Brain Education

As you get older, it is as important that you have a dream for your life as it was when you were young. You may have a better chance of achieving it, now that the basics needs of life-Financial security, starting a career, raising a family, etc.-are no longer of primary importance to you. So, before you close this book up and put it back on the shelf, make sure that you have developed a vision for yourself. Make a plan for who you want to be one, five, or ten years from now. This does not have to mean starting a new career or ten years from now. This does not have to mean starting a new career or taking on some huge project (but that is okay, too). More importantly, it means becoming the kind of person you really want to be in terms of character and your interaction with the world around you. If you have ever thought to yourself, ” I want to leave the world a better place than I found it,” now is the time to act on that desire.

To find your vision, find what really fills you with a sense of joy and contentment. For most, this will probably involve contributing something of value to your community or the world. Don’t be afraid to set your goal high and to dream big.

In addition, it helps to circulate oxygen and nutrients to the brain and stimulates the production of hormones that combat stress and depression.

Just as you guide your children to create healthy habits for nutrition and cleanliness while they are young, guide them also to make physical movement part of their healthy lifestyle. As you may know from your own personal experience, it can be difficult to establish a habit of regular exercise in adulthood.

If your child gains this habit now, it will be very firmly established in the actual circuitry of the brain, and he or she will naturally crave physical movement of all types, rather than avoid it as an unappealing chore.

The first section consists of a collection of basic stretching exercises for kids.

These yoga-like movements are designed to open up the body’s joints, to stretch and strengthen the muscular system, and to promote relaxation. Exercises of this type are wellsuited to brain development because they require the child to use a wide variety of muscles in unique combinations.

Any kind of exercise is good, but these are especially effective for creating a balanced and strong bodily structure while at the same time strengthening unity of the mind and body. And kids will become more aware of their own body as they gain flexibility and coordination. If you would like to adapt them to make them fun and appealing to your child, feel free to do so. The important thing is to move!

from the book ‘Power brain for kids’ by ilchi lee

Brain Education is especially appropriate for today’s children because it offers tools to cope with issues that are unique to the young generation.

Children today are sometimes referred to as “Generation M” because media dominate their lives in so many ways. Media technology, such as cable television and the Internet, provides a constant and unlimited flow of information.

Youngsters must choose which ideas to accept and which to reject. Their choices in this regard will affect their patterns of thinking about themselves and the world around them. The job of the educator and the parent is to help guide children in making these important decisions, which is a difficult task in a media culture more interested in selling jeans and cola than in creating well-rounded, confident individuals.

Brain Education, in its essence, offers simple tools that provide children with the power to choose and use information more effectively.

from ‘Power brain for kids’ book by ilchi lee

The process of Brain Education is divided into five steps. As you progress through the twelve lessons, you and your child will move naturally through these five steps. However, perfecting any one of the steps is a lifelong journey, and the skills gained in earlier steps will continue to be utilized in later steps. Throughout the Brain Education five steps, about which you can ask questions using Ask Ilchi Lee, the creator of Brain Education, You will notice that most of the lessons in this blog focus on the first and second steps, which are most appropriate for children and beginning practitioners.

Step 1

Brain sensitizing: Participants become more aware of the brain and its functions. This step may include some basic understanding of brain structure, but more importantly, it creates awareness of the brain as the organ of all perception, especially sensory perception. Furthermore, practitioners can reawaken sensory perception that may have become dulled through habit or environmental overstimulation. The sensitizing process begins with relaxation of body and mind through stretching and breathing exercises. This step primarily corresponds to Lesson 1-3.

Ilchi Lee says in his book Brain Wave Vibration

Information used to be held by an elite few, the scholars and rulers of a time gone by. But now there is an excess of information available for everyone. Every piece of information is like a calorie. The brain, which has a natural love for acquiring information, slurps up the information wherever it can be found. Soon the brain is overwhelmed by the vast amount of information entering it. Information in its own right is not bad, no more than food is bad. But too much is too much, especially when the quality is not good.

Like fast food, you can get a lot of information cheap these days. Your mind, like your body, gets heavy and clogged up quickly if you don’t make good choices about what you feed it. Brain Wave Vibration is meant to help you stop processing information, almost like a temporary information fast, so that you can begin to take control of your information consumption. To determine your information nutrition level, ask yourself three basic questions.

Ilchi Lee has taught me a lot about the relationship between the brain and information. To me, it is a very impressive to say “Think of information as food for your brain.” Like fast food, you can eat lots of information cheap everyday. That does not mean that the information has high quality. We should care about the information we take, as much as we do about the food we eat.

The number of academic articles on this topic is staggering, offering research on almost every possible topic, from learning disabilities to gender differences to brain development. The underlying message of all this research is very simple: to understand the child’s brain is to understand the child.

Ilchi Lee developed the Brain Education method in South Korea in the 1980s as an updating of traditional Korean mind-body health training systems. The principles and practices of the method were then combined with knowledge about the brain gained from neuroscience, psychology, and other fields. Its essential goal, however, remains very straightforward and practical — the physical, emotional, social, and academic betterment of human beings. If you have any question about Brain Education, you can use Ask Ilchi Lee function of Lee’s main website.

Brain Education is currently thriving in hundreds of schools in Korea, and it has recently been successfully introduced in several K-8 schools in the United States. BE curriculum has been especially successful in teaching the English language to Korean schoolchildren in after-school programs, allowing kids to quickly and easily absorb a language very different from their own. Also the Korean Institute of Brain Science has hosted three International Brain HSP Olympiads, in which BE-trained children and adults have demonstrated a wide range of advanced mental skills, including information processing, memory, and even extrasensory ability.

Brain Research has clearly established that emotional and physical health directly influence children’s ability to learn and consequently affect their performance in school (see Vail). Essentially, the best students are the happiest students. For that reason, Brain Education seeks to enhance learning ability by first creating happier and healthier children. Through consistent BE practice, children gain a sense of empowerment toward the creation of a fulfilling and healthy lifestyle.

Of course, Brain Education created by Ilchi Lee is not only educational system to emphasize the role of the brain in the learning process. Educators are increasingly turning to the discoveries of neuroscience to help them better understand how students learn, and many brain-based educational methods are in use today. In some ways, however, the study of the human brain is still in its infancy, and many aspects of brain function remain a mystery. You could say that we are just now entering “the era of the brain,” as neuroscientific knowledge increases almost daily, and the link between this information and education pedagogy grows stronger and stronger.

Our children do not live in a world where belief systems and bodies of knowledge are passed from generation to generation without external influences. Rather, today’s child must face a veritable smorgasbord of information from which to choose. Our children must be able to adapt and process all this vaired information easily and peacefully, so that they can make the best choices for themselves and the world as a whole.

For this reason, we must help our children develop brains prepared for this expanded role. Through proper education, the world becomes a treasure trove of possibility for our children, rather than a dreaded Pandora’s box of contradictory ideas and misinformation. In the past, educational systems have focused on the storage of facts appropriate to the culture in which they exist. That approach is no longer adequate in today’s complex world. Children must develop skills to make their minds flexible and highly adaptive.

The primary goal of Brain Education is to create “power brains” that are creative, peaceful and productive. Its intention is not only to make better students but also to create happier, healthier people. While education traditionally emphasizes analytical and verbal skills (consider, for example, the content of the SAT), Brain Education develops interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, as well.