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

by John Medina

Mozart Effect comes to mind: the popular idea that listening to classical music makes students better at math.

The brain appears to be designed to (1) solve problems (2) related to surviving (3) in an unstable outdoor environment, and (4) to do so in nearly constant motion. I call this the brain’s performance envelope.

There are two ways to beat the cruelty of a harsh environment: You can become stronger or you can become smarter.

The amygdala allows you to feel rage. Or fear. Or pleasure. Or memories of past experiences of rage, fear, or pleasure. The amygdala is responsible for both the creation of emotions and the memories they generate.

The hippocampus converts your short-term memories into longer-term forms.

The thalamus is one of the most active, well-connected parts of the brain—a control tower for the senses. Sitting squarely in the center of your brain, it processes and routes signals sent from nearly every corner of your sensory universe.

One of the greatest predictors of successful aging, they found, is the presence or absence of a sedentary lifestyle.

The chief reason for the longer life is that exercise improves cardiovascular fitness, which in turn reduces the risk for diseases such as heart attacks and stroke.

In the laboratory, the gold standard appears to be aerobic exercise, 30 minutes at a clip, two or three times a week. Add a strengthening regimen and you get even more cognitive benefit.

Your lifetime risk for general dementia is literally cut in half if you participate in physical activity. Aerobic exercise seems to be the key. With Alzheimer’s, the effect is even greater: Such exercise reduces your odds of getting the disease by more than 60 percent.

the brain’s appetite for energy is enormous. The brain gobbles up 20 percent of the body’s energy, even though it’s only about 2 percent of the body’s weight.

When the brain is fully working, it uses more energy per unit of tissue weight than a fully exercising quadricep.

Some think that a long sleep at night and a short midday nap represent default human sleep behavior, that it is part of our evolutionary history.

One night’s loss of sleep resulted in about a 30 percent loss in overall cognitive skill, with a subsequent drop in performance.

when sleep was restricted to six hours or less per night for just five nights, cognitive performance matched that of a person suffering from 48 hours of continual sleep deprivation.

What do these data tell us? That some people need at least seven hours of sleep a night. And that some people need at least six hours of sleep a night.

When people become sleep deprived, for example, their body’s ability to utilize the food they are consuming falls by about one-third.

Set your schedule—whether college class schedule or work schedule—to match your chronotype.

students temporarily shift to more of an owl chronotype as they transit through their teenage years.

Sleep hormones (such as the protein melatonin) are at their maximum levels in the teenage brain.

• People vary in how much sleep they need and when they prefer to get it, but the biological drive for an afternoon nap is universal.

our stress responses were shaped to solve problems that lasted not for years, but for seconds.

perception of control is a powerful influence on the perception of stress.

The perfect storm of occupational stress appears to be a combination of two factors: (1) a great deal is expected of you, and (2) you have no control over whether you will perform well.

Aerobic exercise, several times a week for 30 minutes each, is an excellent way to shore up your BDNF peacekeeping forces.

What you do in life physically changes what your brain looks like. You can wire and rewire your brain with the simple choice of which musical instrument—or professional sport—you play.

we have at least seven categories of intelligence: verbal/linguistic, musical/rhythmic, logical/mathematical, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.

The more attention the brain pays to a given stimulus, the more elaborately the information will be encoded—that is, learned—and retained.

fact suggests a teaching and business imperative: Find a way to get and hold somebody’s attention for 10 minutes, then do it again.

In everyday life, you use your previous experiences to predict where you should pay attention.

Emotionally charged events are better remembered—for longer, and with more accuracy—than neutral events.

the way the experts organize information. “[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,”

If you want people to be able to pay attention, don’t start with details. Start with the key ideas and, in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions. Meaning before details.

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way? I knew that I initially had only about 600 seconds to earn the right to be heard—or the next hour would be useless. And I knew that I needed to do something after the 601st second to “buy” another 10 minutes.

People usually forget 90 percent of what they learn in a class within 30 days. And the majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours after class.

Learn something while you are sad and you will be able to recall it better if, at retrieval, you are somehow suddenly made sad. It’s called context-dependent or state-dependent learning.

The initial design, created by the initial input, also became the permanent path.

“Quality of encoding” really means the number of door handles one can put on the entrance to a piece of information. The more handles one creates at the moment of learning, the more likely the information is to be accessed at a later date. The handles we can add revolve around content, timing, and environment.

The more a learner focuses on the meaning of information being presented, the more elaborately he or she will process the information.

It’s best to use real-world situations familiar to the learner.

The events that happen the first time you are exposed to information play a disproportionately greater role in your ability to accurately retrieve it at a later date. If you are trying to get information across to someone, a compelling introduction may be the most important single factor in the success of your mission.

Memory may not be fixed at the moment of learning, but repetition, doled out in specifically timed intervals, is the fixative.

“[I]f you want to study for a test you will be taking in a week’s time, and are able to go through the material 10 times, it is better to space out the 10 repetitions during the week than to squeeze them all together.”

the relationship between repetition and memory is clear. Deliberately re-expose yourself to information if you want to retrieve it later. Deliberately re-expose yourself to information more elaborately if you want to remember more of the details. Deliberately reexpose yourself to the information more elaborately and in fixed, spaced intervals if you want the retrieval to be as vivid as possible.

Thinking and talking a lot about information soon after we encounter it (elaborate rehearsal) helps commit it to memory. Allowing time between repetitions is better than cramming.

In the school of the future, lessons are divided into 25-minute modules, cyclically repeated throughout the day. Subject A is taught for 25 minutes. Ninety minutes later, the 25-minute content of Subject A is repeated, and then a third time. All classes are segmented and interleaved in such a fashion. Every third or fourth day would be reserved for quickly reviewing the facts delivered in the previous 72 to 96 hours.

• The more elaborately we encode a memory during its initial moments, the stronger it will be.

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

Perception is not where the integration begins but where the integration culminates.

“There are only three rules for writing a novel,” Maugham once said. “Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.”