Yes! All the amazing and powerful or terrible things we make or cause rely on our brains thinking them up in the first place. Brains allow us to have thoughts and language, and those then lead to great inventions, wars, medicine … anything you can think of that we come up with.
Brains let us sense the world around us. When we scrape our knees or see a flower, our knees or eyes don’t really feel or see what’s happening at all. The message has to go into our head to be worked out, and then it’s our brain that makes us feel that the pain is in the knee or makes us see a flower in front of us!
Our brains also allow us to do something special that animals can’t do, and that is think about ourselves. The fact that we can think about our own brains with our own brains is kind of weird but very clever.
What’s really exciting is how our brains can play tricks on us. Like when you see a magician perform and you think something impossible has happened – the brain can trick us in ordinary life, too. We can get scared watching a film even though we’re in no danger. Or we can think we’ve seen a ghost when we haven’t. Or sometimes a mean person makes us feel bad. When that happens, we can start thinking ‘I’m stupid, no one likes me,’ or ‘I’m worse than everyone else,’ when that’s not true at all … it’s just our brain playing tricks on us!
When that happens we can imagine knocking on the tops of our heads and telling our brains to CALM DOWN. You see, our brains try to help and protect us but sometimes they really overreact, especially to bad stuff. Two really good ideas if that keeps happening are to talk about the problem (that calms our brains down nicely) and to find a hobby that we’re good at (drawing, music, maths, magic, sport, anything) that we and our brains can enjoy together.
