Brain Rules

How does the brain work?

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 12:25:00 +0000

Let me give you some examples of how little we know about how the brain works. We know that you use the left-side of your brain for speech. Under normal circumstances, if you get a stroke on the left side of your brain, your speech can be greatly affected. Depending upon where you got the stroke, it could affect your ability to speak language or your ability to understand language.

There is a little six year old who suffered from something Sturge-Weber syndrome, a catastrophic brain disease. Because he had this disorder, the little guy had to have his entire left hemisphere removed. No left hemisphere, no language. That should have completely destroyed his language ability. Right?

Wrong!

Within two years, the little guy had regained his language abilities entirely. The right side of his brain seemed to have noticed there was a deficit and simply rewired itself to take over talking. Do we understand this?

We do not.

We do not understand how you learn a language of any kind. We don't know how you know how to walk. We don't know how you know how to read. You have a complete map of your body in your head. Actually, you have several maps of your body in your head. Some of them tell you where you are, some of them tell you how to move. One even tells you how to see. We don't know how they coordinate their information. We don't know how it knows its you - and what, if anything, YOU are. Consciousness remains a slippery fish as ever.

So you ask me how the brain works. I am happy to repeat my answer. We have no idea.

Learn more at brainrules.net.

New Book: Attack of the Teenage Brain

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Thu, 12 Apr 2018 21:21:00 +0000

Marvel at the neuroscientific reasons why smart teens make dumb decisions! Behold the mind-controlling power of executive function! Thrill to a vision of a better school for the teenage brain!

The new book, Attack of the Teenage Brain, is an enlightening and entertaining listen that will change the way you think about teen behavior and prompt you to consider how else parents, educators, and policymakers might collaborate to help our challenging, sometimes infuriating, often weird, and genuinely wonderful kids become more successful learners, in school and beyond.

Mom’s beef stew: Five ingredients of intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 00:49:00 +0000

The smell of my mother’s beef stew simmering in the kitchen on a cold winter’s day is easily the best comfort-food memory I have. Mom’s stew was like a warm hug in a bowl.

She once marched me into the kitchen to teach me how to make her famous beef stew. No easy task as she had the annoying habit of changing the recipe almost every time she made it. “It depends on who’s coming over for dinner,” Mom would explain, “or whatever we have lying around the house.” According to her, only two elements were critical to pull off her masterpiece: the quality of the beef and the gravy surrounding the meat.

Like Mom’s stew, human intelligence has two essential components, both fundamentally linked to our evolutionary need to survive.

The first is the ability to record information, called “crystallized intelligence.” The second component is the capacity to adapt that information to unique situations by reasoning and problem solving, called “fluid intelligence.”

In other words, we as humans have the ability to learn rapidly from our mistakes and the ability to apply that learning in unique combinations to our ever-changing world. Intelligence, seen through this evolutionary lens, is simply the ability to do these activities better than someone else.

Mandatory as memory and fluid intelligence are, though, they are not the entire recipe for human smarts. Many ingredients make up the human intelligence stew, and I’d like to describe five that I think you would do well to consider as you contemplate your child’s intellectual gifts. They are:

The desire to explore
Self-control
Creativity
Verbal communication
Interpreting nonverbal communication

1. The desire to explore

This is one of my favorite examples of an infant’s penchant for exploration. I was attending the Presbyterian baptism of a 9-month-old. Things started out well enough. The infant was nestled quietly in his dad’s arms, but as the parents turned to face the pastor, the baby spied the handheld microphone. He quickly tried to wrest the mike out of the pastor’s grip, flicking his tongue out at the ball of the microphone. The little guy seemed to think that the mike was some kind of ice cream cone, and he decided to test his hypothesis.

Thousands of experiments confirm that babies learn about their environment through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas. They use fluid intelligence to extract information, then crystallize it into memory. Nobody teaches infants how to do this, yet they do it all over the world. They are scientists, and their laboratory is the whole world.

Exploratory behavior is a talent highly prized in the working world, too. What traits separate creative, visionary people who consistently conjure up financially successful ideas from less imaginative, managerial types who carry them out? Two business researchers explored that simple question and found that visionaries had in common five characteristics, which the researchers termed “Innovator’s DNA.” Here are the first three:

An unusual ability to associate. They could see connections not obvious to others
An annoying habit of constantly asking “what if.” And “why not” and “how come you’re doing it this way.”
An unquenchable desire to tinker and experiment.

The biggest common denominator of these characteristics? A willingness to explore. The biggest enemy was the non-exploration-oriented system in which the innovators often found themselves.

But you, as a parent, can encourage your child’s natural desire to explore—starting with understanding how inquisitiveness contributes to your child’s intellectual

success.

2. Self-control

A healthy, well-adjusted preschooler sits down at a table in front of two giant, freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies. It’s not a kitchen table—it’s Walter Mischel’s Stanford lab during the late 1960s. The smell is heavenly.

“You see these cookies?” Mischel says. “You can eat just one of them right now if you want, but if you wait, you can eat both. I have to go away for five minutes. If I return and you have not eaten anything, I will let you have both cookies. If you eat one while I’m gone, the bargain is off and you don’t get the second one. Do we have a deal?”

The child nods. The researcher leaves.

What does the child do?

If the children are kindergartners, 72 percent cave in and gobble up the cookie. If they’re in fourth grade, however, only 49 percent yield to the temptation. By sixth grade, the number is 38 percent, about half the rate of the preschoolers.

Welcome to the interesting world of impulse control. It is part of a suite of behaviors under the collective term “executive function.” Executive function controls planning, foresight, problem solving, and goal setting. Mischel and his many colleagues discovered that a child’s executive function is a critical component of intellectual prowess.

Why? Executive function relies on a child’s ability to filter out distracting (in this case, tempting) thoughts, which is critical in environments that are oversaturated with sensory stimuli and myriad on-demand choices. That’s our world, as you have undoubtedly noticed, and it will be your children’s, too.

3. Creativity

My mother’s favorite artist in the world was Rembrandt. She was much less enamored of 20th-century art. I remember her railing about Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain—simply a urinal—being placed in the same artistic firmament as her beloved van Rijn. Toilets as art? And she hated it? For me as an 11-year-old boy, that was artistic Valhalla!

Mom set aside her own preferences and followed my curiosity. She brought home two pictures wrapped in brown paper and sat me down. “Imagine,” she began, “that you tried to express in two dimensions all the information of a three-dimensional object. How would you do it?”

I stumbled around trying to get the right answer, but made no progress.

Mom interrupted. “Perhaps you would come up with something like this!” Mom revealed two prints of Picasso masterpieces: Three Musicians and Violin and Guitar. It was love at first cube. Three Musicians was a revelation to me, as was the creative mind that conceived it.

Why did I think that? How does anyone recognize creativity? It is a tough question, saturated in cultural subjectivity and individual experience, as the differences between me and my mother showed.

Researchers do believe that creativity has a few core components, however. These include the ability to perceive new relationships between old things, to conjure up ideas or things that do not currently exist. Creativity also must evoke emotions, positive or negative, in someone else. Something—a product, a result—has to come of the process.

Can you predict creativity in kids? Psychologist Paul Torrance created a 90-minute exam called the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Children might be presented with a picture of a stuffed rabbit, then told they have three minutes to improve upon the design to make it more fun to play with. They might be presented with a scribble, then told to make a narrative from it. Torrance then followed their lives into adulthood, assessing their creative output throughout: things like patents filed, books written, papers published, grants awarded, and businesses started.

As a research tool, the exam has been formally evaluated many times. Though the test is not without its critics, the most amazing finding remains how well a child’s scores predict his or her future creative output. The test has been translated into 50 languages and taken by millions of people. It is the go-to standard for evaluating creativity in children.

4. Verbal communication

The most memorable experience in my rookie year of parenting our younger son, Noah, was the moment he said his first multi-syllable word. At the time, he possessed a particular preoccupation with sea creatures, which I blame in equal parts on Finding Nemo and National Geographic. We put pictures of sea animals on the ceiling above his changing table, including a cartoon of a giant red Pacific octopus.

One morning I was busy changing his diaper, just before work. Noah suddenly stopped smiling and just stared straight at the ceiling as I cleaned him up.

Slowly, deliberately, he pointed his finger upward, turned his gaze from the ceiling, looked me straight in the eye, and said in a clear voice: “Oct-o-pus.” Then he laughed out loud.

I almost had a heart attack. “Yes!” I cried, “OCTOPUS!”

He replied, “Octo, octo, octopus,” laughing now. We both chanted it.

You can’t argue with the fact that verbal skills are important in human intelligence. What happened in Noah’s brain that made so many things come together at once on that changing table—or in any other child’s brain as language dawns on her like a sunrise? We don’t really know. Many theories abound about how we acquire language.

At birth, your baby can distinguish between the sounds of every language that has ever been invented. Professor Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, discovered this phenomenon. But by their first birthday, Kuhl found, babies can no longer distinguish between the sounds of every language on the planet...Unless they have been spoken to, in person, by someone who speaks another language.

Tucked into this data is a bombshell of an idea, one with empirical support across the developmental sciences. Human learning in its most native state is primarily a relational exercise. You can literally rewire a child’s brain through exposure to relationships.

5. Interpreting nonverbal communication

Though speech is a uniquely human trait, it is nestled inside a vast world of communication behaviors, many of which are used by other animals, too. But we aren’t always communicating the same thing, as legendary dog whisperer Cesar Millan points out. Millan is a world-champion dog handler. His secret is that he thinks like a dog, not like a person, when he’s interacting with a dog.

Millan told Men’s Health, “A lot of people who meet a new dog want to go over to him, touch him, and talk to him.” But, Millan says, “in the language of dogs, this is very aggressive and confusing.”

Instead, Millan says, when you meet a new dog, ignore the animal. Don’t make eye contact. Let the dog come over and inspect you, sniff you. Once the dog gives you cues that he doesn’t find you a threat then you can talk, touch, or make eye contact. When dogs attack people, they may in some cases simply be acting upon an ancient behavioral reflex involving a reaction to, of all things, somebody’s face.

Extracting social information by examining the face is a powerful slice of mammalian evolutionary history. But we humans use our faces, including eye-to-eye contact, for many reasons besides communicating threats. We have the most sophisticated nonverbal message systems on the planet. From babies on up, we constantly communicate social information with our bodies in coordination with our smiles and frowns.

From exploration, self-control, and creativity to verbal and nonverbal ability, it is clear that the intelligence stew has many ingredients. Standard IQ tests are not capable of measuring most of these elements, even though they play a powerful role in the future success of children. However, our survival depends on the ingredients described in my mom's stew.

Learn more in John Medina's Brain Rules for Baby.

Exercise boosts brain power.

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 15:22:00 +0000

Watch John Medina explain how exercise boosts brain power.

Learn more in Brain Rules and listen to a free preview of the Brain Rules for Aging Well audiobook on Libro.fm.

Brain-based parenting tips

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Sun, 10 Dec 2017 03:00:00 +0000

Put the research from John Medina's Brain Rules for Baby into practice.

Tracy Cutchlow, author of the international bestseller Zero to Five: 70 Essential Parenting Tips Based on Science, was the editor of Brain Rules for Baby. She put the research into practice with her own spirited daughter and saw great results. Now, as a licensed coach, she helps parents find calm and confidence with their children. If Brain Rules for Baby is the why, Zero to Five is the how. (Infant uncertainty, toddler tantrums, preschooler power struggles: you've got this!)

Below, Tracy shares some tips to get you started off on the right foot. You can sign up on the Zero to Five website for more parenting tips that work.

3 best ways to boost your baby’s language development

Baby refusing to eat? 8 things to consider

12 ways to include your toddler when cooking and cleaning

When your kid hits another kid (what to say in the moment)

This is how you truly listen to an angry kid

Gratitude: Being Thankful Will Help Make You Happy!

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Sun, 12 Nov 2017 19:50:00 +0000

Gratitude (Brain Rules for Aging Well by John Medina)

Optimistic people live almost eight years longer than the glass half- empties do. Observing the megawatt power of gratitude as a practicing psychotherapist, Martin Seligman developed—and then scientifically tested— exercises centering on the ideas of thankfulness and appreciation. Watch John Medina to learn how to practice gratitude, as featured in Brain Rules for Aging Well.

Learn more about the new book, Brain Rules for Aging Well.

Why Older People Are More Gullible

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 19:45:00 +0000

Why Older People Are More Gullible (Brain Rules for Aging Well by John Medina)

There's an obvious reason the elderly become a target: solo seniors sometimes have obese bank accounts. The less obvious reason has to do with the dark side of focusing on the positive all the time. As you age, you also become more trusting, or better to say, more gullible.

We even think we know why. Watch John Medina explain.

Learn more about the new book, Brain Rules for Aging Well.

3 Things You Need to Know About Sleep

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 22:55:00 +0000

Why Older People Are More Gullible (Brain Rules for Aging Well by John Medina)

Watch John Medina share three surprises in sleep research, as discussed in the new book, Brain Rules for Aging Well.

Here’s the bottom line: you need to get between six and eight hours of sleep every night, no more and no less. If you get less than six hours, mortality risk rises 21 percent in women, 26 percent in men. If you get more than eight hours, mortality risk rises 17 percent in women, 24 percent for men. You have to have the “just right” amount of sleep to optimize both quality and quantity of life.

Learn more about the new book, Brain Rules for Aging Well.

The 10 warning signs of Alzheimer's disease

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 23:10:00 +0000

Excellent checklists have been developed over the years to help loved ones determine whether a person has Alzheimer’s or is simply guilty of being a senior. One of the best is the Alzheimer’s Association’s “10 Warning Signs of Alzheimer’s Disease,” which I'll summarize here in this video. The ten signs can be organized by topic: memory, executive function, emotions, and general processing.

Learn more about the new book, Brain Rules for Aging Well.

Introduction to Brain Rules for Aging Well

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 18:57:00 +0000

Watch John Medina introduce his new book, Brain Rules for Aging Well, in this video.

Announcing Brain Rules for Aging Well, in stores October 3rd

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 18:26:00 +0000

With so many discoveries over the years, science is literally changing our minds about the optimal care and feeding of the brain. All of it is captivating. A great deal of it is unexpected. You may already be experiencing the sometimes-unpleasant effects of the aging process. Or you may be deeply concerned about your loved ones who are. Either way, Brain Rules for Aging Well is for you.

Pre-order the hardcover today from your favorite bookstore and you'll get it by October 3rd.

Listen to a preview of the audiobook.

Is it true that musicians are better at detecting emotion?

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 04:38:00 +0000

There is evidence that musicians are better at detecting emotion. One of the most striking experiments involved a group of English speaking musicians and English speaking non-musicians. They were exposed to a language they could not speak - the researchers chose the Philippine language Tagalog - with speakers talking in emotionally competent ways. Watch the video.

Learn more about Brain Rules or listen to the digital audiobook on Libro.fm.

How the brain pays attention

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 22:26:00 +0000

Listen to a preview of the Attention chapter on YouTube. Get the Brain Rules digital audiobook on Libro.fm.

What’s going on in our heads when we turn our attention to something? Thirty years ago, a scientist by the name of Michael Posner derived a theory that remains popular today. Posner started his research career in physics, joining the Boeing Aircraft Company soon out of college. His first major research contribution was to figure out how to make jet-engine noise less annoying to passengers riding in commercial airplanes. You can thank your relatively quiet airborne ride, even if the screaming turbine is only a few feet from your eardrums, in part on Posner’s first research efforts. His work on planes eventually led him to wonder how the brain processes information of any kind. This led him to a doctorate in research and to a powerful idea that’s sometimes jokingly referred to as the Trinity Model. Posner hypothesized that we pay attention to things using three separable but fully integrated networks of neural circuitry in the brain. I’ll use a simple story to illustrate his model.

One pleasant Saturday morning, my wife and I were sitting on our outdoor deck, watching a robin drink from our birdbath, when all of a sudden we heard a loud “swoosh” above our heads. Looking up, we caught the shadow of a red-tailed hawk, dropping like a thunderbolt from its perch in a nearby tree, grabbing the helpless robin by the throat. As the raptor swooped by us, not three feet away, blood from the robin splattered on our table. What started as a leisurely repast ended as a violent reminder of the savagery of the real world. We were stunned into silence.

In Posner’s model, the brain’s first system functions much like the two-part job of a museum security officer: surveillance and alert. He called it the Alerting or Arousal Network. It monitors the sensory environment for any unusual activities. This is the general level of attention our brains are paying to our world, a condition termed “intrinsic alertness.” My wife and I were using this network as we sipped our coffee, watching the robin. If the system detects something unusual, such as the hawk’s swoosh, it can sound an alarm heard brain-wide. That’s when intrinsic alertness transforms into specific attention, called phasic alertness.

After the alarm sounds, we orient ourselves to the attending stimulus, activating the second network: the Orienting Network. We may turn our heads toward the stimulus, perk up our ears, perhaps move toward (or away) from something. It’s why both my wife and I immediately lifted our heads away from the robin, attending to the growing shadow of the hawk. The purpose is to gain more information about the stimulus, allowing the brain to decide what to do. The third system, the Executive Network, controls what action we take next. Actions may include setting priorities, planning on the fly, controlling impulses, weighing the consequences of our actions, or shifting attention. For my wife and me, it was stunned silence, until one of us moved to clean off the blood.

So we have the ability to detect a new stimulus, the ability to turn toward it, and the ability to decide what to do based on its nature. Posner’s model offered testable predictions about brain function and attention, leading to neurological discoveries that would fill volumes.

Physical activity is cognitive candy

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Sat, 09 Jul 2016 19:11:00 +0000

All of the evidence points in one direction: Physical activity is cognitive candy. Civilization, while giving us such seemingly forward advances as modern medicine and spatulas, also has had a nasty side effect. It gives us more opportunities to sit on our butts. Whether learning or working, we gradually quit exercising the way our ancestors did. Recall that our evolutionary ancestors were used to walking up to 12 miles per day. This means that our brains were supported

for most of our evolutionary history by Olympic-caliber bodies. We were not sitting in a classroom for eight hours at a stretch. We were not sitting in a cubicle for eight hours at a stretch. If we sat around the Serengeti for eight hours—heck, for eight minutes—we were usually somebody’s lunch. We haven’t had millions of years to adapt to our sedentary lifestyle. That lifestyle has hurt both our physical and mental health. There is no question we are living in an epidemic of fatness, a point I will not belabor here. The benefits of exercise seem nearly endless because its impact is systemwide, affecting most physiological systems. Exercise makes your muscles and bones stronger, improving your strength and balance. It helps regulate your appetite, reduces your risk for more than a dozen types of cancer, improves the immune system, changes your blood lipid profile, and buffers against the toxic effects of stress. By enriching your cardiovascular system, exercise decreases your risk

for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. When combined with the intellectual benefits exercise appears to offer, we have in our hands as close to a magic bullet for improving human health as exists in modern medicine. So I am convinced that integrating exercise into those eight hours at work or school will only make us normal.

All we have to do is move.

Want to learn more about Brain Rules and exercise? Watch the exercise video or listen to the digital audiobook on Libro.fm.

Curiosity

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 15:39:00 +0000

Most developmental psychologists believe that a child’s need to know is a drive as pure as a diamond and as distracting as chocolate. Even though there is no agreed-upon definition of curiosity in cognitive neuroscience, I couldn’t agree more. I firmly believe that if children are allowed to remain curious, they will continue to deploy their natural tendencies to discover and explore until they are 101. This is something my mother seemed to know instinctively.

For little ones, discovery brings joy. Like an addictive drug, exploration creates the need for more discovery so that more joy can be experienced. It is a straight-up reward system that, if allowed to flourish, will continue into the school years. As children get older, they find that learning brings them not only joy but also mastery. Expertise in specific subjects breeds the confidence to take intellectual risks. If these kids don’t end up in the emergency room, they may end up with a Nobel Prize.

I believe it is possible to break this cycle, anesthetizing both the process and the child. By first grade, for example, children learn that education means an A. They begin to understand that they can acquire knowledge not because it is interesting, but because it can get them something. Fascination can become secondary to “What do I need to know to get the grade?” But I also believe the curiosity instinct is so powerful that some people overcome society’s message to go to sleep intellectually, and they flourish anyway.

Watch the Exploration video

“You want to get your kid into Harvard?"

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 14:55:00 +0000

Listen to the audio excerpt from the Brain Rules for Baby Relationship chapter.

For most first-time moms and dads, the first shock is the overwhelmingly relentless nature of this new social contract. The baby takes. The parent gives. End of story. What startles many couples is the excruciating toll it can take on their quality of life—especially their marriages. The baby cries, the baby sleeps, the baby vomits, gets held, needs changing, must be fed, all before 4:00 a.m. Then you have to go to work. Or your spouse does. This is repeated day after day after ad nauseam day. Parents want just one square inch of silence, one small second to themselves, and they routinely get neither. You can’t even go to the bathroom when you want. You’re sleep deprived, you’ve lost friends, your household chores just tripled, your sex life is nonexistent, and you barely have the energy to ask about each other’s day.

Is it any surprise that a couple’s relationship suffers? It’s rarely talked about, but it’s a fact: Couples’ hostile interactions sharply increase in baby’s first year.

When I lecture on the science of young brains, the dads (it’s almost always the dads) demand to know how to get their kids into Harvard. The question invariably angers me. I bellow, “You want to get your kid into Harvard? You really want to know what the data say? I’ll tell you what the data say! Go home and love your wife!” This chapter is about that retort: why marital hostility happens, how it alters a baby’s developing brain, and how you can counteract the hostility and minimize its effects.

Get the updated and expanded Brain Rules for Baby audiobook on Libro.fm.

What have researchers learned since Brain Rules was published?

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 01:05:00 +0000

The field of brain science continues its explosive, propulsive revolution since Brain Rules was published. There are probably too many results to give a thorough account here, but I can certainly talk about some of the highlights.

One of the first is that a series of well-funded brain initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic. Groups of brain scientists are being recruited to be cartographers--examining the functional circuitry of the entire brain--at one of the smallest scales imaginable. The American version is called the BRAIN initiative, short for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. It's slated to cost several billion dollars and last 10 years. The European version is called the Human Brain Project. It's a really big effort to use supercomputers to reconstruct the micro-circuitry of the entire human brain

The hope is that such functional mapping expeditions will allow scientists to study at an incredible detail--and get new insights to cure diseases ranging from epilepsy and Parkinson's Disease to brain injuries such as Post Traumatic Stress and stroke.

Another series of leaps involve making brain-machine interfaces. These include harnessing the brain's electrical energy to drive physical devices. This is useful if you are interested in making brain-responsive prosthetics. Given the number of combat injuries the U.S. military has sustained since Brain Rules was written, this is a really exciting field. Progress in deep-brain stimulation technologies--this is where you insert electrical devices into the brain to solve problems ranging from depression to obsessive compulsive disorder, have made great strides.

Brain Rules for Presenters

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 03:39:00 +0000

We know that it takes you about 10 minutes to lose an audience if you’re just giving a normal talk. So at the nine-minute-and-59-second mark, you have to do something fairly radical. In fact, you should do it within 30 seconds of your first words, but certainly at nine minutes and 59 seconds. And here is where we can get into some brain science.

I think anybody who does speeches at all ought to really understand that the brain processes meaning before it processes detail. It wants the meaning of what it is that you’re talking about before it wants the detail of what it is you’re talking about. So then the question you can ask is, from a science point of view, what does meaning mean and what do you have to do at nine minutes and 59 seconds? It’s pretty simple. When a piece of information comes into the brain, your brain immediately interrogates it with six questions right off the bat. And you can see the Darwinian roots of the brain’s processing features really clearly here.

The first question it will ask is, will it eat me? You’re going to make an assessment of threat; that’s a survival mechanism. The second question is, can I eat it? Question number three is, can I have sex with it? And it’s actually not even sex per se. It’s, is there reproductive opportunity?

Question number four is, can it have sex with me? Questions number five and six to me are professionally the most interesting, because there’s no a priori for them. It just shows you something about how the brain learns: Have I seen it before? Or, have I never seen it before? The reason why is, the brain is an unbelievably gifted pattern matcher, and it’s looking for patterns that it’s seen.

So at nine minutes and 59 seconds, you’ve got to address one of those six questions or you’ll lose your audience. I call them hooks. I’ll give you an example. I teach second-year medical students and bioengineering graduate students. When I’m going to be talking about, say, hemispheric connections between the two [halves of the brain] — there’s an area of the braincalled the corpus callosum that actually communicates between the two hemispheres — I do not start out by saying, “The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres, and here is the afferent and efferent neurocabling that connects these two hemispheres together.”

Nope. I’ll start it out with a story. Like, there was a woman who had a really strange behavior. If you were the psychiatrist, this woman comes into the room and she sits down and she starts talking to you, and immediately her left hand grabs her throat and she tries to strangle herself. No kidding. By the way, do I have your attention?

More links:
Attention Brain Rule
Brain Rules for Presenters on SlideShare (thanks to Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen)
Get the Brain Rules (updated and expanded) eBook
Get the Brain Rules (updated and expanded) audiobook on Libro.fm

How does the brain work?

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 01:45:00 +0000

How does the brain work? We have no idea. We are still in the very beginning stages of understanding most of the basics. From a researcher's perspective, it's a very exciting time to be a scientist, because you get to rummage around on the ground floor. But from an overall perspective, most of it is spooky.

Let me give you some examples of how little we know about how the brain works. We know that you use the left-side of your brain for speech. Under normal circumstances, if you get a stroke on the left side of your brain, your speech can be greatly affected. Depending upon where you got the stroke, it could affect your ability to speak language or your ability to understand language.

There is a little six year old who suffered from something Sturge-Weber syndrome, a catastrophic brain disease. Because he had this disorder, the little guy had to have his entire left hemisphere removed. No left hemisphere, no language. That should have completely destroyed his language ability. Right?

Wrong!

Within two years, the little guy had regained his language abilities entirely. The right side of his brain seemed to have noticed there was a deficit and simply rewired itself to take over talking. Do we understand this?

We do not.

We do not understand how you learn a language of any kind. We don't know how you know how to walk. We don't know how you know how to read. You have a complete map of your body in your head. Actually, you have several maps of your body in your head. Some of them tell you where you are, some of them tell you how to move. One even tells you how to see. We don't know how they coordinate their information. We don't know how it knows its you - and what, if anything, YOU are. Consciousness remains a slippery fish as ever.

So you ask me how the brain works. I am happy to repeat my answer. We have no idea.

Visit brainrules.net to learn about the 12 things we know about how the brain works. These are the Brain Rules.

Theory of Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 05:57:00 +0000

Theory of Mind is about as close to mind-reading as people can get. Most formal definitions go along the lines of the ability to discern the intentions, and motivations of yourself or another person. To develop a Theory of their Mind, hence the term. I think it has two components to it, especially if you're talking about one person trying to understand another's behavioral space.

First, it's the ability to penetrate inside someone else's psychological interiors and understand the rewards and punishment systems inside that interior.Second, it's the ability to understand at all times that the rewards and punishment systems inside your head are not necessarily the same ones inside your neighbor's head. But he or she is not going to react like you do because he or she doesn't have the same rewards and punishment systems you do.

I joke in the book about calling the following saying John Medina's Second Law of marriage. Here's the saying: what is obvious to you is obvious to you.

I believe Theory of Mind skills are very important in the establishment and maintenance of social relationships. Necessary for success, though I would argue not sufficient. People often confuse it with empathy, but there are important distinctions. You can have terrific Theory of Mind skills and be a Mother Teresa. You read people insightfully and care about what you see. You can also be an SOB with it, too. You can read people insightfully and manipulate them in order to achieve some goal of yours. A dictator may be born with terrific Theory of Mind skills, but they use their talents to squash anybody that gets in their way.

How does memory work?

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 18:33:00 +0000

Watch John Medina talk about how memory works

How does memory work? To begin with, we have to destroy the premise behind the question. We don't just have a memory system - like a computer has a hard-drive. We have various memory systems, each in charge of different types of learning. And they work in a semi-independent way from each other.

Though we've spent a long time looking, we don't actually know much about how these individual systems work. We know even less about how they are integrated.

Let me give you one striking example of how separate the systems are. James McGaugh has worked with a woman for a long period of time called A.J.

A.J. doesn't impress you with dramatic memory abilities when you first meet her. She is a C student. She doesn't have any flashbulb tendencies. Her declarative memory systems - the ability to remember things you can declare, like "Lincoln was the 16th president" appears to be pretty average. If all you looked at were her declarative systems, you wouldn't want to study her at all.

The problem is, AJ has more than just one memory system.

A.J.'s has a memory system that is anything but average.

She has very powerful what we call semantic autobiographical memory. She can remember anything she has ever done, what she has worn for dinner 15 years ago, what flowers she cut and put on the table, and so. Jim has studied her for years and can confirm that she remembers anything of a semantic autobiographical nature. In fact, she is eidetic in this category, photographic, flashbulb like.

Now here we have a conundrum. How come she can't apply that same talent to her schoolwork? The reason is simple. She has two memory systems that work in a semi-independent fashion. She has a great memory for personal experience, She has a poor memory for facts.

You see, memory isn't simple. So when you ask me "how does memory work?" my first response must be "Pray, about what memory system are you talking?"

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Interview with ABC News

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 05:32:00 +0000

Watch John Medina's interview with ABC News Australia

The Performance Envelope

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 03:59:00 +0000

Watch the performance envelope video

Though we really don't know very much about how the brain processes information - we have yet to be able to determine why you know your name - to give just one flagrant example - we are not clueless about how the brain works.

We know about its evolutionary performance envelope, for example.

These are the conditions upon which the brain processes information in the best way. The most efficient way. The most accurate way.

The human brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an outdoor setting, in unstable meteorological conditions and to do so in near constant motion.

That's so important I'm going to say it again.

The human brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an outdoor setting, in unstable meteorological conditions and to do so in near constant motion.

Let me drill down on this a little bit.

Its important to understand the human brain is the world's most sophisticated survival organ. It's built to keep its owner alive long enough to pass its owner's genes onto the next generation - a decidedly very Darwinian thing to say. There's the survival stuff.

This magnificent survival organ was forged in an outdoor crucible, probably and mostly in East Africa. For 99.987% of our time on the planet, we have lived in settings composed of natural elements, starting out in the savannah. We did it under conditions of increasing climatic instability - where our green, wet rainforest that used to inhabit our North African womb increasingly gave way to the not-as-green and not-as-wet savannah.

Because we were hunter-gatherers in an unstable ecological environment, we were moving around almost all of our waking hours. Some estimates put our movement at nearly 12 miles per day. Constant motion.

Those are the conditions under which our brain thrives. We have not escaped the blast radius of our evolutionary predilections forged over millions of years simply because we have - for the last few thousand - been able to live in sedentary cities.

Get the updated and expanded edition of John Medina's NYT bestseller Brain Rules. Learn more at www.brainrules.net

Why we should all take a nap in the afternoon

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 18:57:00 +0000

Why we should all take a nap in the afternoon

Watch the video

It turns out we need a nap during the afternoon. And historically, it seems we've always needed one. There is the Spanish concept of siesta. Italians call it riposo. If you go to China, you are likely many businesses shut down between 11:30 - 2:00 pm. They take a combination lunch and siesta before going back to work. Americans used to call it a power nap, but the research world calls this a nap zone.

We now know that a nap can profoundly influence productivity during the day. Mark Rosekind, a researcher who used to work for NASA - his job was training pilots - actually did an experiment. He allowed his pilots to take a 26-minute nap, then measured their productivity. He found that productivity increased 34% if he allowed his charges to take a nap. He has a really great quote "What other management strategy will improve people's performance 34% in just 26 minutes?" he is famous for saying.

The research world calls this the nap zone. Other benefits have been found, mostly related to changes in memory performance. Both declarative and procedural memory tasks improve if you take a regular nap. One paper has the delightful title - and remember, this is a research paper "Good sleep, bad sleep! The role of daytime naps in healthy adults.

I have personal experience with this, and I bet you do too. When I don't take a nap in the mid-afternoon, I typically fight being drowsy from about 1:30 on. If I do take a nap in the mid-afternoon, just a small one, I suddenly get a burst of energy and an alertness that allows me to be productive the entire day. I am pleased to say this anecdotal information has strong empirical support.

Learn more about the importance of sleep

Get the updated and expanded edition of John Medina's NYT bestseller Brain Rules

Brain Rules for Baby: Updated and Expanded!

noreply@blogger.com (Brain Rules) — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 21:15:00 +0000

Brain Rules for Baby has grown! The book now features a chapter on the science of sleep -- the No. 1 question parents ask Dr. Medina.

sleepy baby - new chapter
"How do I get my baby to sleep through the night?"

John Medina introduces the new sleep chapter: video

A note from John Medina

I was hesitant, I admit, about adding a sleep chapter to Brain Rules for Baby. The science about getting your child to go to sleep is fairly wobbly.

But you keep asking me about it. Whenever I lecture, whenever you write me, the question “How do I get my child to go to sleep?” keeps reappearing like a public-television fund-raiser.

I do understand your need for junior to get regular sleep. I know one couple who decided not to have any more children because of the toll their first-born’s sleep habits took on their marriage. The issue can’t get much more important than that.

So I get it. Here is your chapter.

Besides, the professor in me can’t help but want to show you how weak-kneed science can be when it’s yoked to real-world problems. Infant sleep is a terrific illustration of science’s strengths and limitations.

In the Sleepy Baby chapter, you will discover two powerful, opposing ideas about how to get your baby to go to sleep. They’re not mutually exclusive, but they don’t tolerate each other very well. Which one you end up believing depends more on personal preference than peer review. It would be nice if the data were better behaved, but they’re not.

I do provide a solution, however. If you are having trouble getting your child to go to sleep, you will find this chapter useful. And if it solves your problem, feelings of love for your child will once again expand in your heart, like a second Big Bang. That’s the most compelling reason for me to add a new chapter on sleep.

Get the book!

eBook (PDF)
Brain Rules for Baby Audiobook

Just want the sleep chapter? Get it here.

Each ebook comes in PDF format, which you can send to your Kindle or other reading device.

Become a fan of Brain Rules for Baby on Facebook.

P.S. Zero to Five by Tracy Cutchlow is due June 17th!