About This Book:
If seen, we do not appreciate our brain. We do not know how complex it is and how many different parts of our brain are involved in doing every work. In this book, you will know the rules of the brain, which will help you to achieve the full potential of your brain. You will learn how to increase your memory and problem solving ability. You will learn how to remain strong and alert with increasing age.
Who should read this summary?
• Students, young professionals and old people
• Whoever wants to know about the amazing power of the brain
About author:
Dr. John Medina is a molecular biologist, professor and author. He is founding director of Talaris Research Institute, who has focused attention on children's cognitive development. Medina has been a great teacher who has been awarded many awards. He is also the director of the Brain Center at Seattle Pacific University. He has written more than 10 books about Psychology.
Now we Start Summary:
introduction:
Have you ever thought how powerful your brain is? It can understand words and numbers. It helps you to go from one place to another even when you are scared or nervous. Your brain is not only powerful but also very fast.
Have you ever thought how do you understand something when you read it? Or how fast do you recognize your friend or a known face even in a crowd? This amazing is of your brain and millions of neurons inside it. It is so surprising that in a small space you can store countless information.
So what can we do to improve our brain? In this book you will learn how the brain works and how you can always maintain it in good condition.
Our brain is a very interesting and surprising machine. Through this book, you will know a lot about it because believe your brain knows you very well.
Exercise:
Rule # 1: Exercise Boosts Brain Power
Our ancestors were, in a way, you can call them Banjara because they used to roam from one place to another. They were forced to go to different places because it was not possible to stay in one place for a long time. They had to face many difficulties such as lack of food or wood, wild animals attacked or the weather was always changing. Moving forward in the face of such a condition helped the brain to develop faster.
But if we talk about today, then our lifestyle and living habits are very different as compared to our ancestors. Today we travel for many hours without moving from our seat. Many types of machines have made our work easier. Yes, how will our old age have a profound effect on our lifestyle.
If you live a dull life, that is, you are inactive and you have spent most of your life lying on the sofa, then there is no doubt that you will start getting older. But if you have adopted an active lifestyle then you will remain agile and agile even after 75 years.
There are many benefits to exercising. It reduces the risk of diseases like heart attack and stroke. It keeps you physically and mentally in perfect shape. Many studies have proved that people who take an active lifestyle are far ahead of people with memory, logic, ability to solve problems and the power to understand things.
If you are also lazy and lethargic then do not be depressed because the research people noticed that after following the exercise program, there was a lot of improvement in the mental ability of inactive people. In four months, he had shown a lot of progress.
Exercise also reduces the risk of diseases occurring in old age. It maintains your mood well because physical exercise releases serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine in your nervous system.
Jack Lalen is a perfect example of how exercise boosts the power of the brain. At the age of 70, he surprised everyone by pulling a 70 boat from Long Beach Harbor, California, to the queens Way Bridge, which had a single man aboard. 70 boats were tied behind Jack and he covered 1.5 miles. In addition to the strong body, at that age too, Jack was mentally fit. His mind and body was like a young man of 20 years.
Now let's take Jim and Frank as exams who adopted an active and interactive lifestyle. Jim used to live in old age home. He did not travel much, just sat in front of the TV. He was very sad and often started crying for no reason.
On the other hand, Frank Physically and Mentally were active. He was always busy with some work. Actually Frank was an architect who completed the work of building a museum at the age of 90. Apart from being physically healthy, he was also happy with his life.
What do you think was the reason for this difference? When you keep yourself active, you are filled with positive thoughts and energy. But where you start to sit empty, then in your mind, devilish thoughts start coming home and fill you with negative thoughts which causes your grief and discomfort as happened with Jim.
There are many people who are dull and interactive like gym but there is still hope for them. Even just 20 minutes of exercise every day has the power to bring positive changes in your health and mood.
Survival:
Rule # 2: The Human Brain Evolved, Too
Our ancestors used not only their bodies but also their brains a lot to escape the harsh environment. He used symbolic reasoning. Symbolic reasoning is the art that makes us different from animals. This is the ability to see things that do not really exist. Imagine that you draw a straight and long line on your hand. Because we have symbolic reasoning, we understand that it means either alphabet "I" or number 1.
Symbolic reasoning has helped our ancestors in interacting with each other and cautioning us if there is any further danger. Thankfully, over time many changes and developments have taken place in human beings and some such symbols have become such that anyone can understand in any corner of the world like red signal means stop, thumps up means OK and so on.
We also use symbolic reasoning in many fields such as language, art, poetry. We have molded our culture into this unique ability. Think of our sacred texts, mythology and designs. Humans created religion and corporation with the help of symbolic reasoning. Animals cannot do all this.
Natural selection removed our weak ancestors and the genes of stronger people passed on to the next generation. Nevertheless, history ignored it. When our ancestors started life on earth with a small population in East Africa, how did the population reach 7 billion today?
So the answer is change. Instead of fighting it, we learned to adapt to change and adopt it. Richard Potts, director of Human Origins at Smithsonian Museum, calls this theory Variability Selection Theory. This theory suggests that there are 2 powerful characteristics in our brain.
First, we become aware when we make mistakes and second our brain gives us permission to learn from them. This ability taught our ancestors to move forward without facing any help from the rapidly changing condition. There was no one to tell or teach them. He faced everything himself and kept moving forward.
Another thing that makes us different from animals is bipedalism. This is the ability that gives us the ability to walk on two legs and use the hands for other work. But the biggest factor that separates humans from others is the prefrontal cortex of our brain.
Prefrontal cortex is particularly responsible for solving the problem, focusing attention, and controlling the natural sense or intuition. Let's understand it with a story.
This is the story of 25-year-old Phineas gauge. He was the head of the railroad construction team. Gage's family and his companions remember him as a funny, smart and hardworking boy. One day, during work, Gauge succumbed to a terrible accident. He was preparing for the blast to remove the rocks. But the blast happened ahead of time.
A 3 foot long steel rod penetrated directly into the center of the gauge brain. This completely damaged her prefrontal cortex. It was no less than a miracle that Gage's life was saved. But this incident changed his life. Laughing smiling gauge was now irritable, angry and quarrelsome. A few years later he died of epileptic seizures.
Attention:
Rule # 3: We considered Pay Attention to Boring Things
To learn things, we need to give attention. The more you focus on something, the more you will be able to remember it. Now in every classroom and office, a question is definitely asked, how to maintain one's attention?
A lot of things distract our attention. Suppose you are reading something and only then your dog starts playing with you or many cars pass by, etc. Wherever our attention is, memory makes its impact there.
Jared Diamond, author of the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel", shared his trip in the New Guinea wilderness and the time he spent with the indigenous New Guinea people living there. The people there were adept at noticing changes in the environment, chasing a trail and finding ways to return home.
Jared, who lived in the city, could do nothing of these. This is an example of how we pay attention to the things that are associated with our culture and the culture in which we grew up. Just imagine that a New Guinea child who was born and raised in New York, do you think he would ever know the techniques of being alive that his ancestors knew?
Interest also has a connection with attention. Marketing professionals take advantage of this principal. In his advertisement, he always brings something new, unique and different concepts. Now take the print ad of Sauza tequila, instead of a party of 20's people, they had painted a picture of a bearded old man who was dressed in filthy crocodiles and had a big mischievous laugh on his face.
The old man had only one tooth in his mouth. It was written on it "There is just a hole in the teeth of this man". It was written below that "Life is hard but you should not have tequila". This ad attracted the attention of the people because its picture was so unique and different and there was humor in the written line.
Information or awareness also affects attention. Let's understand from an exam. In the book "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by well-known neurologist and author Dr. Oliver Sacks, Dr. Oliver had a patient who had a dangerous stroke. The back of his brain was badly damaged.
The effect of this was that she could not feel anything in the left part of her body and could not see anything with the left eye. She did not know what is happening in her left side, so she could not pay attention to it.
Whenever she used make-up after this accident, she would do only on the right side of the face, when she ate, she would eat the right side of her plate. She often complained to the nurse why she was never given anything sweet to eat. The nurse used to tell them that if she looks in her left side, then she will definitely see sweets. Sweets were always kept there, they simply did not know about it.
Short-term memory:
Rule # 4: Repeat to Remember
Your memory helps you stay alive. If your brain does not remember what food you are allergic to, then you will get sick after eating the same thing again and again. Experiences shape your brain and help you live longer. But how does our memory actually work?
German researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus tried to answer this question by experimenting with himself. He coined 2,300 three alphabet absurd words like ZUG, REN, TAZ and spent his entire life memorizing them. Through this experiment, Ebbinghaus realized that memory has a different life span. Some memories are remembered only for a few moments while some are remembered for a lifetime. Ebbinghaus said that in order to remember a memory for a long time, he had to repeat the words in between. The more times you repeat that Emory, the longer it stays. Due to the work of Ebbinghaus, further study was done on this subject.
You can apply this principal to study. If you need to remember a lot, then you can do this at all if you repeat it everyday. But if you try to remember a lot of information in a short time just before the exam, then you will fail. Ebbinghaus says that it is better to remember a little information than to gap, remembering small portions by taking more effective breaks than trying to remember everything at once.
What is your social security number? Do you know how to ride a bike? When you try to remember your social security number, the last time you saw your card or the last time you wrote your number, you try to see that image.
But when you ride your bike again after many years, then you do not do this. You don't miss every step like grabbing the handle, sitting on the seat and stepping on the pedal. You do not have to think or remember much in doing all this.
We are talking about two types of memory on the basis of awareness or not. Declarative memory are those you can tell about, like "I wore a black shirt" or "We live on planet earth". This type of memory requires awareness.
Non-declarative memory, on the other hand, is what you automatically do, such as tying a shoe rope, brushing your teeth, or riding a bike. This is because motor skills are not part of our conscious awareness.
Every morning you do all the work of your routine without any extra effort. You don't have to miss anything to brush teeth or to tie shoes. Even if you have not rode a bike or played guitar for many years, your muscles will still remember how to do that work.
H.M was nine years old when he fell from a bicycle. He suffered a deep injury on his head, after which he started having frequent seizures. His condition was getting worse as he got older. Then there was a time when once a week H.M. He started falling unconscious. By reaching the age of 30, he was not able to do any work. Even he was not safe in his house. Seeing his condition, his family took him to a well-known neurosurgeon, William Scoville.
Scoville stated that the temporal lobe in H.M.'s brain was the problem. It is a part of the brain above both our ears. Scoville removed the left and right temporal lobe of his brain. This leads to H.M. The seizures have reduced but he has lost the ability to convert short term memory to long term memory. After the surgery, H.M. could not remember anything for long.
As time passed, there was a time when H.M. Could not even recognize myself in the mirror. His face had grown old. This was not the same as before the surgery. H.M. He did not know how old he was. He could not remember any new name, face, song or words. His memory was so low that even after meeting someone, if he turned away, he would forget that person.
H.M. Remained a subject of research for years. They would all behave in a cheerful and sociable manner with the scientist. He never tired due to any test because every experience was new to him. H.M. at the age of 82 because of respiratory problems. Has died
Long-term memory:
Rule # 5: Remember to Repeat
As the name suggests, the memory of the short term is not so much for the short term. According to scientist Alan Baddeley, it has a complex process of three factors. The first is auditory, the second is visual and the third is executive. Short term is more accurate working memory for term memory.
The auditory factor is given for the words we hear. The visual factor is responsible for the image that we see and picture it in our brain. The central executive keeps track of everything in the short term memory. Let's understand it with a story.
Miguel Najdorf was a famous chase player. When he was in Argentina for a competition, Germany attacked Poland. Miguel's family was taken captive and taken to a concentration camp. With the hope that he would be able to meet his family again, Miguel played 45 games of the Chase in 11 hours. He used it as a publicity stunt so that a member of his family could find out about him after hearing about him.
Playing Chase non-stop for 11 hours was a surprise in itself, but there was another interesting thing in it that Miguel was playing all these games blindfolded. Note that at the beginning of the game, there is a fixed place for every piece on the board of the chase. Miguel first played the game using the audio factor.
When the player in front would have made his move, Miguel would have asked him which piece he had increased and according to that he would have done his trick. After that, he used the visual factor to create an image in his brain that how every piece moves on the chase board. Therefore, he could easily win the game even with his eyes closed. Finally, Miguel used the central executive factor to differentiate one game from the other, meaning that when a game was over, he would re-set his mental image to the initial setting of the game.
As Ebbinghaus said, if you do not repeat your information in between and do not connect it with other important information, you will soon forget about it. This process is called consolidation. In this way we convert our short term memory to long term memory.
In simple words, consolidation means repeating and adding. If you really want to remember something, then you have to repeat it again and again. Its mantra is: Repeat and connect.
You will be surprised to know that your childhood memories are not as accurate as you think. As time passes, the details of any event in your memory begin to fade and hence the brain starts adding new things to that event.
Your brain takes in every information you experience in the world. Therefore, it uses the technique of connecting your old memories with new memories. This makes the brain easy to understand the meaning of everything.
For example, assume that at the age of 8, you spent a very good time with your parents at the beach. By the age of 10, you will be able to remember the details of that day very accurately. You may have written about that day in your diary. But if you will read that diary after thirty years, then the memory of that day will not be the same as it was while writing the diary. This happens because your new experiences affect your happy memory, due to which its details start to disappear. The things that we do not remember again and again, the brain starts deleting those things automatically.
Sleep:
Rule # 6: Sleep Well, Think Well
Often, due to lack of sleep, due to the changes you feel, you start overreacting and you are not wrong in this. Studies have repeatedly proved that lack of sleep causes severe damage to your body. We cannot work continuously without stopping or without sleep because our body has an automatic system of waking and sleeping.
Waking and sleeping have been described as a fight going on inside our body. This fight is between Process C and Process S. Process C is made of hormones and chemicals that work to keep you awake. On the other hand, Process S is made of hormones and chemicals whose job is to make you sleep.
In this fight, the process which dominates more is more likely to be lost, but why? This is because the longer you stay awake, the more you will start sleeping because your body is very tired.
Even taking a nap in the afternoon is considered healthy by the researchers. Taking a nap does not mean that you are lazy or sleeping too much. Our body just needs a chance to rest for some time, even if it is just a few minutes.
A study conducted by NASA showed that a pilot's performance had increased by 34% after taking a 26-minute nap. Another study showed that the mental processing of students who took a 45-minute nap had increased significantly. Let's understand it with a story.
In 1965, 17-year-old Randy Garner decided that he would be constantly awake for 11 days for his science project. He not only showed this amazing work by doing the truth, but he also made a record that year as the longest sleepless person.
But after this, during his experiment Randy became very tired, cuddled and behaved like forgetful. Symptoms of Alzheimer's disease such as confusion, insanity and mental confusion started appearing in it. Randy's body was acting like a broken machine. On the last day of his experiment, his fingers began to tremble and he was unable to speak properly.
Getting complete sleep is not only necessary for children. This is a natural process of our body to recharge itself. Getting full sleep is very important for a person of all ages.
When you need to study for the exam or work on an important project, then you must take the rest in between. Taking a nap does not mean being lazy, rather it makes you more productive.
CONCLUSION:
So you learned about the 6 rules of the brain in this book that can change your life.
Brain rule # 1 says that exercise helps you to keep not only physical but also mentally fit. It leads you to old age in a very beautiful way.
Brain rule # 2 told you that your brain has been developing over time. There have been many changes in it. It has helped keep you alive by adapting yourself to the changing environment.
Brain Rule # 3 talked about the effect of memory, interest and awareness in your attention. We pay more attention to what is important for our culture, which is extraordinarily and understood by our understanding.
Brain Rule # 4 explained to you that it is more effective to memorize a little bit of information than to memorize a lot of information at once. You need to take a break in the middle and repeat that information so that you can remember it.
Brain Rule # 5 taught you about consolidation. Repeating and connecting converts short term memory into long term memory.
Brain Rule # 6 reminded you how important it is to sleep. It helps you become smarter and healthier than ever.
Our brain is like a muscle. It needs exercise but together it also needs rest. So hopefully these rules will help you in increasing the capacity of your mind.
Our brain is an excellent system to process information and if seen, it is the most unique and complex machine that ever works, which also does wonders and sometimes surprises us. So take good care of it and try to unlock its unlimited potential because we are sure that its power will surprise you.
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