Brain Rules: How our brain works?

Most of us have no idea what's really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details every business leader, parent, and teacher should know--such as the brain's need for physical activity to work at its best.

How do we learn? What exactly do sleep and stress do to our brains? Why is multi-tasking a myth? Why is it so easy to forget--and so important to repeat new information? Is it true that men and women have different brains?

In Brain Rules, molecular biologist Dr. John Medina shares his lifelong interest in how the brain sciences might influence the way we teach our children and the way we work. In each chapter, he describes a brain rule--what scientists know for sure about how our brains work--and then offers transformative ideas for our daily lives.

Medina's fascinating stories and sense of humor breathe life into brain science. You'll learn why Michael Jordan was no good at baseball. You'll peer over a surgeon's shoulder as he finds, to his surprise, that we have a Jennifer Aniston neuron. You'll meet a boy who has an amazing memory for music but can't tie his own shoes.

You will discover how:

- Every brain is wired differently
- Exercise improves cognition
- We are designed to never stop learning and exploring
- Memories are volatile
- Sleep is powerfully linked with the ability to learn
- Vision trumps all of the other senses
- Stress changes the way we learn

In the end, you'll understand how your brain really works--and how to get the most out of it.

Summary:

• 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 percent.

Take a look at a lens dedicated especially for this topic: Rule #1: Exercise

Summary:

• We don't have one brain in our heads; we have three. We started with a "lizard brain" to keep us breathing, then added a brain like a cat's, and then topped those with the layer of Jell-O known as the cortex--the third, and powerful, "human" brain.


• We took over the Earth by adapting to change itself, after we were forced from trees to the Savannah when climate swings disrupted our food supply.


• Going from four legs to two to walk on the Savannah freed up energy to develop a complex brain.


• Symbolic reasoning is a uniquely human talent. It may have arisen from our need to understand one another's intentions and motivations, allowing us to coordinate a group.

If you want to get more on this topic, check back, new lens is coming up!

Summary

• What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like -- it literally rewires it.


• The various regions of the brain develop at different rates in different people.


• No two people's brains store the same information 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.

If you want to get more on this topic, check back, new lens is coming up!

Summary:

• The brain's attentional "spotlight" can focus on only one thing at a time: no multitasking.


• We are better at seeing patterns and abstracting the meaning of an event than we are at recording details.


• 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.


If you want to get more on this topic, check back, new lens is coming up!

Summary:

• The brain has many types of memory systems. One type follows four stages of processing: encoding, storing, retrieving and forgetting.


• Information coming into your brain is immediately split into fragments that are sent to different regions of the cortex for storage.


• 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.

If you want to get more on this topic, check back, new lens is coming up!

Summary:

• Most memories disappear within minutes, but those that survive the fragile period strengthen with time.


• Long-term memories are formed in a two-way conversation between the hippocampus and the cortex, until the hippocampus breaks the connection and the memory is fixed in the cortex - which can take years.


• Our brains give us only an approximate view of reality, because they mix new knowledge with past memories and store them together as one.


• The way to make long-term memory more reliable is to incorporate new information gradually and repeat it in timed intervals.

If you want to get more on this topic, check back, new lens is coming up!

Summary:

• The brain is in a constant state of tension between cells and chemicals that try to put you to sleep and cells and chemicals that try to keep you awake.



• The neurons of your brain show vigorous rhythmical activity when you're asleep - perhaps replaying what you learned that day.



• 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.



• Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive functions, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.

If you want to get more on this topic, check back, new lens is coming up!

Summary:

• Your body's defense system - the release of adrenaline and cortisol - is built for an immediate response to a serious but passing danger, such as a saber-toothed tiger. Chronic stress, such as hostility at home, dangerously deregulates a system built only to deal with short-term responses.


• 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 impact across society, on children's ability to learn in school and on employees' productivity at work.

Summary:

• We absorb information about an event through our senses, translate it into electrical signals (some for sight, others from sound, etc.), disperse those signals to separate parts of the brain, then reconstruct what happened, eventually perceiving the event as a whole.


• The brain seems to rely partly on past experience in deciding how to combine these signals, so two people can perceive the same event very differently.


• Our senses evolved to work together - vision influencing hearing, for example - which means that we learn best if we stimulate several senses at once.


• Smells have an unusual power to bring back memories, maybe because smell signals bypass the thalamus and head straight to their destinations, which include that supervisor of emotions known as the amygdala.

Summary:

• Vision is by far our most dominant sense, talking up half of our brain's resources.


• What we see is only what our brain tells us we see, and it's not 100 percent accurate.


• The visual analysis we do has many steps. The retina assembles photons into little movie-like streams of information. The visual cortex processes these streams, some areas registering motion, others registering color, etc. Finally, we combine that information back together so we can see.


• We learn and remember best through pictures, not through written or spoken words.

Summary:

• The X chromosome that males have one of and females have two of - though one acts as a backup - is a cognitive "hot spot," carrying an unusually large percentage of genes involved in brain manufacture.


• Women are genetically more complex, because the active X chromosomes in their cells are a mix of Mom's and Dad's. Men's X chromosomes all come from Mom, and their Y chromosome carries less than 100 genes, compared with about 1500 for the X chromosome.


• Men's and women's brains are different structurally and biochemically - men have a bigger amygdala and produce serotonin faster, for example - but we don't know if those differences have significance.


• 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.

Summary:

• 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.


• Specific parts of the brain allow this scientific approach. The right prefrontal cortex looks for errors in our hypothesis ("The saber-toothed tiger is not harmless"), and an adjoining region tells us to charge behavior ("Run!").


• We can recognize and imitate behavior because of "mirror neurons" scattered across the brain.


• 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.

For me, this is definitely one of the best books I have read so far. It has clear structure, good stories from life and what's more very good ideas to use in our lives.

Indeed, we should know more about how we work and why we work like that. This is not some rocket science and it affects all of us - businessmen, teachers, parents.. just curious people. Of course, this book is not for you if you don't like learning (no, I don't mean going to school, but getting to know new things), but if you are still reading this lens, I assume you are curious, just like most (maybe even all) of children are!

I will be updating mainly lenses about certain rules and add some personal experience as well.

PS. Brain Rules DVD adds a lot to the book and there is a video about every chapter included. +more.