareness #mindsetmatters #brain

Resources:

Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?. Nature Reviews Neuroscience

Wang G, Chen L, Cichy RM, Kaiser D. (2025 ) Enhanced and idiosyncratic neural representations of personally typical scenes. Proceedings of the Royal Society B taken in Montreal, Canada by @mindbrainedu

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6 months ago

The way you see the world, navigate its challenges, and chase what matters lies in your biological uniqueness.

Just like your DNA, eyes, and fingerprints are yours alone, your brain has its own special wiring pattern — called a connectome. Shaped by your life experiences, it determines how you learn, decide, focus, and respond to the world. These natural differences shape your intelligence, personality, emotional processing, and social intuition.
(fMRI studies can even identify you from a crowd with over 99% accuracy!)

You are not “better” or “worse.” You’re not falling behind — you’re simply walking your own path, doing everything within your means. And those means are shaped by your unique biology and history.

No one else will ever experience life exactly as you do.
Embrace it. ❤️

#yourlifematters #neuroscience #psychology #brain #mind taken in Canada by @mindbrainedu

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6 months ago

Memory is often perceived as a tape recorder or a photograph that delivers an exact playback of what once happened. But memory is not reproductive. It is reconstructive.

Every time you remember a moment from your life (what we call episodic memory), you’re not accessing the original event itself. Instead, you’re actively rebuilding a version of it, often influenced by the version your brain created during previous recalls.

With each retrieval, the brain pieces together fragments of stored information and blends them with your current knowledge, expectations, emotions, and even new details from outside sources. This makes memory flexible and useful for everyday life, but also prone to errors, distortions, or false memories.

That’s where the saying “There is your side, my side, and the truth” comes from.

Why does this happen?

The answer lies in its elegant but complex architecture. Unlike a single video file stored in one place, a memory doesn’t live in a dedicated “circuit” or folder in the brain. It exists as a unified engram complex — a network of sparse groups of neurons (called engram cells) that are functionally linked across many different brain regions.
Retrieval (remembering) isn’t a simple playback. Your brain has to reactivate and bind these distant neural ensembles back together through a process of pattern completion. This distributed design gives memory its remarkable adaptability in a changing world, but also makes the whole process inherently error-prone.

#brain #memory #neuroscience #learning #psychology by @mindbrainedu

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6 months ago

This small genetic difference allowed the incredible brain change. Humans are not cognitively unique because we have a completely different brain, but because a small set of genetic changes reshaped the neocortex—that “intelligent part” which enables higher cognition, e.g. abstract thinking, language, planning, decision-making and so on. In contrast to other species, the Homo Sapiens brain can worry about tomorrow, replay the past, imagine things that don’t exist… and question itself.

Our neocortex got much larger in its surface area by becoming more folded (those valleys and ridges you see when you look at the brain), making up ~80% of the brain and coming to dominate it.

The associative areas—the ones responsible for combining information and creating meaning—got massively expanded, allowing purely unique human functions.

#brain #neuroscience #humanbrain #brainfacts by @mindbrainedu

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6 months ago

Watch out! Your brain is wired to chase the next reward.

DOPAMINE is the brain’s reward chemical, most commonly associated with pleasure.

S❤️x, shopping, smelling cookies baking in the oven—all of these trigger dopamine release, or a “dopamine rush”.

Primarily produced in the midbrain (the VTA & substantia nigra), this feel-good neurotransmitter is also involved in reinforcement. That’s why when something gives you joy, your brain pushes you to come back to it again and again.

But dopamine also has its dark side: the intense feeling of reward, which doesn’t allow you to stop.

From social media to fast food and c🫥ca🧪n addiction—all of them are driven by dopamine.

It also plays a role in:

• cognition (learning, attention)
• mood
• movement
• sleep & pain processing
• body & hormone regulation

This system has been wired into the human brain for thousands of years. It evolved to help us survive. Today, awareness gives you something powerful: once you understand it, you are no longer just reacting—you are in control. by @mindbrainedu

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7 months ago