Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

by John Medina

Ha! That shows you I am reading this via Kindle.

The brain appears to be designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment, and to do so in nearly constant motion.

A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary.

This is blatant hyperbole. Much evidence points to less time spent in acquiring and preparing food in primitive cultures. They undoubtedly did sit for much more than 8 hours a day.

The change was enough to shake us out of our comfortable trees, but it wasn’t enough to kill us when we landed.

You adapt to variation itself.

Any learning environment that deals with only the database instincts or only the improvisatory instincts ignores one half of our ability. It is doomed to fail.

It isn't knowledge or critical thinking. It's both!

The Paleomammalian brain appears in you the same way it does in many mammals, such as house cats, which is how it got its name. It has more to do with your animal survival than with your human potential. Most of its functions involve what some researchers call the “four F’s”: fighting, feeding, fleeing, and … reproductive behavior.

The four F's of the paleomammalian brain

Human pregnancies are still remarkably risky without modern medical intervention. The solution? Give birth while the baby’s head is small enough to fit through the birth canal. The problem? You create childhood.

During this time of extreme vulnerability, you had a creature fully capable of learning just about anything and, at least for the first few years, not good for doing much else.

It was in our best interests to teach well: Our genetic survival depended upon our ability to protect the little ones.

If someone does not feel safe with a teacher or boss, he or she may not be able to perform as well. If a student feels misunderstood because the teacher cannot connect with the way the student learns, the student may become isolated.

its success is fully dependent upon feelings.

You can get a headache just thinking about the fact that deep inside your brain, at this very moment, bits of neurons are moving around like reptiles, slithering to new spots, getting fat at one end or creating split ends. All so that you can remember a few things about Eric Kandel and his sea slugs.

Ow, ow, ow, ...

The brain acts like a muscle: The more activity you do, the larger and more complex it can become.

The human brain, only partially constructed at birth, won’t be fully assembled for years to come. The biggest construction programs aren’t finished until you are in your early 20s, with fine-tuning well into your mid-40s.

Wow, so the first 40 years of childhood really are the hardest!

Even identical twins do not have identical brain wiring. Consider this thought experiment:

two brains are creating different memories of the same movie.

Learning results in physical changes in the brain, and these changes are unique to each individual.

Theory of Mind skills possess the single most important ingredient for becoming effective communicators of information.

Teacher alone or software alone is not as effective.

You cannot change the fact that the human brain is individually wired. Every student’s brain, every employee’s brain, every customer’s brain is wired differently. That’s the Brain Rule. You can either accede to it or ignore it.

what separates novices from experts?

“[Experts’] knowledge is not simply a list of facts and formulas that are relevant to their domain; instead, their knowledge is organized around core concepts or ‘big ideas that guide their thinking about their domains.”

Relating too much information, with not enough time devoted to connecting the dots.

How true indeed that expertise doesn’t guarantee good teaching!

The brain doesn’t pay attention to boring things, and I am as sick of boring presentations as you are.

Memory, it seems, makes us not only durable but also human.

People usually forget 90 percent of what they learn in a class within 30 days.

We now know that the space between repetitions is the critical component for transforming temporary memories into more persistent forms. Spaced learning is greatly superior to massed learning.

Research shows that the life cycle of declarative memory can be divided into four sequential steps: encoding, storing, retrieving, and forgetting.

I learned these steps before but then....

We really don’t know how the brain keeps track of things. We have given a name to the total number of changes in the brain that first encode information (where we have a record of that information). We call it an engram. But we might as well call them donkeys for all we understand about them.

We know that information is remembered best when it is elaborate, meaningful, and contextual.

But then how do we become fluent outside of the "Spanish room"

This idea that the brain might cheerily insert false information to make a coherent story underscores its admirable desire to create organization out of a bewildering and confusing world. The brain constantly receives new inputs and needs to store some of them in the same head already occupied by previous experiences. It makes sense of its world by trying to connect new information to previously encountered information, which means that new information routinely resculpts previously existing representations and sends the re-created whole back for new storage. What does this mean? Merely that present knowledge can bleed into past memories and become intertwined with them as if they were encountered together. Does that give you only an approximate view of reality? You bet it does. This tendency, by the way, can drive the criminal-justice system crazy.

elaborative rehearsal,

This is why Think, Pair, Share and reflection are so helpful. Even taking notes can be a big help!

Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information if you want to retrieve it later. Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately if you want the retrieval to be of higher quality. Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately, and in fixed, spaced intervals, if you want the retrieval to be the most vivid it can be.

Many, most in Utah, are now 4, 90 minute segments. This should allow more focused sustained effort and should provide for between 3 and 9 repetitions in a class period.

His description here seems to focus on the recall of content. There is also a critical component of practicing skills and improvisation based on content. Learning isn't only recall it is also the ability to improvise.

“Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.

William Dement - sleep researcher

So how much sleep does a person need? Given all of our recent understanding about how and when we sleep, you might expect that scientists would come up with the answer fairly quickly. Indeed, they have. The answer is: We don’t know.

Typical!

It’s a fight because the brain really wants to take a nap and doesn’t care what its owner is doing.

Clearly, for specific types of intellectual skill, sleep can be a great friend to learning.

The bottom line is that sleep loss means mind loss. Sleep loss cripples thinking, in just about every way you can measure thinking. Sleep loss hurts attention, executive function, immediate memory, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning ability, general math knowledge. Eventually, sleep loss affects manual dexterity, including fine motor control (except, perhaps, for pinball) and even gross motor movements, such as the ability to walk on a treadmill.

This could easily be incorporated simply by having a problem identifying day and then sleeping on it and having a problem solving day.

Part one: There must be an aroused physiological response to the stress, and it must be measurable by an outside party. I saw this in obvious fashion the first time my then 18-month-old son encountered a carrot on his plate at dinner. He promptly went ballistic: He screamed and cried and peed in his diaper. His aroused physiological state was immediately measurable by his dad, and probably by anyone else within a half mile of our kitchen table. Part two: The stressor must be perceived as aversive. This can be assessed by a simple question: “If you had the ability to turn down the severity of this experience, or avoid it altogether, would you?” It was obvious where my son stood on the matter. Within seconds, he took the carrot off his plate and threw it on the floor. Then he deftly got down off his chair and tried to stomp on the predatory vegetable. The avoidance question was answered in full. Part three: The person must not feel in control of the stressor. Like a volume knob on some emotional radio, the more the loss of control, the more severe the stress is perceived to be. This element of control and its closely related twin, predictability, lie at the heart of learned helplessness. My son reacted as strongly as he did in part because he knew I wanted him to eat the carrot, and he was used to doing what I told him to do. Control was the issue. Despite my picking up the carrot, washing it, then rubbing my tummy while enthusiastically saying “yum, yum,” he was having none...

Why do our bodies need to go through all this trouble? The answer is very simple. Without a flexible, immediately available, highly regulated stress response, we would die.

Clearly, stress hurts learning. Most important, however, stress hurts people.

One of the greatest predictors of performance in school turns out to be the emotional stability of the home.

It seems that we could better spend some of our educational dollars in improving homes!

The perfect storm of occupational stress appears to be a combination of two malignant facts: a) a great deal is expected of you and b) you have no control over whether you will perform well.

Stress costs!