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See how the brain works while using it in the process of reading this book! 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 - like that physical activity boosts your brain power.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", Dr. John Medina, a molecular biologist, 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 humour 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 proves 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.
[...]... teenagers meet your brain The prefrontal cortex is only the newest addition to the brain Three brains are tucked inside your head, and parts of their structure took millions of years to design (This “triune theory of the brain is one of several models scientists use to describe the brain s overarching structural organization.) Your most ancient neural structure is the brain stem, or “lizard brain. ” This... have exchanged it for classrooms and cubicles Summary Rule #2 The human brain evolved, too • 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 thin 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... humor while doing this kind of brain research Welcome to the world of experience-dependent brain wiring, where a great deal of the brain is hard-wired not to be hard-wired Like a beautiful, rigorously trained ballerina, we are hard-wired to be flexible We can immediately divide the world’s brains into those who know of Jennifer Aniston or Halle Berry and those who don’t The brains of those who do are not... that his brain is busy comparing and contrasting comments from the text with the movie and is assessing whether he agrees with them The other twin has not seen this magazine, so his brain isn’t doing this Even though the difference may seem subtle, the two brains are creating different memories of the same movie That’s the power of the Brain Rule Learning results in physical changes in the brain, and... even identical twins having identical experiences possess brains that wire themselves exactly the same way And you can trace the whole thing to experience on the street where you live Perhaps a question is now popping up in your brain: If every brain is wired differently from every other brain, can we know anything about the organ? Well, yes The brain has billions of cells whose collective electrical... typical and optimized, and then compare the results The reason to do this is straightforward: You cannot change the fact that the human brain is individually wired Every student’s brain, every employee’s brain, every customer’s brain is wired differently That’s the Brain Rule You can either accede to it or ignore it The current system of education chooses the latter, to our detriment It needs to be... thalamus, one of the most active, well-connected parts of the brain a control tower for the senses Sitting squarely in the center of your brain, it processes signals sent from nearly every corner of your sensory universe, then routes them to specific areas throughout your brain How this happens is mysterious Large neural highways run overhead these two brains, combining with other roads, branching suddenly... human brain cannot simultaneously activate more than 2 percent of its neurons at any one time More than this, and the glucose supply becomes so quickly exhausted that you will faint If it sounds to you like the brain needs a lot of glucose—and generates a lot of toxic waste—you are right on the money This means the brain also needs lots of oxygen-soaked blood How much food and waste can the brain generate... of birds to do complex tricks, killed them all, and dissected their brains He found that his trained birds had more extensive folding patterns in specific regions of their brains than his untrained birds Fifty years later, Charles Darwin noted similar differences between the brains of wild animals and their domestic counterparts The brains in wild animals were 15 to 30 percent larger than those of their... business settings? What types of exercise need to be done, and how often? That’s worth investigating Summary Rule #1 Exercise boosts brain power • 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 . Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data is available upon request. ISBN-10: 0-9 79777 7-0 -4 ISBN-13: 97 8-0 -9 79777 7-0 -7 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Joshua and Noah Gratitude, my dear boys, for constantly. 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. and school. The brain is complex, and I am taking only slivers of information from each subject—not comprehensive but, I hope, accessible. The Brain Rules film, available at www.brainrules.net/dvd,