1. Rule #7 SLEEP
1.1. Sleep well, think well.
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2. Rule #8 STRESS
2.1. Stressed brains don't learn the same way.
2.1.1. Your brain is built to deal with stress that lasts about 30 seconds. The brain is not designed for long term stress when you feel like you have no control. The saber-toothed tiger ate you or you ran away but it was all over in less than a minute. If you have a bad boss, the saber-toothed tiger can be at your door for years, and you begin to deregulate. If you are in a bad marriage, the saber-toothed tiger can be in your bed for years, and the same thing occurs. You can actually watch the brain shrink.
2.1.2. Stress damages virtually every kind of cognition that exists. It damages memory and executive function. It can hurt your motor skills. When you are stressed out over a long period of time it disrupts your immune response. You get sicker more often. It disrupts your ability to sleep. You get depressed.
2.1.3. The emotional stability of the home is the single greatest predictor of academic success. If you want your kid to get into Harvard, go home and love your spouse.
2.1.4. You have one brain. The same brain you have at home is the same brain you have at work or school. The stress you are experiencing at home will affect your performance at work, and vice versa.
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3. Rule #9 multisensory SENSORY INTEGRATION
3.1. Stimulate more of the senses.
3.1.1. Our senses work together so it is important to stimulate them! Your head crackles with the perceptions of the whole world, sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, energetic as a frat party.
3.1.2. Smell is unusually effective at evoking memory. If you're tested on the details of a movie while the smell of popcorn is wafted into the air, you'll remember 10-50% more.
3.1.3. Smell is really important to business. When you walk into Starbucks, the first thing you smell is coffee. They have done a number of things over the years to make sure that’s the case.
3.1.4. The learning link. Those in multisensory environments always do better than those in unisensory environments. They have more recall with better resolution that lasts longer, evident even 20 years later.
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4. Rule #10 VISION
4.1. Vision trumps all other senses.
4.1.1. We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you'll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you'll remember 65%.
4.1.2. Pictures beat text as well, in part because reading is so inefficient for us. Our brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures, and we have to identify certain features in the letters to be able to read them. That takes time.
4.1.3. Why is vision such a big deal to us? Perhaps because it's how we've always apprehended major threats, food supplies and reproductive opportunity.
4.1.4. Toss your PowerPoint presentations. It’s text-based (nearly 40 words per slide), with six hierarchical levels of chapters and subheads—all words. Professionals everywhere need to know about the incredible inefficiency of text-based information and the incredible effects of images. Burn your current PowerPoint presentations and make new ones.
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4.2.2. Vision trumps all other senses.
5. Rule #13 MUSIC
5.1. Study or listen to boost cognition.
5.1.1. There’s a commercial from the 1970s, starring actor and director Orson Welles, about a California winery’s fastidious production philosophy. “We will sell no wine before its time,” Welles intoned. That tagline could easily be applied to our subject. Ideas about how music affects the brain long have been the providence of anecdote. But the research has been maturing for a while now. Now it is of sufficient quality that a few solid things can be said about it.
5.1.2. Science has a wholly undeserved reputation for being confident, quick, and decisive. Real science is insecure, slow, and obsessed with doing more experiments. The research on music and the brain is a terrific illustration of how tentative our enterprise can be. Many bright people have labored long and hard to bring up to the surface the few nuggets available in this chapter. It’s exciting stuff that will only get more exciting as the years go by.
5.1.3. A music chapter has been on my mind for years. My wife is a classical composer, and I have been around swirls of her music our entire marriage (more than three decades now). It is natural for me as a brain scientist to wonder about how music affects her, and me, and our children—the way we think and the way we feel.
5.1.4. Writing about these data, tentative as they may be, is an attempt to understand what goes on in the brain—including yours—when we perform or listen to our favorite songs. I think you will find it uplifting. And, if you live with a musician, perhaps also explanatory.
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6. Rule #11 GENDER
6.1. Male and female brains are different.
6.1.1. What’s different? Mental health professionals have known for years about sex-based differences in the type and severity of psychiatric disorders. Males are more severely afflicted by schizophrenia than females. By more than 2 to 1, women are more likely to get depressed than men, a figure that shows up just after puberty and remains stable for the next 50 years. Males exhibit more antisocial behavior. Females have more anxiety. Most alcoholics and drug addicts are male. Most anorexics are female.
6.1.2. Men and women handle acute stress differently. When researcher Larry Cahill showed them slasher films, men fired up the amygdale in their brain’s right hemisphere, which is responsible for the gist of an event. Their left was comparatively silent. Women lit up their left amygdale, the one responsible for details. Having a team that simultaneously understood the gist and details of a given stressful situation helped us conquer the world.
6.1.3. Men and women process certain emotions differently. Emotions are useful. They make the brain pay attention. These differences are a product of complex interactions between nature and nurture
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7. Rule #12 EXPLORATION
7.1. We are powerful and natural explorers.
7.1.1. The desire to explore never leaves us despite the classrooms and cubicles we are stuffed into. Babies are the model of how we learn—not by passive reaction to the environment but by active testing through observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion. Babies methodically do experiments on objects, for example, to see what they will do.
7.1.2. Google takes to heart the power of exploration. For 20 percent of their time, employees may go where their mind asks them to go. The proof is in the bottom line: fully 50 percent of new products, including Gmail and Google News, came from “20 percent time.”
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8. Rule #1 EXERCISE
8.1. Exercise boosts brain power.
8.1.1. The human brain evolved under conditions of almost constant motion. From this, one might predict that the optimal environment for processing information would include motion. That is exactly what one finds. Indeed, the best business meeting would have everyone walking at about 1.8 miles per hour.
8.1.2. Researchers studied two elderly populations that had led different lifestyles, one sedentary and one active. Cognitive scores were profoundly influenced. Exercise positively affected executive function, spatial tasks, reaction times and quantitative skills.
8.1.3. So researchers asked: If the sedentary populations become active, will their cognitive scores go up? Yes, it turns out, if the exercise is aerobic. In four months, executive functions vastly improve; longer, and memory scores improve as well.
8.1.4. Exercise improves cognition for two reasons:
8.1.5. Exercise increases oxygen flow into the brain, which reduces brain-bound free radicals. One of the most interesting findings of the past few decades is that an increase in oxygen is always accompanied by an uptick in mental sharpness.
8.1.6. Exercise acts directly on the molecular machinery of the brain itself. It increases neurons’ creation, survival, and resistance to damage and stress.
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9. Rule #2 SURVIVAL
9.1. The human brain evolved, too.
9.1.1. The brain is a survival organ. It is designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment and to do so in nearly constant motion (to keep you alive long enough to pass your genes on). We were not the strongest on the planet but we developed the strongest brains, the key to our survival.
9.1.2. The strongest brains survive, not the strongest bodies. Our ability to solve problems, learn from mistakes, and create alliances with other people helps us survive. We took over the world by learning to cooperate and forming teams with our neighbors.
9.1.3. Our ability to understand each other is our chief survival tool. Relationships helped us survive in the jungle and are critical to surviving at work and school today.
9.1.4. If someone does not feel safe with a teacher or boss, he or she may not perform as well. If a student feels misunderstood because the teacher cannot connect with the way the student learns, the student may become isolated.
9.1.5. There is no greater anti-brain environment than the classroom and cubicle.
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10. Rule #3 WIRING
10.1. Every brain is wired differently.
10.1.1. What YOU do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like – it literally rewires it. We used to think there were just 7 categories of intelligence. But categories of intelligence may number more than 7 billion—roughly the population of the world.
10.1.2. No two people have the same brain, not even twins. Every student’s brain, every employee’s brain, every customer’s brain is wired differently.
10.1.3. You can either accede to it or ignore it. The current system of education ignores it by having grade structures based on age. Businesses such as Amazon are catching on to mass customization (the Amazon homepage and the products you see are tailored to your recent purchases).
10.1.4. Regions of the brain develop at different rates in different people. The brains of school children are just as unevenly developed as their bodies. Our school system ignores the fact that every brain is wired differently. We wrongly assume every brain is the same.
10.1.5. Most of us have a “Jennifer Aniston” neuron (a neuron lurking in your head that is stimulated only when Jennifer Aniston is in the room).
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11. Rule #4 ATTENTION
11.1. We don't pay attention to boring things.
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12. Rule #5 Shortterm MEMORY
12.1. Repeat to remember.
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13. Rule #6 Long term memory
13.1. Remember to repeat.
13.1.1. It takes years to consolidate a memory. Not minutes, hours, or days but years. What you learn in first grade is not completely formed until your sophomore year in high school.
13.1.2. Medina’s dream school is one that repeats what was learned, not at home, but during the school day, 90-120 minutes after the initial learning occurred. Our schools are currently designed so that most real learning has to occur at home.
13.1.3. How do you remember better? Repeated exposure to information / in specifically timed intervals / provides the most powerful way to fix memory into the brain.
13.1.4. Forgetting allows us to prioritize events. But if you want to remember, remember to repeat.
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