http://www.johnmedina.com/
http://raisingchildren.net.au/articles/talaris_research_institiute_-_content_partner.html
http://uwmedicine.washington.edu/Facilities/UWSchoolOfMedicine
http://www.spu.edu/
......If you have a better idea of how the brain actually works, you can then start to do the things that will help you get the most out of your brain.
- Exercise (運動)
- Evolution (進化)
- Wiring (大腦迴路)
- attention Span (注意力集中的時間)
- Short-Term Memory (短期記憶)
- Long-Term Memory (長期記憶)
- Sleep (睡眠)
- Stress (壓力)
- Senses (感官)
- Vision (視覺)
- Gender (性別)
- Exploration (探索)
5.20.2008
Brain Rules for PowerPoint & Keynote presenters
Garr Reynolds, author of "Presenation Zen," has a great post on his blog discussing the book: Brain Rules for PowerPoint & Keynote presenters.Here's what Garr says about the book:"Brain Rules is one of the most informative, engaging, and useful books of our time. Required reading for every educator and every business person. My favorite book of 2008!"
View Upload your ownAbove: here's a slide presentation Garr created based on some of the ideas in Brain Rules.
Posted by John Medina Labels: Exercise, Garr Reynolds, PowerPoint, Presentation Zen, Presentations, Vision
0 comments
5.13.2008
Brain Rules Webinar - Tuesday, June 3 at 2pm EDT/11am PDT
Join John Medina for a live Brain Rules Webinar covering Exercise, Stress, and Multitasking. The free Webinar is hosted by Alvaro Fernandez, the co-founder of SharpBrains.Date and time: Tuesday, June 3 at 2pm EDT/11am PDTRegister: HereSharpBrains Blog PostBrain Rules
Posted by John Medina Labels: alvaro fernandez, SharpBrains, Webinar
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4.25.2008
Harvard Business Review Interview - "The Science of Thinking Smarter"
The May issue of Harvard Business Review features an interview with John Medina, author of "Brain Rules." The article is called The Science of Thinking Smarter (click to read the full article on the HBR site). Below is the executive summary.Neuroscience can show managers ways to improve productivity. A Conversation with brain expert John J. Medina by Diane CoutuAdvances in neurobiology have demonstrated that the brain is so sensitive to external experiences that it can be rewired through exposure to cultural influences. Experiments have shown that in some people, parts of the brain light up only when they are presented with an image of Bill Clinton. In others, it’s Jennifer Aniston. Or Halle Berry. What other stimuli could rewire the brain? Is there a Boeing brain? A Goldman Sachs brain?No one really knows yet, says Medina, a developmental molecular biologist, who has spent much of his career exploring the mysteries of neuroscience with laypeople. As tempting as it is to try to translate the growing advances to the workplace, he warns, it’s just too early to tell how the revolution in neurobiology is going to affect the way executives run their organizations. “If we understood how the brain knew how to pick up a glass of water and drink it, that would represent a major achievement,” he says.Still, neuroscientists are learning much that can be put to practical use. For instance, exercise is good for the brain, and long-term stress is harmful, inevitably hurting productivity in the workplace. Stressed people don’t do math very well, they don’t process language very efficiently, and their ability to remember—in both the short and long terms—declines. In fact, the brain wasn’t built to remember with anything like analytic precision and shouldn’t be counted on to do so. True memory is a very rare thing on this planet, Medina says. That’s because the brain isn’t really interested in reality; it’s interested in survival.What’s more, and contrary to what many twentieth-century educators believed, the brain can keep learning at any age. “We are lifelong learners,” Medina says. “That’s very good news indeed.”Read the full interview in Harvard Business Review
Posted by John Medina Labels: Harvard Business Review
4 comments
4.14.2008
http://brainrules.blogspot.com/2008/04/authorsgoogle-freakonomics-blog-and.html
Last week John spoke at Google about exercise and stress. You can watch the talk on YouTube or below.John wrote a short essay for the Freakonomics Blog on the New York Times Web site. He addressed the question: How Much Progress Have Psychology and Psychiatry Really Made?Here are links to other news and sites for Brain Rules readers:- Seattle Times feature article - "12 rules to boost your brain power"- Watch John's interview on Northwest Afternoon (KOMO-ABC)- iTunes - download the exercise chapter from the audio book- YouTube - watch dozens of videos from the Brain Rules DVD- Web tutorials for all 12 brain rules.John Medina testing the Sleep Pod at the Googleplex.
Posted by John Medina Labels: AuthorsatGoogle, Freakonomics, YouTube
0 comments
4.07.2008
Introduction to Brain Rules
Go ahead and multiply the number 8,388,628 x 2 in your head. Can you do it in a few seconds? There is a young man who can double that number 24 times in the space of a few seconds. He gets it right every time. There is a boy who can tell you the exact time of day at any moment, even in his sleep. There is a girl who can correctly determine the exact dimensions of an object 20 feet away. There is a child who at age 6 drew such lifelike and powerful pictures, she got her own show at a gallery on Madison Avenue. Yet none of these children could be taught to tie their shoes. Indeed, none of them have an IQ greater than 50. The brain is an amazing thing. Your brain may not be nearly so odd, but it is no less extraordinary. Easily the most sophisticated information-transfer system on Earth, your brain is fully capable of taking little black squiggles from a piece of bleached wood and deriving meaning from them. To accomplish this miracle, your brain sends jolts of electricity crackling through hundreds of miles of wires composed of brain cells so small that thousands of them could fit into the period at the end of this sentence. You accomplish all of this in less time than it takes you to blink. Indeed, you have just done it. What's equally incredible, given our intimate association with it, is this: Most of us have no idea how our brain works. This has strange consequences. We try to talk on our cell phones and drive at the same time, even though it is literally impossible for our brains to multitask when it comes to paying attention. We have created high-stress office environments, even though a stressed brain is significantly less productive. Our schools are designed so that most real learning has to occur at home. This would be funny, if it weren't so harmful. Blame it on the fact that brain scientists rarely have a conversation with teachers and business professionals, education majors and accountants, superintendents and CEOs. Unless you have the Journal of Neuroscience sitting on your coffee table, you're out of the loop. My book is meant to get you into the loop. 12 brain rules My goal is to introduce you to 12 things we know about how the brain works. I call these Brain Rules. For each rule, I present the science and then offer ideas for investigating how the rule might apply to our daily lives, especially at work and school. The brain is complex, and I am taking only slivers of information from each subject—non-comprehensive but accessible. A sampling of the ideas you'll encounter: -For starters, we are not used to sitting at a desk for eight hours a day. From an evolutionary perspective, our brains developed while working out, walking as many as 12 miles a day. The brain still craves the experience, especially in sedentary populations like our own. That's why exercise boosts brain power (Brain Rule #1) in such populations. Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in long-term memory, reasoning, attention, problem-solving tasks, and more. I am convinced that integrating exercise into our eight hours at work or school would only be normal. - As you no doubt have noticed if you've ever sat through a typical PowerPoint presentation, people don't pay attention to boring things (Brain Rule #4). You've got seconds to grab someone's attention, and only 10 minutes to keep it. At 9 minutes and 59 seconds, something must be done quickly—something emotional and relevant. Also, the brain needs a break. That's why I use stories in this book to make many of my points. - Ever feel tired around 3 o'clock in the afternoon? That's because your brain really wants to take a nap. You might be more productive if you did: In one study, a 26-minute nap improved NASA pilots' performance by 34 percent. Even so, the brain isn't resting while it sleeps. It is surprisingly active. And whether you get enough rest affects your mental agility the next day. Sleep well, think well (Brain Rule #7). - We'll meet a man who can read two pages at the same time, one with each eye, and remember everything in the pages forever. Most of us do more forgetting than remembering, of course, and that's why we must repeat to remember (Brain Rule #5). When you understand the brain's rules for memory, you'll see why I want to destroy the notion of homework. - We'll find out why the terrible twos only look like active rebellion but are actually a child's powerful urge to explore. Babies may not have a lot of knowledge about the world, but they know a whole lot about how to get it. We are all natural explorers (Brain Rule #12), and this never leaves us, despite the artificial environments we've built for ourselves. Back to the jungle What we know about the brain comes from biologists who study brain tissues, experimental psychologists who study behavior, and cognitive neuroscientists who study how the first relates to the second. Evolutionary biologists have gotten into the act as well. Though we know precious little about how the brain works, our evolutionary history tells us this: The brain appears to be designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment, and to do so in nearly constant motion. I call this the brain's performance envelope. If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to tear down both and start over. In many ways, starting over is what the book is all about.
Posted by John Medina Labels: 12 brain rules, Introduction
1 comments
3.25.2008
Feel Tired at 3pm? Take a Nap
It must have taken some getting used to, if you were a staffer in the socially conservative early 1960s. Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th president of the United States and leader of the free world, routinely closed the door to his office in the midafternoon and put on his pajamas. He then proceeded to take a 30-minute nap. Rising refreshed, he would tell aides that such a nap gave him the stamina to work the long hours required of the U.S. commander-in-chief during the Cold War. Such presidential behavior might seem downright weird. But if you ask sleep researchers like William Dement, his response might surprise you: It was LBJ who was acting normally; the rest of us, who refuse to bring our pajamas to work, are the abnormal ones. And Dement has a fair amount of data to back him up.Above: watch the Symphony of Yawns video clip from the Brain Rules DVD.LBJ was responding to something experienced by nearly everyone on the planet. It goes by many names-the midday yawn, the post-lunch dip, the afternoon "sleepies." We'll call it the nap zone, a period of time in the midafternoon when we experience transient sleepiness. It can be nearly impossible to get anything done during this time, and if you attempt to push through, which is what most of us do, you can spend much of your afternoon fighting a gnawing tiredness. It's a fight because the brain really wants to take a nap and doesn't care what its owner is doing. The concept of "siesta," institutionalized in many other cultures, may have come as an explicit reaction to the nap zone.At first, scientists didn't believe the nap zone existed except as an artifact of sleep deprivation. That has changed. We now know that some people feel it more intensely than others. We know it is not related to a big lunch (although a big lunch, especially one loaded with carbs, can greatly increase its intensity). It appears, rather, to be a part of our evolutionary history. Some scientists think that a long sleep at night and a short nap during the midday represent human sleep behavior at its most natural.When you chart the process S curve and process C curve, you can see that they flat-line in the same place-in the afternoon. Remember that these curves are plotting the progress of a war between two opposed groups of cells and biochemicals. The battle clearly has reached a climactic stalemate. An equal tension now exists between the two drives, which extracts a great deal of energy to maintain. Some researchers, though not all, think this equanimity in tension drives the nap zone. Regardless, the nap zone matters, because our brains don't work as well during it. If you are a public speaker, you already know it is darn near fatal to give a talk in the midafternoon. The nap zone also is literally fatal: More traffic accidents occur during it than at any other time of the day.On the flip side, one NASA study showed that a 26-minute nap improved a pilot's performance by more than 34 percent. Another study showed that a 45-minute nap produced a similar boost in cognitive performance, lasting more than six hours. Still other researchers demonstrated that a 30-minute nap taken prior to staying up all night can prevent a significant loss of performance during that night.If that's what a nap can do, imagine the benefits of a full night's sleep.Listen to this post from the "Brain Rules" Audio Book.
Posted by John Medina Labels: brain rule #7, napping, Sleep
3 comments
3.16.2008
The brain cannot multitask
The following is an excerpt from John Medina's new book, "Brain Rules." You can also listen to the excerpt. Above is a clip from the Brain Rules DVD about multitasking. Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time. At first that might sound confusing; at one level the brain does multitask. You can walk and talk at the same time. Your brain controls your heartbeat while you read a book. Pianists can play a piece with left hand and right hand simultaneously. Surely this is multitasking. But I am talking about the brain’s ability to pay attention. It is the resource you forcibly deploy while trying to listen to a boring lecture at school. It is the activity that collapses as your brain wanders during a tedious presentation at work. This attentional ability is not capable of multitasking. Recently, I agreed to help the high-school son of a friend of mine with some homework, and I don’t think I will ever forget the experience. Eric had been working for about a half-hour on his laptop when I was ushered to his room. An iPod was dangling from his neck, the earbuds cranking out Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, and Green Day as his left hand reflexively tapped the backbeat. The laptop had at least 11 windows open, including two IM screens carrying simultaneous conversations with MySpace friends. Another window was busy downloading an image from Google. The window behind it had the results of some graphic he was altering for MySpace friend No. 2, and the one behind that held an old Pong game paused mid-ping. Buried in the middle of this activity was a word-processing program holding the contents of the paper for which I was to provide assistance. “The music helps me concentrate,” Eric declared, taking a call on his cell phone. “I normally do everything at school, but I’m stuck. Thanks for coming.” Stuck indeed. Eric would make progress on a sentence or two, then tap out a MySpace message, then see if the download was finished, then return to his paper. Clearly, Eric wasn’t concentrating on his paper. Sound like someone you know? To put it bluntly, research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously. Eric and the rest of us must jump from one thing to the next. To understand this remarkable conclusion, we must delve a little deeper into the third of Posner’s trinity: the Executive Network. Let’s look at what Eric’s Executive Network is doing as he works on his paper and then gets interrupted by a “You’ve got mail!” prompt from his girlfriend, Emily. step 1: shift alert To write the paper from a cold start, blood quickly rushes to the anterior prefrontal cortex in Eric’s head. This area of the brain, part of the Executive Network, works just like a switchboard, alerting the brain that it’s about to shift attention. step 2: rule activation for task #1 Embedded in the alert is a two-part message, electricity sent crackling throughout Eric’s brain. The first part is a search query to find the neurons capable of executing the paper-writing task. The second part encodes a command that will rouse the neurons, once discovered. This process is called “rule activation,” and it takes several tenths of a second to accomplish. Eric begins to write his paper. step 3: disengagement While he’s typing, Eric’s sensory systems picks up the email alert from his girlfriend. Because the rules for writing a paper are different from the rules for writing to Emily, Eric’s brain must disengage from the paper-writing rules before he can respond. This occurs. The switchboard is consulted, alerting the brain that another shift in attention is about to happen. step 4: rule activation for task #2 Another two-part message seeking the rule-activation protocols for emailing Emily is now deployed. As before, the first is a command to find the writing-Emily rules, and the second is the activation command. Now Eric can pour his heart out to his sweetheart. As before, it takes several tenths of a second simply to perform the switch. Incredibly, these four steps must occur in sequence every time Eric switches from one task to another. It is time-consuming. And it is sequential. That’s why we can’t multitask. That’s why people find themselves losing track of previous progress and needing to “start over,” perhaps muttering things like “Now where was I?” each time they switch tasks. The best you can say is that people who appear to be good at multitasking actually have good working memories, capable of paying attention to several inputs one at a time. Here’s why this matters: Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50 percent longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50 percent more errors.
Source: Rogers RD & Monsell, S (1995) Depth of processing and the retention of words in episodic memory Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 124(2): 207 - 231 Table 2 of Experiment Cluster #1 (crosstalk conditions)
Notes: These trials involved uninterrupted (single-focus) tasks and interrupted (multiple-focus) tasks. Data are shown for experiments involving number-based manipulations and letter-based manipulations.
Some people, particularly younger people, are more adept at task-switching. If a person is familiar with the tasks, the completion time and errors are much less than if the tasks are unfamiliar. Still, taking your sequential brain into a multitasking environment can be like trying to put your right foot into your left shoe. A good example is driving while talking on a cell phone. Until researchers started measuring the effects of cell-phone distractions under controlled conditions, nobody had any idea how profoundly they can impair a driver. It’s like driving drunk. Recall that large fractions of a second are consumed every time the brain switches tasks. Cell-phone talkers are a half-second slower to hit the brakes in emergencies, slower to return to normal speed after an emergency, and more wild in their “following distance” behind the vehicle in front of them. In a half-second, a driver going 70 mph travels 51 feet. Given that 80 percent of crashes happen within three seconds of some kind of driver distraction, increasing your amount of task-switching increases your risk of an accident. More than 50 percent of the visual cues spotted by attentive drivers are missed by cell-phone talkers. Not surprisingly, they get in more wrecks than anyone except very drunk drivers. Watch the video below from the Brain Rules DVD. It isn’t just talking on a cell phone. It’s putting on makeup, eating, rubber-necking at an accident. One study showed that simply reaching for an object while driving a car multiplies the risk of a crash or near-crash by nine times. Given what we know about the attention capacity of the human brain, these data are not surprising. Do one thing at a time The brain is a sequential processor, unable to pay attention to two things at the same time. Businesses and schools praise multitasking, but research clearly shows that it reduces productivity and increases mistakes. Try creating an interruption-free zone during the day—turn off your e-mail, phone, IM program, or BlackBerry—and see whether you get more done."
Posted by John Medina Labels: attention, brain rule #4, multitasking, productivity
2 comments
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