Key Messages
Understand How Your Brain Works To Maximize Its Potential
The Brain Rules book summary tells us that if we want to make our brains work better, we need to learn how exactly our brain operates.
This includes understanding what it takes to make our minds healthier and happier, like regular exercise, or the importance of good sleep for more than just beauty reasons.
Furthermore, learning information with all of our senses is a key component in absorbing and retaining what we take in.
Whether it be an amputee feeling his absent limb through a mirror or a Russian journalist recalling random numbers after 15 years, all evidence proves that the smarter your brain can be with the knowledge you give it.
So tonight, spend some time taking in knowledge and improving your recall by engaging all senses when studying; because the more you know and understand about how your brain works makes it easier for you to make it work even better.
Exercise Is Essential For Peak Mental And Physical Performance
Regular exercise is essential for optimal brain functioning.
Studies have found that when your body gets regularly exercised it stimulates its renewal process and generates hormones like Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF).
These hormones help to improve how well the brain works by keeping neurons refreshed and healthy.
BDNF also increases the number of neuron connections, so the more you exercise, the stronger these neuron connections become – allowing for increased cognitive functioning.
Regular exercise also improves blood flow in all of your body’s tissues, which helps with higher absorption and utilization of vital vitamins, minerals and nutrients from the food we eat.
It can also lead to a production of new blood vessels which makes it easier for your body to move vital elements around and get rid of toxins.
Essentially, regular exercise is helping you create better ‘roads’ in your body, just as an English engineer developed back in 1800s – but this time it’s involving blood vessels instead of rock and gravel!
The Importance Of Getting Enough Sleep For Brain Functioning
When it comes to getting the best sleep and feeling better mentally, following your natural sleep cycle is key.
It’s important to recognize that each person has their own unique sleep preferences and rhythms, so understanding your sleep needs and tailoring your sleep schedule accordingly can make a big difference in cognitive abilities.
Research has shown that those who stay true to their natural cycle generally have stronger cognition.
And when it comes to our individual sleeping patterns, there are generally three types; larks (those who wake up early and are most alert before noon), owls (those who don’t hit the sack before 3am but are most alert around 6pm) and hummingbirds, which fluctuate between the two.
What all this means is that you should try to stick as closely as possible to your natural preferences when it comes to designing an optimal sleep schedule for yourself.
If you don’t get enough rest during one week – for example – this sleep debt can be carried into the next week.
An inability to catch up on lost hours of rest during later periods can lead to significant cognitive impairments.
For instance, one study found that after just five days of six or fewer hours of sleeping per night, participants scored as badly on cognitive tests as those who went without sleeping for 48 hours straight!
The Dangers Of Chronic Stress: How Too Much Can Impair Our Brain Functioning
No one can deny that stress has a purpose.
The fight or flight response is an innate survival mechanism that helps protect us from danger.
The problem, however, is that when people become accustomed to long-term stress and don’t feel in control of their lives, it can wreak havoc on the way they think.
Martin Seligman was one of the first to identify this condition now known as “learned helplessness” through a series of studies on dogs subjected to electrical shocks.
When allowed to escape the shocks, the dogs stayed put, cowering in fear and whimpering instead of trying to escape – assuming the shocks were inevitable instead of taking action towards a better future.
Chronic stress similarly debilitates humans, making us think less efficiently (like doing poor math and language processing) and memory recall up to 50% lower than we would otherwise be able to achieve!
Not only that, but executive functioning associated with problem-solving and self-control decreases too.
To stay healthy mentally, it’s important to reduce your chronic stress levels when possible.
Emotions And Cognitive Systems Help Us Focus On The Details That Matter Most
According to Brain Rules, your brain only pays attention to what it considers to be the most important stimuli.
The rest of the information is simply background noise that your brain ignores.
This is why we have cognitive systems designed to hone in on threats, opportunities and patterns – so that our brains can accurately judge what information is worthy of paying attention to, and what can be safely ignored.
For example, when you read these sentences, only a fewbreakthroughs get noticed by your conscious mind.
As for the restof the details, they are simply not important enough for your brain’sto process – regardless of how interesting or interestingthey may be.
To make sure that people don’t completely zone out during long presentations or speeches, Brain Rules recommends using structures such as dividing words into relevant groups which can help increase memory retention by as much as 40%.
By grouping information into meaningful chunks instead of listing it off randomly, you ensure that your audience stays focused on important details rather than struggling through a deluge of data overload noise.
Our Brains Re-Wire Themselves In Response To Experiences And Are Subject To Different Levels Of Development, As Proven By Michael Jordan’S Failed Attempt At Baseball
Every brain is wired differently.
What we experience in life helps carve our neural pathways and shape the way our brains develop.
Michael Jordan’s story of failing at baseball, even though he was one of the top athletes in history, serves as a prime example: his brain was simply not wired for this particular sport.
Neurosurgeons conducted a test to illustrate this further.
When they showed a man a picture of Jennifer Aniston, they discovered that one neuron fired in his brain – only when stimulated by seven different pictures of her, though it remained dormant for all other images the subject was shown.
What this illustrates is that our brains are able to adapt and change themselves based on external input.
The development of the human brain isn’t complete at birth – it continues well into our 20s, with small changes happening all the way until our 40s as well.
This is why schools should understand that not every child learns at exactly the same rate and fashion.
In conclusion, it’s important to recognize that everyone experiences life differently, which will determine how your brain develops and shapes itself over time.
As such, you’re more likely to be successful in your area of acquired expertise due to neural pathways wiring in specific ways over time.
Leverage Meaningful Information, Spaced Intervals, And Reminders To Improve Memory Retention
The brains ability to store information comes with an important condition – meaning and purpose.
Take Solomon Shereshevskii, a Russian born journalist in 1886.
When given a formula of letters and numbers, he was able to remember it 15 years later.
Yet, while capable of memorizing any random data, Shereshevskii struggled to process the data into meaningful patterns.
This emphasizes that our brains can only encode meaningful information in order for us to truly retain it.
Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered that students were more likely to retain their learning when they repeated the material at regular intervals.
The repetition reinforces information to our brain which begs the question: if this is important enough for me to repeat, then it must have value or meaning.
That’s why spaced intervals are so crucial – our minds need time between recall sessions in order for learning to truly sink in and “stick”!
Another challenge that arises when memorizing something is the risk of overwriting existing memories with new ones.
Evidence suggests that when we activate old memories from long-term storage, they enter short-term memory again where they’re vulnerable to being replaced by something newer we would like to store in long-term memory (hence why language learning is often challenging!).
That is why meaning and context plays such an essential role associated with recalling knowledge successfully – without meaning, no amount of spaced intervals will produce successful results — your brain won’t attach any relevance if you don’t give it any real reason too!
Our Brain Has Evolved To Benefit From Multisensory Learning Experiences
Our brains have evolved over time to make use of multiple senses.
That means rather than just trying to learn from one sense, like hearing or sight only, we can actually benefit from both.
Research has shown that our senses are connected and stimulate each other.
In one study, when participants watched a video of someone speaking without sound, the parts of their brain responsible for sound processing were still activated – even though there was no sound!
So visual stimuli can activate the parts of our brains that typically handle sound.
Furthermore, a study by cognitive psychologist Richard Mayer showed that people are better able to remember information if they receive it through multiple senses.
He separated people into three groups: ones which only heard the information, ones which only saw it and ones who heard and saw it together.
The results of his experiment showed that those who heard and saw the information did best in their recall ability.
Therefore, our brains thrive in multisensory environments as it allows us to better take in and understand various sources of information at once.
This means that exposing yourself to multimedia learning projects involving audio-visual elements can be more effective than relying on one sense alone!
Vision’S Power Tricks Our Other Senses And Leads To The Pictorial Superiority Effect
It’s amazing how our visual sense is the strongest.
To better remember facts, it’s best to combine visuals with information.
This was illustrated in an experiment with wine tasters who couldn’t tell the difference between red and white wines that had been dyed red.
It showed that when we drink something, vision will trump smell!
Another study examined 2,500 images shown for 10 seconds each, and participants could accurately recall them after a few days; one year later they could still remember images at an incredible rate of 63%.
However, if no image accompanied spoken information, people only recalled around 10 percent after three days.
Wrap Up
Brain Rules, by John Medina, is an incredibly informative and actionable book on understanding how the human brain works, and optimizing your mind in order to maximize your intellectual potential.
The key message of this book is that the human brain is a sophisticated information-transfer system and that you can optimize it by exercising, getting enough sleep, and avoiding chronic stress.
Moreover, the book also provides tips for effectively delivering information so people will remember it.
This includes keeping lectures short, giving people the opportunity for multisensory learning, making use of visuals in presentations as well as taking advantage of the pictorial superiority effect.
In conclusion, Brain Rules is essential reading for those looking to improve their cognitive abilities and make use of their full mental capabilities.
