A summary of John Medina's book Brain Rules
amazon.co.uk
Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power
- our brains were built for walking---12 miles a day!
- to improve your thinking skills, move
- exercise gets blood to your brain, bringing it glucose for energy and oxygen to soak up the toxic electrons that are left over. It also stimulates the protein that keeps neurons connecting.
- Aerobic exercise just twice a week halves your risk of general dementia. It cuts your risk of Alzheimer's by 60%.
Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too.
Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently
- what you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like---it literally rewires it.
- no two people's brains store the same information in the same way in the same place.
- we have a great number of ways of being intelligent, many of which don't show up on IQ tests.
Rule #4: People don't pay attention to boring things.
- The brain's attentional "spotlight" can focus on only one thing at a time: no multitasking.
- emotional arousal helps the brain learn.
- audiences check out after 10 minutes, but you can keep grabbing them back by telling narratives or creating events rich in emotion.
Rule #5: Repeat to remember (short-term memory)
- Most of the 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 chances of remembering something if you reproduce the environment in which you first put it into your brain.
Rule #6: Remember to repeat (long-term memory)
- most memories disappear within minutes, but those that survive the fragile period strengthen with time.
- the way to make long-term memory more reliable is to incorporate new information gradually and repeat it in timed intervals.
Teach in cycles of say 25 minutes, and teach every subject three times (interleave subjects). We should review what we have learned in the last learning slot every 72 to 96 hours.
Rule #7: Sleep well, think well
- People vary in how much sleepo they need and when they prefer to get it, but the biological drive for an afternoon nap is universal.
- Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.
When sleep was restricted to six hours or less for just five nights,
for example, cognitive performance matched that of a person suffering
from 48 hours of continual sleep deprivation.
Rule #8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way
- Under chronic stress, adrenaline creates scars in your blood vessels that can cause a heart attack or stroke, and cortisol damages the cells of the hippocampus, crippling your ability to learn and remember.
- Individually, the worst kind of stress is the feeling that you have no control over the problem---you are helpless.
- Emotional stress has huge impacts across society, on children's ability to learn in school and on employees' productivity at work.
Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses at the same time
- Our senses evolved to wotk together---vision influencing hearing, for example---which means that we learn best if we stimulate several senses at once.
Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses
- vision is by far out most dominant sense, taking up half of our brain's resources.
- we learn and remember best through pictures, not through written or spoken words.
Rule #11: Male and female brains are different
- Men and women respond differently to acute stress: Women activate the left hemisphere's amygdala and remember the emotional details. Men use the right amygdala and get the gist.
Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers
- Some parts of our adult brains stay as malleable as a baby's, so we can create neurons and learn new things throughout our lives.
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