Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Book & DVD)

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Book & DVD) Features

Additional Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Book & DVD) Information

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, molecular biologist Dr. John Medina 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 humor 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 finds, to his surprise, 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.

You will discover how:

- Every brain is wired differently
- Exercise improves cognition
- We are designed to never stop learning and exploring
- Memories are volatile
- Sleep is powerfully linked with the ability to learn
- Vision trumps all of the other senses
- Stress changes the way we learn

In the end, you'll understand how your brain really works--and how to get the most out of it.

About the DVD The Brain Rules DVD, included with this book, is a lively tour of the 12 brain rules. You will experience firsthand Medina's rare gift for making science fun, accessible, and relevant. The DVD will take your understanding of the book to the next level.

What Customers Say About Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Book & DVD):

outstanding. I'm a teacher and a father and have found this to be a very useful and interesting book.

Author, John Medina, explains how the brain works better than any other author I have read. And he writes in voice to be easy for understanding the subject well.

It is very informative and provides just enough jargon to educated. It's not a self help book. It's more like an FYI regarding your brain and memory. This is a well written book by a very intelligent scientist who knows a thing or two about research. It's hard not to come away from this book without learning something.

This makes your change some of your lifestyles so that you could be more alert, remember more and be energized.

One night's loss of sleep resulted in about a 30% loss in overall cognitive skill, with a subsequent drop in performance. It cuts your risk of Alzheimer's by 60%. The chapter/rule on 1) Exercise boosts brain power; 7) Sleep well, think well; 8) Stressed brains dont learn the same way, are outstanding. It also stimulates the protein that keeps neurons connnecting.

- Summary of Chapter/Rule 4 People dont pay attention to boring things. Our brains were built for walking - 12 miles a day. pg94Our brains give us only an approximate view of reality, because they mix new knowledge with past memories and store them together as one. Emotional arousal helps the brain learn. Aerobic exercise just twice a week halves your risk of general dementia. To improve your thinking skills, move.

Highly recommended.Below please find some of my favorite passages for your reference. Great substance and excellent writing skill, esp the concise summary in the end of each chapter. Another study showed that a 45 min nap produced a similar boost in cognitive performance, lasting more than 6 hours. Definitely one of the most enlightening pop science book in the market right now. Audiences check out after 10 minutes, but you can keep grabbing them back by telling narratives or creating events rich in emotion.

Exercise gets blood to your brain, bringing it glucose for energy and oxygen to soak up the toxic electrons that are left over. The ability to make insulin and to extract energy from the brain's favorite desset, glucose, begins to fail miserably.If healthy 30 yr old are sleep deprived for 6 days (4 hr of sleep per night), parts of their body chemistry soon revert to that of a 60 yr old. pg70The brain's attentional "spotlight" can focus on only one thing at a time; No multitasking. If I could give it a six star, I would. The way to make long term memory more reliable is to incorporate new info gradually and repeat it in timed intervals. pg147One NASA study showed that a 26 min nap improved a pilot's performance by more than 34%. pg160Take an A student used to scoring in the top 10% of virtually anything she does.

One study showed that if she gets just under 7 hr of sleep on weekdays, and about 40 min more on weekends, she will begin to score in the bottom 9% of non sleep-deprived individuals.sleep debt will be carried into the next week.Another study followed soldiers responsible for operating complex military hardware. And if they are allowed to recover, it will take them almost a week to get back to their 30 yr old systems. If you like Outliers, Freakonomics, Predictably Irrational and so on, you would love this one. pg162The perfect storm of occupational stress appears to be a combination of 1) a great deal is expected of you 2) you have no control over whether you will perform well. - Summary of Chapter/Rule 1 pg 28 What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like - it literally rewires it. We are better at seeing patterns and abstracting the meaning of an event than we are at recording detail. Bump that to 2 nights' loss, and the figure becomes 60%.When sleep was restricted to 6 hr or less per night for just 5 nights, cognitive performance matched that of a person suffering from 48 hr of continual sleep deprivation.When people become sleep deprived, their ability to utilize the food they are consuming falls by about 1/3.

pg187