John Medina

32 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School

Brain Rules

Presents twelve scientifically proven facts about how the human brain works and explains how to apply each fact to get the most out of one's brain on a daily basis, discussing such concepts as attention, memory, and sleep.

12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

Barry Hess

I was a little disappointed in the book. I think the hype machine surrounding the book outpaced it. In some ways, I would just as soon stuck with what I learned from the hype machine (interviews, web site, blog posts, etc) rather than bothering with the book. Most of the content had already been presented.

You'd think the depth of the book would counter this, but it didn't so much for me. I realize all the studies in the book were published, peer reviewed, and recreated. But the manner in which they were presented was fairly flippant, "one study one time maybe proved such and such might be true." So even if it isn't the case, the writing gave the appearance that some of the theories weren't yet deeply defended.

Here are the 12 "Brain Rules" in summary, with some of my thoughts thrown in:


EXERCISE

Our brains evolved while we walked for miles per day. Thus they think better while exercising.

There are physiological reasons to exercise as well - blood gets to your brain and delivers good product.

Aerobic exercise twice per week halves risk of dementia and cuts Alzheimer's by 60 percent. His general point is that older people who seem really sharp by-in-large exercised throughout their life. Later he makes the point that they were also very curious, lifetime learners. So maybe it's a combination of things.

An ongoing theme throughout the book is how Medina would change learning and work environments. Basically, he'd literally have you on a treadmill at work. I'd try it if it weren't such an expensive experiment…


SURVIVAL

Lots of talk about brain evolution, but not too much to really grab onto. Symbolic reasoning is a uniquely human talent. The guess is it arose from the need to understand intentions and motivations, allowing us to coordinate within groups.


WIRING

Another section with little to grasp for every day life. Basically, learning physically changes the wiring in the brain. Also, people's brain regions develop at different rates and information is stored in different places. So in terms of teaching people, that's a daunting variety of brain makeup! Again, he gets into how this knowledge should effect the way we teach.


ATTENTION

Brains don't multitask.

We are better at seeing patterns and abstracting the meaning of an event than recording details.

Emotional arousal helps the brain learn.

Audiences check out after 10 minutes, but you can grab them back by telling narratives or creating rich emotional events.

There were good bits about lecture design:

- Every 10 minutes, do something that "buys" another 10 minutes of attention.
- Provide the gist first. Leverage the brain preferring general meaning to details.
- Sprinkle in "where we are" moments through the presentation. Otherwise the audience has to "multitask" to figure it out themselves. Explain where a concept fits into the rest of the presentation.

More about the 10-minute "hook":

- Trigger an emotion: fear, laughter, happiness, nostalgia, whatever
- Attract evolutionary instincts by making the hook describe a threatening even or a reproductive event (do this tastefully, natch).
- Crisp, to the point narratives work as a hook
- The hook should be relevant to the content else the audience will mistrust you. Also keeps them in the flow of the material even during "breaks."
- The hook should either look backwards (to previous 10 minutes) or forward within the content
- In an hour lecture, good early hooks mean you may be able to skip hooks in the second half of the lecture


SHORT-TERM MEMORY

Most events that predict whether something learned also will be remembered occur in the first few seconds of learning. The more elaborately we encode a memory during its initial moments, the stronger it will be.

You can improve your chance of remembering something if you reproduce the environment in which you first put it into your brain.

Practically speaking, this means that real-world examples greatly improve the ability to remember something. Constantly pepper main learning points with meaningful experiences.

Compelling introductions matter. He described a cinema professor he had that basically started stripping at the beginning of class. Once he was down to his shorts he said, "You will probably never forget now that some films use physical nudity to express emotional vulnerability. What could be more vulnerable than being naked?" The memory of an event is stored in the same places that were initially recruited to perceive the learning event. The more brain structures recruited (door handles created, as Medina says), the easier it is to gain access to the information later.


LONG-TERM MEMORY

Those memories that survive the first few minutes strengthen with time.

Our brains give us only an approximate view of reality because they mix new knowledge with past memories and store them together as one.

The way to make long-term memory more reliable is to incorporate new information gradually and repeat it in timed intervals. He described a school day where a few new topics were learned back to back and then iterated again throughout the day. Then in a couple weeks or month they were repeated again. It would be interesting to consider how to do this for oneself.


SLEEP

The biological drive for an afternoon nap is universal.

Loss of sleep basically hurts every mind and motor function.

Basically, the best thing for learning is sleep. Lots of it. People vary in how much they need, but their doing themselves a disservice by not getting enough sleep.


STRESS

The body's defense system releases adrenaline and cortisol and is built for things such as getting away fro saber-toothed tigers. Chronic stress, however, dangerously deregulates a system built only for short-term stress responses.

Chronic stress (release of adrenaline) can lead to scarring of blood vessels which in turn leads to heart attacks and strokes. Cortisol damages cells in the brain crippling your ability to learn and remember.

Helplessness is the worst kind of stress.

Emotional stress has huge impacts across society, on children's ability to work in school and on employees' productivity at work.

This chapter got to me in a couple ways. I'm in touch with people who work at my former employer. It's amazing to me how much stress is created by the employer's childish corporate policies. I've long thought they were working against their goals, and this chapter about stress puts brain science on my side as well.

More sadly, the discussion of how children react to stress in the home really made me step back a bit. I tend to think people should be responsible for their own education and such. I realize that some environments really make it difficult to learn. I suppose in a sense I understood it as stress, but I hadn't really thought of it that way before. Interesting, also, that stress from, say, fighting parents is enough to completely derail a kid.

I'm not a really an "it takes a village" person at all, but this chapter had me rethinking that mentality a bit. At the very least, I'm really in tune now to how important it is for my wife and I to keep a happy, healthy relationship for our kids' sakes.


SENSORY INTEGRATION

We learn best if we stimulate several senses at once. Smell has the unusual power to bring back memories, probably because smell signals bypass the thalamus and head straight to their destinations. He again discussed ways to incorporate smell with learning, but it didn't seem to me that the science is very strong yet in this area.


VISION

Vision is by far our most dominant sense, taking up half of our brain's resources.

What we see is what our brain tells us we see - it's not 100 percent accurate. (For instance, our eyes have blind spots that the brain interpolates.)

Also, the eye "sees" things, then disassembles it all to send to the brain, which reassembles it. Fairly crazy stuff.

Pictures are our best learning tool - not the written or spoken word. He discussed the launch of USA Today and how it was laughed at. Now it's tops in circulation, and he wasn't calling that necessarily a bad thing.


GENDER

This was a really interesting chapter. However, it gets pretty detailed. I will say it may help me relate to my wife a little better. :)


EXPLORATION

Some interesting discussion about babies being a model of how we learn - by active testing of our environment through observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion.

He discusses how his mom instilled creativity in him, nurturing his every interest through childhood (dinosaurs, spaceships, Greek mythology, etc). Then when he told her that he was becoming an atheist at 14, his very religious mother did not scold him but rather bought him Nietzsche's "Twilight of the Idols" and said "if you're going to be an atheist, be the best one out there!"

He also discussed the difficulty of keeping learning on a fun, fascinating level for students once grades are introduced. Most kids will think of knowledge as a way to get grades ( = success = happiness) rather than an end in itself.

And he theorized that a high degree of curiosity leads to a long life with a very healthy brain.


(Hmm…in the end, the book wasn't so bad. But it took me a lot longer to read it than I would have expected, which tells me something.)

Laura

The main reason why I didn't write a full review for this is because, well, I know nothing about the brain and Medina is a neurologist so this book could be filled with nothing but psychobabble nonsense and I wouldn't know the difference. Regardless, I thought that Medina had a very easy to understand writing style and I liked his little stories. Overall, Brain Rules gets a thumbs up from me. I bet he's honored.

Read more like this review on my blog, http://www.bookwormbasics.blogspot.com

Most of us have no idea what’s really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details every business leader, parent, and teacher should know—like the need for physical activity to get your brain working its best. How do we learn? What exactly do sleep and stress do to our brains? Why is multi-tasking a myth? Why is it so easy to forget—and so important to repeat new knowledge? Is it true that men and women have different brains? In Brain Rules, Dr. John Medina, a molecular biologist, shares his lifelong interest in how the brain sciences might influence the way we teach our children and the way we work. In each chapter, he describes a brain rule—what scientists know for sure about how our brains work—and then offers transformative ideas for our daily lives. Medina’s fascinating stories and infectious sense of humor breathe life into brain science. You’ll learn why Michael Jordan was no good at baseball. You’ll peer over a surgeon’s shoulder as he proves that most of us have a Jennifer Aniston neuron. You’ll meet a boy who has an amazing memory for music but can’t tie his own shoes. You will discover how: Every brain is wired differently Exercise improves cognition We are designed to never stop learning and exploring Memories are volatile Sleep is powerfully linked with the ability to learn Vision trumps all of the other senses Stress changes the way we learn In the end, you’ll understand how your brain really works—and how to get the most out of it.

Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded)

Allison Hornery

Having been on a brain science reading binge of late, this book has been one of the best of the bunch. Wryly amusing, matter-of-fact and completely accessible I found John Medina's observations and suggestions for everyday life as well as big systemic shifts really engaging.

Brain Rules 32 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School

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