Brain Rules

John Median is a brilliant writer. Within “Brain Rules” book he manage to convert so many scientific and social study to story to hook the reader. He nicely describe how bring works. The author also illustrated how these finding could boost one's productivity at work, home and school. John also open up and talk about his childhood, love life and parenthood to make connection with reader and have himself and incidents which he have been through as example.

John divide the brain rules to 12 as follow:
Rule #1: EXERCISE: Exercise boosts brain power.
Rule #2: SURVIVAL: The human brain evolved, too.
Rule #3:WIRING: Every brain is wired differently.
Rule #4: ATTENTION: We don't pay attention to boring things.
Rule #5: MEMORY (SHORT-TERM): Repeat to remember.
Rule #6: MEMORY (LONG-TERM): Remember to repeat.
Rule #7: SLEEP: Sleep well, think well.
Rule #8: STRESS: Stressed brains don't learn the same way.
Rule #9: SENSORY INTEGRATION: Stimulate more of the senses.
Rule #10: VISION: Vision trumps all other senses.
Rule #11: GENDER: Male and female brains are different.
Rule #12: EXPLORATION: We are powerful and natural explorers.

Brain functionality have been discussed within this book in a way that a person with no prior knowledge could follow as well. The analogies provided within the book are nice and easy to apprehend. In addition results of many experiments on human and animal shared to back the rules provided in each section. Also it have been demonstrated how brain injuries patients contributed immensely to brain study and learn nitty-gritty of brain.

John Medina also described how these findings could be leveraged to boost productivity within school, work and personal life. John describe how and when brain could be more prepared to learn and digest materials as well as could perform well and retrieve data accordingly. Nice example of school, work and personal life have been provided to support all these findings.

Furthermore John talk openly about his childhood, love life as well as hid parenthood. This openness hook the reader and attract their attention. He have nice parables of his childhood as well as devastating ones. He directly and indirectly correlate all this stories to one of the topics within the book and illustrate their effects within his personal life.

I find this book interesting it is one of a kind for me so it gave me a lot learn. Being aware of what's possibly going on in once mind could be come handy to survive and thrive.

About the book: Brain Rules gives you insight into how our brains function and explains how you can take advantage of such knowledge to push your brain to work better. From gaining more productivity at work to absorbing more at school, mastering the “brain rules” will help make learning with all your senses become second nature.

About the author: John Medina is a professor, research consultant and expert in molecular biology. He founded the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research and the Talaris Research Institute.

My highlights:
Regular exercise stimulates the body to renew itself and generates hormones to help the brain work.
The more you exercise, the healthier and more robust your brain and body will be!
You have a natural sleep cycle that is individual to you. Follow it and you'll feel and think better.
What exactly does sleeping do? Simply put, sleeping regenerates our mind and body.
When it comes to sleeping patterns, there are three types: larks, owls and hummingbirds.Larks wake up often before 6 a.m. and are the most alert before noon. Some 10 percent of the population are classified as larks. In contrast, owls rarely hit the sack before 3 a.m., being most alert around 6 p.m. Owls too make up about 10 percent of the population.
The rest of us are hummingbirds, fluctuating between the other two types. Sometimes we stay up late; sometimes we wake up before the sun rises.
Chronic stress is debilitating, making you think poorly and lose memory. Reduce stress where you can.
While a little stress can help you take action, too much stress is detrimental to your overall health.
Your brain pays attention to stimuli it considers the most important. The rest is just noise.
If you want your audience to pay attention to a presentation, for example, keep it under 10 minutes, as otherwise the abundance of information will overload the minds of your audience!
Our brains store information if it's meaningful and doesn't interfere with other information.
Information needs to be meaningful for our brains to remember it.If you have to memorize a piece of information, make it more meaningful by repeating the information to yourself at spaced intervals.
Spaced intervals make your brain realize that the information you're repeating and it's processing is important. It must be meaningful, your brain thinks, or you wouldn't be recalling it so often. And when your brain attaches meaning to something, it remembers it better.
Our senses have evolved to work together. Multisensory environments can help you learn better.
We don't learn as well in unisensory situations, in which only one sense is used.
The benefits of multisensory experiences might seem counterintuitive. Wouldn't a brain get overloaded with too much competing information? Yet our brains don't work that way. Research has shown that they prefer heavy lifting! So expose yourself to multisensory learning tools.
To better remember facts, combine visuals with information. Our visual sense is the strongest.
When people listen to information, they only recall about 10 percent of it after a period of three days. Yet if an image accompanies spoken information, people will remember 65 percent of the information after the same period.This is called the pictorial superiority effect.

Final summary
The human brain is a sophisticated information-transfer system. Optimize your mind by understanding better how it works. Exercise, get enough sleep and avoid chronic stress. Take advantage of multisensory learning and the pictorial superiority effect. In doing so, you'll maximize your intellectual potential.

Not just a fascinating read

Also has actionable items to integrate into your life and helpful summaries. Tore through this book, but it has great summaries per chapter

Brain Rules was fascinating. I am a teacher and plan on using many of the things from the book in my classroom. I found it a relatively easy read even for someone who hasn't read much about brain research before.

This is an interesting read - especially for those looking to gain a better understanding of cognitive operations. I found the chapters on sleep, stress, long-term memory, and gender (and how each one effects the brain) especially interesting. The book has a really nice flow to it - and delves deep enough to ‘unpack' some of the more complex theories of neurologists and social scientists - without turning into an academic journal.

Readable and memorable summation of the state of knowledge in how we think. All of this will be familiar if you've read Sapolsky, Ramachandran, Fisher, or any of the hot neuro writers. But if you haven't, you owe it to yourself to read this book. This is important material, helpful as a guide to lifelong learning.

Medina practices what he preaches. His writing is vivid, reinforced by the very “rules” he discusses. You can see and read his twelve “rules” at brainrules.net, but his book really drives them home in a useful, productive way. (I quote “rules” because this isn't rules in the “rules you should follow” kind of book; it's more “rules of thumb”, or “this is our best guess as to how the brain works”. Think “rules that are there whether you like it or not, and you should be aware of”).