BRAIN RULES (THE SHORT VERSION)

Transcription

1 BRAIN RULES (THE SHORT VERSION) 1. Rule #1: Exercise Boosts Brain Power (Exercise) a. Survival of the Fittest i. Our fancy brains developed not while we were lounging around but while we were working out. ii. We grew up in top physical shape, or we didn t grow up at all. The human brain became the most powerful in the world under conditions where motion was a constant presence. b. Is There One Factor that Predicts How Well You Will Age? i. One of the greatest predictors of successful aging was the presence or absence of a sedentary lifestyle. ii. Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in tests that measure long term memory, reasoning, attention, problem solving, even so called fluid intelligence tasks. iii. Neuroscientists consistently foiund that when couch potatoes are enrolled in an aerobic exercise program, all kinds of mental abilities begin to come back online. 1. When children jogged for 30 minutes two or three times a week, after 12 weeks, their cognitive performance had improved significantly compared with pre jogging levels. iv. Bad News? 1. In the laboratory, aerobic exercise, 30 minutes at a time, two or three times week is the gold standard. Add a strengthening regimen and you get even more cognitive benefit. v. Can Exercise Treat Brain Disorders? 1. Your lifetime risk for general dementia is literally cut in half if you participate in leisure time physical activity. Aerobic exercise seems to be the key. With Alzheimer s, the effect is even greater: Such exercise lowers your odds of getting the disease by more than 60 percent., a. Exercise regulates the release of the three neurotransmitters most commonly associated with the maintenance of mental health: i. Serotonin ii. Dopamine iii. Norepinephrine vi. Are the Cognitive Benefits Only for the Elderly? 1. Physically fit children identify visual stimuli faster. 2. They appear to concentrate better. 3. They allocate more cognitive resources to a task and do so for longer periods of time.

2 4. They pay better attention to their subjects when they ve been active, less likely to be disruptive. c. Brain Nutrition i. The brain represents only about 2% of most people s body weight, yet it accounts for about 20% of the body s total energy usage. ii. The human brain cannot simultaneously activate more than 2% of its neurons at any one time. More than this, and the glucose supply becomes so quickly exhausted that you will faint. d. Exercise literally increases blood volume in a region of the brain called the dentate gyrus. i. The dentate gyrus is a vital constituent of the hippocampus, a region deeply involved in memory formation. (More on that later) ii. Exercise stimulates BDNF. 1. Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor. a. This protein keeps existing neurons young and healthy. b. Encourages neurogenesis (formation of new neurons). i. The cells most sensitive to this are in the hippocampus. e. Can We Improve? i. Dr. Medina is convinced that integrating exercise into the 8 hours of school or work will not make us smarter. It will only make us normal. f. Recess Twice A Day i. Cutting off physical exercise the very activity most likely to promote cognitive performance to do better on a test score is like trying to gain weight by staving yourself. g. General Summary of Rule #1 Exercise Boosts Brain Power i. Our brains were built for walking 12 miles/day! ii. To improve your thinking skills, move. 2. Rule #2: The Human Brain Evolved Too (Survival) a. Symbolic Reasoning i. Symbolic reasoning gives us the capacity for language, for written language, mathematics, and art among other things. 1. Symbolic reasoning takes almost three years of experience to become fully operational. We don t appear to do much to distinguish ourselves from apes before we are out of the terrible twos. b. Variability Selection Theory i. Attempts to explain why our ancestors became increasingly allergic to inflexility and stupidity. 1. The theory predicts interactions between two feature of the brain. a. A database in which to store a fund of knowledge b. The ability to improvise off of that database.

3 i. One allows us to know when we ve made mistakes, the other allows us to learn from those mistakes. c. Some schools and workplaces emphasize a stable, rote learned database. They ignore the improvisatory instincts drilled into us for millions of years. Creativity suffers. Others emphasize creative usage of a database, without installing a fund of knowledge in the first place. They ignore our need to obtain a deep understanding of a subject, which includes memorizing and storing a richly structured database. c. Meet Your Brain i. Prefrontal Cortex 1. This region controls many of the behaviors that separate us from other animals and from teenagers. ii. Paleomammalian brain 1. Its functions involve a. Fighting b. Feeding c. Fleeing d. Reproduction 2. Structures a. Amygdale i. Rage ii. Fear iii. Pleasure iv. Memories of past rage, fear and pleasure v. Creation of emotions and the memories they generate. b. Hippocampus i. Coverts short term memories into longer term memories. c. Thalamus i. Control tower for the senses. d. Theory of Mind i. We try to see our entire world in terms of motivations. 1. We ascribe motivations to our pets and even to inanimate objects. 2. Success if fully dependent upon feelings. e. General Summary of Rule #2: The Human Brain Evolved, Too i. We don t have one brain in our heads; we have three. ii. Symbolic reasoning is a uniquely human talent. 3. Rule #3: Every Brain is Wired differently Wiring a. DNA i. Nearly 6 feet of DNA is contained in a cells nucleus. 1. Like stuffing 30 miles of fishing line into a blueberry.

4 b. The brain is constantly learning things therefore the brain is constantly rewiring itself. c. Study by Charles Darwin i. The brains in wild animals are 15 to 30% larger than those of their tame, domestic counterparts. d. Violin players? i. The neural regions that control their left hands, where complex, fine motor movement is required on the strings, are enlarged, swollen and crisscrossed with complex association. By contrast, the areas controlling the fight hand, which draws the bow have much less complexity. e. The brain acts like a muscle, the more activity you do, the larger and more complex it can become. i. Brains aren t finished until the early to mid 20 s and fine tuned well into the 40 s. ii. When babies are born, their brains have about the same number of connections as adults. By the time children are 3 years old, connections in specific regions of their brains have double or tripled. 1. The brains trims a lot of this so that by the time children are 8 or so, their brains are back to their original numbers. iii. At puberty, outgrowth and pruning begin again. 1. There is a great deal of brain activity in the terrible twos and also during the terrible teens. 2. The brains of kids are just as unevenly developed as their bodies. f. Experience dependent brain wiring. i. A great deal of the brain is hard wired not to be hard wired. 1. Brains are so sensitive to external inputs that their physical wiring depends upon the culture in which they find themselves. 2. Bilingual people don t store their second language and their first language in similar places. g. Summary of rule #3: Every Brain is Wired Differently Wired i. What you do and learn in life physical changes what your brain looks like. ii. The various regions of the brain develop at different rates in different people. 4. Rule #4: We Don t Pay Attention To Boring Things Attention a. Attention spans in most people is only 10 minutes. b. We use previous experience to predict where we should pay attention. c. Different cultures pay attention to different things. i. The brain hemispheres separate spotlights for visual attention. 1. Left hemisphere a. This spotlight is small, capable of paying attention only to items on the right side of the visual field. 2. Right hemisphere a. Has the global spotlight (sees the whole picture, right and left sides)

5 d. Posner s model i. 3 parts 1. 1 st : Alerting or arousal network a. Monitors the sensory environment for any unusual activities. The general level of attention our brains are paying to our world. i. A condition termed Intrinsic Alertness nd : Intrinsic Alertness transforms into specific attention, call Phasic Alertness. a. The purpose is to gain more information about the stimulus. i. You orient towards (or away from) a stimulus rd : Executive Network a. The Oh my gosh what should I do now? Behaviors ii. 4 behavioral characteristics 1. Emotions (get our attention) a. Emotionally arousing events tend to be better remembered than neutral events. b. Amygdala i. Helps create and maintain emotions. ii. Chock full of the neurotransmitter dopamine. 1. Dopamine greatly aids memory and information processing. 2. Meaning before details a. The brain remembers the emotional components of an experience better than any other aspect. b. Emotional arousal focuses attention on the gist of an experience at the expense of peripheral details. c. With the passage of time, our retrieval of gist always trumps our recall of details. d. Memory is enhanced by creating association between concepts. e. If you want to get the particulars correct, don t start with details. Start with the key ideas and, in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions. 3. The brain cannot multitask a. We are biologically incapable of processing attention rich inputs simultaneously. i. A person who is interrupted (or who interrupts themselves) takes 50% longer to accomplish a task. They also make up to 50% more errors. 4. The brain needs a break a. Most people relate to much information, with not enough time devoted to connecting the dots.

6 b. Do one thing at a time. i. Businesses and schools praise multitasking but research clearly shows that it reduces productivity and increase mistakes. e. Summary of rule #4 (People Don t Pay Attention to Boring Things) i. Focus on one thing at a time: no multitasking. ii. Emotional arousal helps the brain learn iii. Audiences check out after 10 minutes. 5. Rule #5: Short term memory Repeat To Remember a. People usually forget 90% of what they learn in a class within 30 days. b. The majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours after class. i. One could increase the life span of a memory simply by repeating the information in timed intervals. The more repetition cycles a given memory experienced, the more likely it is to persist in the mind. ii. Spaced learning is greatly superior to massed learning. c. Two types of memories i. Declarative memories 1. Those that can be experienced in our conscious awareness. a. Jupiter is a planet. 2. Can be broken down into 4 sequential steps. a. Encoding b. Storing c. Retrieving d. forgetting ii. Non declarative memories 1. Those that cannot be experienced in our conscious awareness, such as the motor skills necessary to ride a bike. iii. The hippocampus is specifically involved in converting short term information into longer term forms. iv. Declarative memory is any conscious memory system that is altered when the hippocampus and various surrounding regions become damaged. v. Non declarative memory is defined as those unconscious memory systems that are NOT altered when the hippocampus and surrounding regions are damaged. vi. Signals from different sensory sources are registered in separate brain areas. d. The more elaborately we encode information at the moment of learning, the stronger the memory. i. We remember things much better the more elaborately we encode what we encounter, especially of we can personalize it. 1. The brain has no central happy hunting ground where memories go to be infinitely retrieved. Memories are distributed all over the surface of the cortex.

7 e. Retrieval may best be improved by replicating the conditions surrounding the initial encoding. i. It appeared that memory worked best if the environmental conditions at retrieval mimicked the environmental conditions at encoding. 1. Even responds to mood. ii. Information is remembered best when it is elaborate, meaningful, and contextual. f. The more a learner focuses on the meaning of the presented information, the more elaborately the encoding is processed. i. When you are trying to drive a piece of information into your brain s memory systems, make sure you understand exactly what that information means. If you are trying to drive information into someone else s brain, make sure they know what it means. ii. The more personal an example, the more richly it becomes encoded and the more readily it is remembered. g. The memory of an event is stored in the same places that were initially recruited to perceive the learning even. The more brain structures recruited at the moment the learning, the easier it is to gain access to the information. h. Summary of rule #5 Short Term Memory Repeat To Remember i. Information coming into your brain is immediately split into fragments that are sent to different regions of the cortex for storage. ii. The more elaborately we encode a memory during its initial moments, the stronger it will be. 6. Rule #6 Long Term Memory Remember To Repeat a. Elaborative rehearsal i. Thinking or talking about an event immediately after it has occurred enhances memory for that event. 1. Deliberately re expose yourself to the information if you want to retrieve it later. 2. Deliberately re expose yourself to the information more elaborately if you want the retrieval to be of higher quality. 3. Deliberately re expose yourself to the information more elaborately, and in fixed, spaced intervals, if you want the retrieval to be the most vivid it can be. a. Learning occurs best when new information is incorporated gradually into the memory store rather than when it is jammed in all at once. b. How the brain is wired for long term memory formation i. Neurons spring from the cortex and snake their way over to the medial temporal lobe, allowing the hippocampus to listen I on what the cortex is receiving. Wires also erupt from the lobe and wriggle their way back to the cortex, returning the eavesdropping favor. This loop allows the hippocampus to

8 issue orders to previously stimulated cortical regions while simultaneously gleaning information from them. 1. The end result of their association is the creation of long term memories. a. The process of long term memory formation can take years to complete. b. Memory is not fixed at the moment of learning. Repetition provides the fixative. c. Summary of Rule #6 Long Term Memory Repeat to Remember i. Long term memories are formed between the hippocampus and the cortex which can take years (11 to 15). ii. Incorporate new information gradually and repeat it in timed intervals. 7. Rule #7: Sleep Well, Think Well a. We don t know why we need sleep. i. The brain does not appear to sleep. b. There is a regular rhythmic schedule to waking and sleeping. i. Circadian Arousal System (Process C) 1. This system keeps you awake. ii. Process S 1. This system puts you to sleep. iii. Process C remains active for about 16 hours of active consciousness. iv. Process S remains active for about 8 hours. 1. It is possible to become dysfunctional with too much sleep or not enough sleep. c. The Nap Zone i. The brain wants to take a nap no matter what the owner is doing. 1. A 45 minute nap in the afternoon can produce a 34% increase in cognitive performance. d. Performance i. An A student in the top 10% when sleep is reduced to 7 hours in weekdays and 40 minutes more on weekends reduce their performance to the lower 9%. 1. Sleep loss cripples thinking, in nearly every way possible. Attention, executive function, immediate memory, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning ability, general math knowledge. Eventually, sleep loss affect manual dexterity, including fine motor control and even gross motor movements. 2. In sleep, the brain replays the sequence of learning. This sequence can be replayed thousands of times. 3. The brain consolidates the day s learning the night after that learning occurred, an interruption of that sleep disrupts the leaning cycle. a. Data suggests that students temporarily shift to more of an owlish sleep pattern as they transit through their teenage years.

9 The natural tendency of these teenagers is to sleep more, especially in the morning. As we age, we tend to get less sleep, and some suggests we need less sleep too. e. Summary of rule #7: Sleep Well, Think Well i. The neurons of your train show vigorous rhythmical activity when you re asleep perhaps replaying what learned that day. ii. The biological drive for an afternoon nap is universal. iii. Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity. 8. Rule #8: Stressed Brains Don t Learn the Same Way a. Martin Seligman coined the term learned helplessness. i. The perception of inescapability and its associated cognitive collapse. b. To your brain and body, saber toothed tigers, intense physical pleasure and turkey gravy look remarkably similar. An aroused physiological state is characteristic of both stress and pleasure. i. A three part definition 1. Part one: An aroused physiological response to the stress must be measurable by an outside party. 2. Part two: The stressor must be perceived as aversive. If you had the ability to turn down the severity of this experience, or avoid it altogether, would you? 3. Part three: The person must not feel in control of the stressor. The more the loss of control, the more severe the stress is perceived to be. c. If stress is not too severe, the brain performs better. Its owner can solve problems mre effectively and is more likely to retain information. d. If stress is too severe or too prolonged, stress begins to harm learning. i. Stressed people don t do math very well. They don t process language very efficiently. They have poorer memories, both short and long forms. Stressed individuals do not generalize or adapt old pieces of information to new scenarios as well as non stressed individuals. They can t concentrate. ii. Stress hurts declarative memory (things you can declare) and executive function (the type of thinking that involves problem solving). e. Research shows that memories of stressful experiences are formed almost instantaneously in the human brain. f. Chronic exposure to stress can lead you to depression. i. Depression is a deregulation of thought processes, including memory, language, quantitative reasoning, fluid intelligence, and spatial perception. g. One of the greatest predictors of performance in school turns out to be the emotional stability of the home. i. Stress in the home is profoundly related to kids ability to do well in the classroom and, when they grow up, in the workforce.

10 1. The kids have more difficulty regulating their emotions, soothing themselves, focusing their attention on others. h. Stress is behind more than half of the 550 million working days lost each year because of absenteeism. i. The Perfect Storm of occupational stress. i. It appears to be a combination of two malignant facts: 1. A great deal is expected of you. 2. You have no control over whether you will perform well. a. A perfect formula for learned helplessness. j. Summary of rule #8: Stressed Brains Don t Learn the Same Way i. Chronic stress dangerously deregulates a system built only to deal with shortterm responses. ii. Under chronic stress, adrenaline damages the cells of the hippocampus, crippling your ability to learn and remember. iii. The worst kind of stress is the feeling that you have no control over the problem you are helpless. 9. Rule #9: Stimulate More of the Brain a. Stimulate more of the brain for learning. b. Most of the sophisticated learning occur in regions known as association cortices. i. Association cortices are not exactly sensory regions, and they are not exactly motor regions, but they are exactly bridges between them (hence the name association). ii. Written information 1. Written information has a lot of visual feature in it, and this takes a great deal of effort and time to organize. It is one of the reasons that reading is a relatively slow way to put information into the brain. c. To increase learning, stimulate more of the senses. i. Learning is less effective in a unisensory environment. 1. Multisensory presentations are the way to go. ii. Rules for multimedia presentations: 1. Multimedia principle: People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone. 2. Temporal contiguity principle: people learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near to each other rather than far from each on the page or screen. 3. Coherence principle: People learn better when extraneous material is excluded. 4. Modality principle: people learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on screen text. d. The Proust Effect i. Smells evoke memories

11 ii. Researchers report that smell exposed experimental groups can accurately retrieve twice as many memories as the controls. iii. Odors appear to do their finest work when subjects are asked to retrieve the emotional details of a memory or to retrieve autobiographical memories. iv. Odors are not so good at retrieving declarative memory. v. Smell enhanced learning when combined with the same smell while sleeping can increase recall up to 11%. e. Summary of rule #9: Stimulate More of the Sense at the Same Time i. We learn best if we stimulate several senses at once. 10. Rule #10: Vision Trumps All Other Senses a. We do not see with our eyes. We see with our brains. b. Visual processing doesn t just assist in the perception of our world. It dominates the perception of our world. c. We experience our visual environment as a fully analyzed opinion about what the brain thinks is out there. d. Specialized nerve cells deep within the retina interpret the patterns of photons striking the retina, assemble the patterns into partial movies and then send these movies off to the back of our heads. These movies are called tracks. Tracks are coherent, though partial, abstractions of specific features of the visual environment. i. One track is composed only of outlines, or edges. ii. Another track only the movement of an object. iii. There may be as many as 12 of these tracks operating simultaneously in the retina, sending off interpretations of specific features of the visual field. e. The visual cortex is big and ridiculously specific. Some areas respond only to diagonal lines, and only to specific diagonal lines. Some only the color information; others, only edges; others, only motion. f. Charles Bonnet Syndrome i. People see things that aren t there. ii. Almost all of the patients experiencing the hallucinations know that they aren t real. g. The brain has to devote to vision a lot of its precious thinking resources. It takes up about half of everything you do. h. The more visual the input becomes, the more likely it is to be recognized and recalled. i. Called the Pictorial Superiority Effect or PSE. i. The brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures. i. To our cortex, there is no such thing as words. ii. When we read, most of us try to visualize what the text is telling us. j. We pay special attention if the object is in motion. k. If drawings are too complex or lifelike, they can distract from the transfer of information l. Most powerpoint presentation are text based. They should be picture based. m. Summary of rule #10: Vision Trumps All Other Senses i. Vision is by far our most dominant sense, taking up half of our brain s resources.

12 ii. We learn and remember best through pictures, not through written or spoken words. 1. Rule #11: Gender: Male and Female Brains are Different a. Gender biases hurt real people in real world situations. b. The basic default setting of the mammalian embryo is to become female. c. 1,500 genes reside on the X chromosome. i. Many of those genes involve brain function. ii. Many of them govern how we think. iii. An unusually large percentage of the X chromosomes genes were found to create proteins involved in brain manufacture. 1. Some of these genes may be involved in establishing higher cognitive functions. d. Female amygdalas tend to talk mostly to the left hemisphere. e. Male amygdalas communicate mostly with the right hemisphere. f. Mental retardation is more common in males than in females in the general population. g. Male have no backup X, if the males X gets damage, they have to live with the consequences. h. If a female s X is damaged, she can often ignore the consequences. i. Right brain vs. Left brain i. Creative vs. analytical people is a folk tale. ii. The hemispheres are not equal however. 1. The right side of the brain tends to remember the gist of an experience, and the left brain tends to remember the details. 2. Women consistently report more vivid memories for emotionally important event. j. Boys always compete, and girls always cooperate. Is a myth i. Boys are extremely cooperative, they are simply doing to through competition deploying their favorite strategy of physical activity. k. Get the facts straight on emotions. i. Emotions are useful. They make the brain pay attention. ii. Men and women process certain emotions differently. iii. Sometimes women are accused of being more emotional than men, from the home to the workplace. I think that women might not be any more emotional than anyone else. I explained that because women perceive their emotional landscape with more data points (that s the detail) and see it in greater resolution, women may simply have more information to which they are capable of reacting. If men perceived the same number of data points, they might have the same number of reactions. l. Summary of rule #11 Male and Female Brains are Different i. Men and women respond differently to acute stress: women active the left hemisphere s amygdala and remember the emotional details. Men use the right amygdala and get the gist.

13 2. Rule #12 Exploration: We are Powerful and Natural Explorers a. We are natural explorers, even if the habit sometimes causes injuries. The tendency is so strong, it is capable of turning us into lifelong learners. b. In 1979, Andy Meltzoff demonstrated mirrored behavior. i. He stuck his tongue out at a newborn and we polite enough to wait for a reply. The baby stuck her tongue back out at him! He reliable measured this imitative behavior with infants only 42 minutes old. The baby had never seen a tongue before, not Meltzoff s and not her own yet the baby knew she had a tongue, know Meltzoff had a tongue, and somehow intuited the idea of mirroring. c. By and after the age of 2, we push the boundaries of people s preferences, then stand back and see how they react. Then we repeat the experiment, pushing them to their limits over and over again to see how stable the findings are, as if you were playing peek a boo. Slowly you begin to perceive the length and height and breadth of people s desires, and how they differ from yours. Them, just to be sure the boundaries are still in place, you occasionally do the whole experiment over again. d. We use our right prefrontal cortex to predict error and to retrospectively evaluate input for errors. The anterior congulate cortex, just south of the prefrontal cortex, signals us when perceived unfavorable circumstances call for a change in behavior. e. Some regions of the adult brain stay a malleable as a baby s brain, so we can grow new connections, strengthen existing connections, and even create new neurons, allowing all of us to be lifelong learners. f. A child s need to know is a drive as pure as a diamond and as distracting as chocolate. g. The best school s are medical schools for three reasons: i. Consistent exposure to the real world. 1. By combining traditional book learning and a teaching hospital, the student gets an unobstructed view of what they are getting into while they are going through it. ii. Consistent exposure to people who operate in the real world. 1. Medical students are taught by people who actually do what they teach as their day job. iii. Consistent exposure to practical research programs. h. The greatest brain rule of all is.the importance of curiosity. i. Summary of Brain Rule #12 Exploration: We are Powerful and Natural Explorers i. Babies are the model of how we learn. 1. By active testing through observation, hypothesis, and conclusion. ii. We recognize and imitate behavior because of mirror neurons scattered across the brain. iii. Some part of our adult brains stay as malleable as a baby s, so we can create neurons and learn new things throughout our lives.