Brain Rules
12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School
Ratings24
Average rating3.7
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—such as the brain's need for physical activity to work at 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, molecular biologist John Medina 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. You will discover how:Exercise improves cognitionEvery brain is wired differentlyWe are designed never to stop learning and exploringMemories are volatile and susceptible to corruptionSleep is powerfully linked with the ability to learnVision trumps all of the other sensesStress changes the way we learnIn the end, you'll understand how your brain really works—and how to get the most out of it.
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About the book: Brain Rules gives you insight into how our brains function and explains how you can take advantage of such knowledge to push your brain to work better. From gaining more productivity at work to absorbing more at school, mastering the “brain rules” will help make learning with all your senses become second nature.
About the author: John Medina is a professor, research consultant and expert in molecular biology. He founded the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research and the Talaris Research Institute.
My highlights:
Regular exercise stimulates the body to renew itself and generates hormones to help the brain work.
The more you exercise, the healthier and more robust your brain and body will be!
You have a natural sleep cycle that is individual to you. Follow it and you'll feel and think better.
What exactly does sleeping do? Simply put, sleeping regenerates our mind and body.
When it comes to sleeping patterns, there are three types: larks, owls and hummingbirds.Larks wake up often before 6 a.m. and are the most alert before noon. Some 10 percent of the population are classified as larks. In contrast, owls rarely hit the sack before 3 a.m., being most alert around 6 p.m. Owls too make up about 10 percent of the population.
The rest of us are hummingbirds, fluctuating between the other two types. Sometimes we stay up late; sometimes we wake up before the sun rises.
Chronic stress is debilitating, making you think poorly and lose memory. Reduce stress where you can.
While a little stress can help you take action, too much stress is detrimental to your overall health.
Your brain pays attention to stimuli it considers the most important. The rest is just noise.
If you want your audience to pay attention to a presentation, for example, keep it under 10 minutes, as otherwise the abundance of information will overload the minds of your audience!
Our brains store information if it's meaningful and doesn't interfere with other information.
Information needs to be meaningful for our brains to remember it.If you have to memorize a piece of information, make it more meaningful by repeating the information to yourself at spaced intervals.
Spaced intervals make your brain realize that the information you're repeating and it's processing is important. It must be meaningful, your brain thinks, or you wouldn't be recalling it so often. And when your brain attaches meaning to something, it remembers it better.
Our senses have evolved to work together. Multisensory environments can help you learn better.
We don't learn as well in unisensory situations, in which only one sense is used.
The benefits of multisensory experiences might seem counterintuitive. Wouldn't a brain get overloaded with too much competing information? Yet our brains don't work that way. Research has shown that they prefer heavy lifting! So expose yourself to multisensory learning tools.
To better remember facts, combine visuals with information. Our visual sense is the strongest.
When people listen to information, they only recall about 10 percent of it after a period of three days. Yet if an image accompanies spoken information, people will remember 65 percent of the information after the same period.This is called the pictorial superiority effect.
Final summary
The human brain is a sophisticated information-transfer system. Optimize your mind by understanding better how it works. Exercise, get enough sleep and avoid chronic stress. Take advantage of multisensory learning and the pictorial superiority effect. In doing so, you'll maximize your intellectual potential.
This is an interesting read - especially for those looking to gain a better understanding of cognitive operations. I found the chapters on sleep, stress, long-term memory, and gender (and how each one effects the brain) especially interesting. The book has a really nice flow to it - and delves deep enough to ‘unpack' some of the more complex theories of neurologists and social scientists - without turning into an academic journal.
Readable and memorable summation of the state of knowledge in how we think. All of this will be familiar if you've read Sapolsky, Ramachandran, Fisher, or any of the hot neuro writers. But if you haven't, you owe it to yourself to read this book. This is important material, helpful as a guide to lifelong learning.
Medina practices what he preaches. His writing is vivid, reinforced by the very “rules” he discusses. You can see and read his twelve “rules” at brainrules.net, but his book really drives them home in a useful, productive way. (I quote “rules” because this isn't rules in the “rules you should follow” kind of book; it's more “rules of thumb”, or “this is our best guess as to how the brain works”. Think “rules that are there whether you like it or not, and you should be aware of”).
