Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power.
-To improve thinking skills, MOVE.
-Exercise gets blood to the brain, brings it glucose for energy, oxygen to soak up toxic electrons, and stimulates protein to connect neurons.
-Aerobic exercise twice a week halves your risk of dementia, and cuts your risk of Alzheimer's by 60%.
Rule #2: Our brains have 3 different aspects to help us survive.
1)Reptile Brain = regulates breathing and body functions so we don't have to "think" about it.
2)Mammalian Brain = helps us in times of fear. (Fight or Flight)
3)Human Brain = complex, problem solving, pattern seeking, emotional brain
Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently.
-No two people store the same information in the same way, in the same place in their brain.
-What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like (literally rewires it). Different regions of the brain develop at different rates in different people.
-We have a great number of ways of being intelligent, many of which don't show up on IQ tests or standardized tests.
Rule #4: Emotion drives attention.
-The brain's attentional "spotlight" can only focus on one things at a time: no multitasking.
-We are better at seeing patterns and abstracting the meaning of an event than we are at recording detail.
-Audiences check out after 10 minutes, but you can keep grabbing them back by telling narratives or creating events rich in emotion.
Rule #5: Repeat to remember.
-Our brains have many types of memory systems. One type follows four stages of processing: encoding, storing, retrieving, and forgetting.
-You can improve your chances of remembering something if you reproduce the environment in which you first put it into your brain.
-Most of the events that predict whether something learned will also be remembered occur in the first few seconds of learning. The more elaborately we encode the memory during its initial moments, the stronger it will be.
Rule #6: Remember to repeat.
-Our brains give us an approximate view of reality because they mix new knowledge with past memories and store them together as one.
-Most memories disappear within minutes, but if they can survive the fragile period they strengthen with time.
-The way to make long term memory more reliable is to incorporate new information gradually and repeat it in timed intervals.
Rule #7: Sleep is very important.
-How much sleep everyone needs varies, but we all want an afternoon nap.
-There is only about 20% of our sleep time that our brain is truly "at rest." During the rest of the time the brain is more active than when we were awake "processing" the events of the day.
-Lack of sleep is harmful. It hurts attention, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor function.
Rule #8: a stressed brain doesn't function for learning.
-The worst type of stress is the feeling that you have no control over the problem.
-Under chronic stress, adrenaline creates scars in your blood vessels that cause a heart attack or stroke. Cortisol cripples the cells of the hippocampus criplling your ability to learn and remember.
-Your body's defense system is built for an immediate response to a passing danger. If you are constantly under stress, your body will deregulate that system and you could become unable to cope in times of danger.
Rule #9: Stimulate the senses.
-We absorb info about an event through our senses, break it into electrical signals, then send them to different areas of the brain, which puts them back together. But how we perceive these signals depends on our past experience, so different people can see the same event two totally different ways.
-Smells have an unusual power to bring back memories, maybe because smell signals bypass the thalamus and head straight to their destinations, which include the supervisor of emotions, the amygdala.
-Our senses work together - vision influencing hearing, for example - which means that we learn best if we stimulate several senses at once.
Rule #10: Vision trumps all senses.
-Vision is our most dominant sense. It takes up half of our brain's resources.
-We learn best through pictures, not through written or spoken word.
-Vision isn't exact. It's our brain's best guess since light falls on our retina in two dimensions, and our world is three dimensional.
Rule #11: Male and female brains are different.
-Women are genetically more complex, because the active X chromosomes in their cells are a mix of Mom's and Dad's. Men's X chromosomes all come from Mom, and their Y chromosome carries less than 100 genes, compared with about 1,500 for the X chromosome.
-Men and women respond differently to acute stress; Women activate the left hemisphere's amygdala and remember the emotional details. Men use the right amygdala and get the gist.
Rule #12: We are explorers.
-We recognize and imitate behavior because we are all wired to connect to each other on a cellular level with our "mirror neurons."
-We can create new neurons and add new learning throughout our entire lives. School isn't the only place for learning.
-Babies teach us how to really learn...NOT by being passive listeners, but by exploring, testing, participating, and coming to a conclusion.
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