Brain Rules, by John Medina: A Book Review
 
Dr. Mark Rosekind, NASA scientist, discovered a single activity with a startlingly large impact on pilot performance.
 
“What other management strategy will improve people’s performance 34% in just 26 minutes?” he famously asked.
 
The answer to that is just one of the pearls of wisdom from John Medina’s book, “Brain Rules”. Medina is a molecular biologist who has spent a lifetime examining human brain development. In this book, he takes us on a journey inside the brain, describing its various parts and what they do, and then he dives even deeper to observe how our neurons communicate with each other. But this isn’t a biology textbook, and since Medina knows how your brain works, he knows how to keep it engaged and excited. It's an easy and entertaining read, while still being practical.

The book outlines 12 “rules” distilled from decades of brain science. Each chapter is focussed on one “rule” about how the brain works according to research. Each chapter concludes with concrete ideas on how work, home, and school could be improved if we honoured that particular rule.
 
For example, the chapter about memory discusses the importance of spaced repetition (not cramming!) for learning. If you do a lot of thinking about a topic, and talk about it a lot, that information gets committed to memory because your brain keeps rehearsing and retrieving the information.
 
How could that idea have real-life applications? It could have implications for how work training is conducted, for one thing. Medina also suggests experimenting with organizing school subjects into cycling modules.

In the chapter on sleep, Medina notes that teenagers, on average, tend to temporarily shift to a night owl chronotype. Would most teens benefit if high school classes started after 9:00 am? How about if we matched student-teacher chronotypes?
 
Taken together, the ideas Medina suggests at the end of each chapter could change society as a whole… but more practically speaking, they can help you make more interesting presentations, boost your productivity, sharpen your memory, and improve learning.
 
So what is that single activity that Rosekind found will boost your performance and improve your memory? It’s an afternoon nap.

Brain Rules is published by Pear Press. Find out more at www.brainrules.net.
 
This review was written by Fawn Fritzen.

Most humans are terrible at multi-tasking, and there’s plenty of research to prove it. Try this little exercise.
 
Time yourself as you recite the numbers 1 to 10 as fast as possible. (Betcha you can do it in under 2 seconds!)
 
Got that? Now time yourself as you recite the alphabet as fast as possible up to the letter J. That takes hardly any time at all, right?
 
Now… time yourself switching from numbers to letters, like this: 1A, 2B, 3C, etc. (Go ahead and try that!) 
 
How did you do? It’s almost guaranteed that this third task will take you more than the other two combined. That’s because your brain can’t truly do both tasks at the same time. Instead, it switches quickly from one to the other, and every time your brain has to switch tasks, there’s a little time gap that slows you down… and quickly adds up to a lot of lost time.
 
There may be some hope, though. A 2015 study showed that people CAN improve their multitasking abilities. Intuitively, this makes sense: if you practice saying the 1A through 10J sequence, you will get better and faster at it.
 
But there are still caveats here. The participants in this study had to do a LOT of practice in order to improve. Their simple task was to simultaneously distinguish a particular shape as it flashed across a screen, while also identifying a particular sound. In order to improve, they repeated these tasks, on average, 1,008 times!
 
We also don't know the limits of multitasking training. While the study looked at fairly simple tasks, the brain regions involved in more complex activities might be totally different and impossible to improve. Tasks like responding to emails while writing a report (or texting while driving) involve much bigger parts of our brains. There is a significant time lag when you switch between these complex tasks. You’ll be a lot more successful if you set aside time to focus on each.
 
(And definitely NEVER drive and text!)

Have you ever heard a symphony performed by a live orchestra? With as many as 70 to 100 musicians playing, an orchestra provides a rich auditory experience, with complex layers of sound.

But did you ever think of the symphony as a visual experience? Sure, there are plenty of musicians to look at, but that doesn’t help you to understand the structure and story of the music itself.

If you’ve taken our “Communication Styles for Collaboration” workshop, you know the four ways we take in information: Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, and Kinaesthetic. These are the four “modalities” of learning.

When you are trying to communicate information, it will be easier to understand if you use as many modalities as possible.

Going to the symphony is largely an auditory experience. But what if you could visually experience the music, too?

Well, now you can. Musicologist Dr. Hannah Chan-Hartley has developed a series of “Visual Listening Guides” that map out the music with icons, colour, and graphical representations of important musical themes. Regardless of your musical background, these Visual Listening Guides give you a birds-eye view of an orchestral work. They visually present the structure, important sonic landmarks, key instruments, and development and recurrence of musical themes. You get extra “at-a-glance” information that follows the music without distracting you with lots of text.

Check out the guide below, which outlines the first movement of Beethoven's famous Symphony No. 5. Try following along while watching the first 7 minutes of this video of the piece. (That's John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique.)

​[EDIT: The original video was removed from YouTube. Try this one instead, the West-Eastern Divan Orcestra, conducted by Daneil Barenboim in 2012.]

Adding the visual element enriches the listening experience by making it easier to understand. Can you think of other real-world examples of visual and auditory modalities being used together for richer understanding?

For more information about Chan-Hartley’s Visual Listening Guides, visit https://www.symphonygraphique.com. 

Do you need new ideas? To boost your creative thinking, go for a walk!
 
Going for a walk, especially in nature, can increase creative output by 60% compared to sitting. Studies show that when you walk, you get more ideas, and they’ll be more diverse.
 
Try taking a walk while brainstorming, or just before you need to complete a creative exercise.
 
If you can’t go outside, even a treadmill can give you a boost. Walking has also been shown to improve memory and promote the growth and health of new brain cells.
 
Do your body and your brain a favour. Go for a walk.

It is easy to feel that when we are alert we are more productive. In fact, there is a lot of science that would back up this notion. Science shows that in our most alert and awake moments, our memory, decision-making abilities, and attention are all improved. This finding is so universal, that those moments have even been dubbed our “optimal time of day.”
 
During the “optimal time of day”, our brains are better able to control the flow of information from thought and perception. This is a fancy way of saying that we can block out distractions. We can maintain our focus and our working memory on relevant information that is useful to whatever task is at hand.
 
While these moments are incredibly useful during the work day, they can at times be elusive. As our alertness levels are primarily driven by our circadian rhythms, there are natural dips that occur alongside the peaks. Many office workers experience a natural dip around 2 to 3 pm, which explains the afternoon coffee break. Additionally, other factors come into play that can affect our alertness, such as staying up unusually late, or sugary foods that can cause an energy boost and crash.
 
But hold it right there. If you are reaching for coffee to bring you up to your decision-making prime, stop right now! The “optimal time of day” is great for many tasks, but there is one essential task that we are more likely to excel at when feeling fatigued: insight problem-solving.
 
We often face two types of problems in our work lives. The analytical problems require us to search through and narrow the problem space, moving closer toward the solution as different possibilities are eliminated. Insight problems, on the other hand, require us to actually reframe the initial problem and see it from a completely different angle. We need to break free from how our brain is focussed on a problem and pull in seemingly irrelevant information to solve it. Solutions to these problems pop into the mind in an unexpected flash – often called an “Aha!” moment.
 
When we are experiencing a dip in alertness – or even a downright crash – our inhibitory attentional processes become less efficient. (That's the ability to block out irrelevant information.) The result is that our brains open up to the kind of random information necessary for insight problem solving. We are able to break away from our current framing of the problem and open ourselves up to a new point of view.
 
Instead of planning your lunch break during your “non-optimal” time of day or pumping yourself full of caffeine, embrace these low-alertness moments and set aside that time for work that requires creative and insightful problem solving.
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