Brain Rules for Educators

As anybody who has read Brain Rules knows, Dr. John Medina has a few bones to pick with how the traditional classroom is structured. If Dr. Medina were in charge, a typical day at school would be transformed in a myriad of ways that would increase levels of efficiency, permanence, and, well, fun while learning. Fortunately, educators are listening to Dr. Medina as well, and they're starting to share their thoughts with the rest of us:

-At The Huffington Post, Tom Vander Ark hypothesizes what a Brain Rules-inspired classroom would look like.

-Watch Dr. Medina's interview about which "brain rules" are myths and which ones are backed by scientific evidence in his interview with Mary Cullinane at the Microsoft Innovative Education Forum.

-Listen to Dr. Medina's in-depth discussion of Brain Rules for Teachers from the "Leaps and Bounds for Teachers" series from Berklee Faculty Development.

-You don't need to transform the entire educational system from the bottom up in order for the message Brain Rules to take a positive effect in your classroom: watch high school wrestling coach Mike Hagerty give his unsolicited praise detailing how Brain Rules has influenced his teaching.

Have you figured out new ways to integrate Brain Rules in your classroom? Don't hesitate to share and start a discussion with other educators at the Brain Rules Facebook page.

New Brain Rules for Baby Videos

We are excited for you to meet Brain Rules Baby, who shares parenting wisdom from Brain Rules for Baby in these 60-second videos.

Watch Out - Your Kids Are Watching You More Than You Think


That's right, kids are really good a imitation.  Even a 13-month-old child can remember an event a week after a single exposure.  Even when you don't realize it, your kids are watching the world around you.  What you allow into your child's brain influences their expectations about the world, which in turn influences not only what they are capable of perceiving, but their very behavior.

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Under 2? No TV for you!


Americans 2 years of age and older now spend an average of four hours and 49 minutes per day in front of the TV—20 percent more than 10 years ago. And we are getting this exposure at younger and younger ages, made all the more complex because of the wide variety of digital screen time now available. In 2003, 77 percent of kids under 6 watched television every day. And children younger than 2 got two hours and five minutes of “screen time” with TVs and computers per day. The average American is exposed to about 100,000 words per day outside of work. Fully 45 percent of those words come from television. The fact is, the amount of TV a child should watch before the age of 2 is zero.

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What Humans Can Learn From Monkeys

We are exploring the sometimes creepy, always fascinating distance between genes and behaviors. In this entry, I wish to illustrate a dramatic example of how nature and nurture interact, not by examining humans, but by considering some genetic next-door neighbors: vervet monkeys. This is a great example of  “Learn from your parents — it’s good for you!” without a human parent in sight.

Vervet monkeys have interesting predator vocalizations, and even something of a vocabulary. The animals appear to be born with this ability — there’s our nature. As we shall see, however, the application requires some practice — and that’s our nurture. This is easily seen in vervet monkey foraging behaviors, whether the animals are searching for food on the ground or in the trees.

Vervet monkeys have a vocalization for the warning “Run, you idiot, there’s a snake on the ground!”, for example. When an adult vocalizes this warning, the whole tribe runs into the trees, and everyone is safe. They have another word for “Run, you idiot, there’s a predatory bird in the air!” When an adult vocalizes this warning, the whole tribe dives to the ground, and everyone is safe one again.

Note that I italicized the word “adult” throughout the previous paragraph. That’s because when the tribe hears a youngster vocalize either the snake or bird warning, the tribe doesn’t do anything. The members wait until they hear an adult say it. Why do they pause? Because the little ones often get the vocabulary mixed up. They have not yet learned the correct application of their handy early warning system.

The adults aren’t trying to be obnoxious. They are trying to avoid a disaster. Imagine the tragedy if the whole tribe responded to a juvenile’s call to hit the dirt when the little guy saw a snake. The funny cartoon version has him saying sheepishly, “Oops. I meant, trees” — but the deadly real world version is “no more tribe.” Little vervets may be born with the ability to warn others, but they have not yet been instructed on its proper use. They will eventually learn the correct behavior by persistent interactions with older members of the tribe, but the instruction set is not innate. They may have been born with pre-loaded vocalizing software. That doesn’t mean they know how to use it.

A very similar situation between biological ability and social experience is observed with humans, examples of which we will explore in the next few entries. We may come into this world with some pretty sophisticated DNA, but like our primate cousins, that is no guarantee we know how to use it.

We do not see with our eyes. We see with our brains.

We do not see with our eyes. We see with our brains.

The evidence lies with a group of 54 wine aficionados. Stay with me here. To the untrained ear, the vocabularies that wine tasters use to describe wine may seem pretentious, more reminiscent of a psychologist describing a patient. (“Aggressive complexity, with just a subtle hint of shyness” is something I once heard at a wine-tasting soirée to which I was mistakenly invited—and from which, once picked off the floor rolling with laughter, I was hurriedly escorted out the door).

These words are taken very seriously by the professionals, however. A specific vocabulary exists for white wines and a specific vocabulary for red wines, and the two are never supposed to cross. Given how individually we each perceive any sense, I have often wondered how objective these tasters actually could be. So, apparently, did a group of brain researchers in Europe. They descended upon ground zero of the wine-tasting world, the University of Bordeaux, and asked: “What if we dropped odorless, tasteless red dye into white wines, then gave it to 54 wine-tasting professionals?” With only visual sense altered, how would the enologists now describe their wine? Would their delicate palates see through the ruse, or would their noses be fooled? The answer is “their noses would be fooled.” When the wine tasters encountered the altered whites, every one of them employed the vocabulary of the reds. The visual inputs seemed to trump their other highly trained senses.

Folks in the scientific community had a field day. Professional research papers were published with titles like “The Color of Odors” and “The Nose Smells What the Eye Sees.” That’s about as much frat boy behavior as prestigious brain journals tolerate, and you can almost see the wicked gleam in the researchers’ eyes. Data such as these point to the nuts and bolts of the Brain Rule: Vision trumps all other senses. Visual processing doesn’t just assist in the perception of our world. It dominates the perception of our world.

Related Links:

Vision

Vision audio clip

Brain Rules Workshops

Meaning Before Details

Watching J.C. take an order is like watching Ken Jennings play Jeopardy! J.C. never writes anything down, yet he never gets the order wrong. As the menu offers more than 500 possible combinations of food (entrees, side dishes, salad dressing, etc.) per customer, this is an extraordinary achievement. J.C. has been recorded taking the orders of 20 people consecutively with a zero percent error rate. J.C. worked in a restaurant frequented by University of Colorado brain scientist K. Anders Ericsson. Noticing how unusual J.C.’s skills were, he asked J.C. if he would submit to being studied. The secret of J.C.’s success lay in the deployment of a powerful organization strategy. He always divided the customer’s order into discrete categories, such as entree, temperature, side dish, and so on. He then coded the details of a particular order using a lettering system. For salad dressing, Blue Cheese was always “B,” Thousand Island always “T” and so on. Using this code with the other parts of the menu, he assigned the letters to an individual face and remembered the assignment. By creating a hierarchy of gist, he easily could apprehend the details.

The Schema video is an example of meaning before details.



J.C.’s strategy employs a principle well-known in the brain-science community: Memory is enhanced by creating associations between concepts. This experiment has been done hundreds of times, always achieving the same result: Words presented in a logically organized, hierarchical structure are much better remembered than words placed randomly—typically 40 percent better. This result baffles scientists to this day. Embedding associations between data points necessarily increases the number of items to be memorized. More pieces of intellectual baggage to inventory should make learning more difficult. But that is exactly not what was found. If we can derive the meaning of the words to one another, we can much more easily recall the details. Meaning before details.

worth a thousand words

When it comes to memory, researchers have known for more than 100 years that pictures and text follow very different rules. Put simply,the more visual the input becomes, the more likely it is to be recognized—and recalled. The phenomenon is so pervasive, it has been given its own name: the pictorial superiority effect, or PSE.

Human PSE is truly Olympian. Tests performed years ago showed that people could remember more than 2,500 pictures with at least 90 percent accuracy several days post-exposure, even though subjects saw each picture for about 10 seconds. Accuracy rates a year later still hovered around 63 percent. In one paper—adorably titled “Remember Dick and Jane?”—picture recognition information was reliably retrieved several decades later.

Sprinkled throughout these experiments were comparisons with other forms of communication. The favorite target was usually text or oral presentations, and the usual result was “picture demolishes them both.” It still does. Text and oral presentations are not just less efficient than pictures for retaining certain types of information; they are way less efficient. If information is presented orally, people remember about 10 percent, tested 72 hours after exposure. That figure goes up to 65 percent if you add a picture.

The inefficiency of text has received particular attention. One of the reasons that text is less capable than pictures is that the brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures. Data clearly show that a word is unreadable unless the brain can separately identify simple features in the letters. Instead of words, we see complex little art-museum masterpieces, with hundreds of features embedded in hundreds of letters. Like an art junkie, we linger at each feature, rigorously and independently verifying it before moving to the next. The finding has broad implications for reading efficiency. Reading creates a bottleneck. My text chokes you, not because my text is not enough like pictures but because my text is too much like pictures. To our cortex, unnervingly, there is no such thing as words.

That’s not necessarily obvious. After all, the brain is as adaptive as Silly Putty. With years of reading books, writing email, and sendingtext messages, you might think the visual system could be trained torecognize common words without slogging through tedious additional steps of letter-feature recognition. But that is not what happens. No matter how experienced a reader you become, you will still stop and ponder individual textual features as you plow through a book, and you will do so until you can’t read anymore. Perhaps, with hindsight, we could have predicted such inefficiency. Our evolutionary history was never dominated by text-filled billboards or Microsoft Word. It was dominated by leaf-filled trees and saber-toothed tigers. The reason vision means so much to us may be as simple as the fact that most of the major threats to our lives in the savannah were apprehended visually. Ditto with most of our food supplies. Ditto with our perceptions of reproductive opportunity.

The tendency is so pervasive that, even when we read, most of us try to visualize what the text is telling us. “Words are only postage stamps delivering the object for you to unwrap,” George Bernard Shaw was fond of saying. These days, there is a lot of brain science technology to back him up.

Learn more:

Vision and the brain

Getty Images video (from Brain Rules DVD)

Death by PowerPoint (from Brain Rules DVD)

7 Observations About the Next Generation -- And What to Do About Them (Part 1)

Arik Korman interviews John Medina about the challenges facing the next generation. Watch the interview on YouTube or below.



1. The database is getting poorer.
Expert notion is shifting from knowing the knowledge outright to simply being reassured that it could be gotten "from somewhere." The students simply know where to get it, but the information is not immediately resident in their own brains.

2. The students' notion of intellectual toughness is shifting.
The amount of material they think is "hard" is growing and they don't like it.

Brain Rules in the News
- John Medina on Bob Rivers (video part 1)
- John Medina on Bob Rivers (video part 2)
- Oprah.com
- New Rules for Saving Your Memory (More magazine)
- Get more on facebook and YouTube
- #8 on New York Times Business bestseller list

The Biological Threat of Stress: From the Jungle to Wall Street

If news about the economy isn’t stressful enough to make you drive your fist through the TV, wait until you hear what stress can do to your brain. Unrelenting stress can hurt the brain’s leading talent — which is learning — and, in its most potent forms, it can even lead to brain damage.

But before you read this admittedly depressing story, would you do me a favor? The article that accompanies this piece provides some practical advice about what you can do to ameliorate the effects of stress. Please promise to read it as well — because you can tame the impact of stress on your life. To underscore how important stress-relieving behaviors are, I am presenting the bad news first. But the bad news is neither the end, nor the most important part, of the story.

Definitions
You might be surprised to know that the negative linkages between stress and learning were not easy to measure in the laboratory. First, most of the time stress does not cause brain damage and, oddly enough, certain stressors can actually be quite good for learning.

Second, no one could find a single grouping of physiological states unique to stress. Indeed, it was discovered that a person’s overall responses to aversive stimuli were the same responses they had to their favorite chocolate bar. Or to sex.

Third, no two people react to stress in exactly the same way, which is another way of saying perceptions of stress were (and are) highly subjective.

So how are we going to define "unrelenting stress"? We actually do have definitions that make sense to a test tube these days, using insights uncovered many years ago and centering around a small but very powerful word: control. The principle is this: The more out of control you feel over some bad thing coming at you, the more likely you are to experience the type of stress that can hurt you.

“Out of control” is measured in two directions: an inability to control the frequency of the bad stuff coming at you, and an inability to control its severity once the bad stuff has arrived. This loss of control has been shown to greatly increase the probability of the brain slipping into an anxiety or clinical depression. That can profoundly affect learning, and even cause neurological harm.

The very kinds of experiences in which recessions are marinated, ranging from layoffs to the current slowdown’s favorite flavor — retirement erosion — can provide a perfect elixir for brain debilitation.

The Stress Response System and the Saber-toothed Tiger
Why should a system embedded so deeply in your psyche be so potentially dangerous to you? Stress responses play an extraordinarily important part in our evolutionary survival, after all.

The answer has less to do with biological systems than it has to do with social ones — and also with timing. The brain is well-adapted for solving stress-related problems that are short-term in duration. The saber-toothed tiger either ate you or you ran away from it, but the whole thing was over in less than five minutes.

Great for a jungle. Lousy for Wall Street. A recession doesn’t last for five minutes. Neither does a bad marriage, or a bad job. When you try to push a system that was adapted only for solving short-term problems into solving long-term ones, the system first becomes over-extended, then it becomes overwhelmed.

There are many lines of evidence supporting this insight. The metabolic machinery that would actually allow you to handle a stressful experience is almost completely exhausted in 30 minutes (a great deal of it consumed in the first five). If the system moves beyond this performance benchmark, it starts to deregulate, like a server with too many demands on its time.

Another line of evidence is a reaction to the first: Stress systems possess negative feedback loops that almost immediately ask the brain if it is OK to shut the systems down, even if it just started revving things up. Why? Because overlong activation hurts things, and your body simply does not have the resources to cope with sustained assaults to its metabolic first responders,

A final line of evidence has to do with the speed of our reactions and our conscious awareness of them. Our stress responses react so quickly that we often do not become aware we are reacting until after we have already started the process. We literally start running away from an aversive stimulus before we are even aware we are moving.

The reason? It simply takes too much time to tell the parts of the brain responsible for consciousness that a big feline is chasing you, time in which you could turn into lunch. So you start running and, in mid-stride, become aware of what you are doing. The delay is about 200 milliseconds.

Milliseconds? That’s less than the time it takes to blink your eyes. The performance envelope of our stress system is designed to solve problems of very short duration.

So what happens when you push a system designed to solve problems lasting less than an hour into an experience where the problems last for months? The answer is depressing. Severe stress experienced over long periods of time can result in physical brain damage.

Danger Zone: Long Term Stress
When you are stressed, your body gives you two options to respond. One option involves deploying a hormone called epinephrine (or, if you are from Great Britain, adrenalin), supervising the so-called fight-or-flight response. The second choice involves the hormone cortisol.

Which system you deploy first may be in part genetically determined, but the goals of both are the same: to shift enough blood flow to your thighs to get you to move out of the arena of danger — and to give your brain a reason for doing so quickly. Hormones rage through your body like a storm surge, energy resources are pumped wildly into far-flung tissues, you dump any excess waste your body is currently carrying, and your brain kicks you into a high state of surveillance.

We are going to follow one of the alert signals, the cortisol we just mentioned, to discuss why an over-exposure causes physical damage to specific regions in the brain.

When stress is moderate in severity, acutely experienced, or both, your stress systems work very well. Cortisol is secreted by your adrenal glands, organs that lie atop of your kidneys. This hormone is part of the Delta Force of your stress response, supervising not only the mission to get you out of danger, but helping to calm you down once the mission is accomplished.

Cortisol even goes into your brain, aiding and abetting regions that are involved in learning (specifically an area of the brain called the hippocampus). That makes sense; you want to learn quickly from the things that could threaten your biological future.

It is this brain access that provides a conduit for the killing, however. Left to its own devices, dumping cortisol onto unprotected hippocampal cells will kill them just as surely as acid burns skin. Fortunately, your brain “knows” this and has left the hippocampus with some pretty good protection. Hippocampal cells have within them an heroic protein called Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (mercifully shortened to BDNF). BDNF can protect a nerve cell from the toxic effects of cortisol. As long as the system is not overwhelmed, BDNF does a pretty good job of buffering against the negative effects of stress.

Watch this video explaining BDNF

When you begin to feel out of control, however, the system short-circuits. If too much cortisol floods into the brain, which is what happens with severe, sustained stress, BDNF cannot keep up the fight. Cells die. Cortisol has a fair number of dirty tricks up its sleeve when produced in large quantities, including the ability to turn off the gene that makes BDNF. Not only can cortisol take the field, it can render its victims incapable of mounting a counter-attack as well.

The Good News About Stress
There are many other issues involved in a complete description of this complex story, including the fact that some people are genetically wired to be more stress-tolerant than others. But the good news is powerful and does not require a genetic explanation.

The brain damage turns out in most cases not to be permanent. You can actually reverse this evil over-regulation in real time, and cure the negative effects listed here. This article discusses some of the ways this seeming miracle can occur.

Learn more about stress and the brain

Brain Rules for public speaking

Scott Berkun recently interviewed John Medina for his blog Speaker Confessions. Scott asks the question: what makes public speakers good or bad? He's working on a book to answer that question.

SB: How can a lecturer use attention, but make sure not to abuse it? Or put another way, does repetitive use of phasic alertness, getting an audience to refocus their attention ever few minutes, have declining effects over time?

JM: I do not believe in entertainment in teaching, during the holy time information is being transferred from one person to another. I do believe in engagement, however, and there is one crucial distinction that separates the two: the content of the emotionally competent stimulus (“hook”). If the story/anecdote/case-history is directly relevant to the topic at hand (either illustrating a previously explained point or introducing a new one), the student remains engaged. Cracking a joke for the sake of a break, or telling an irrelevant anecdote at a strategic time is a form of patronizing, and students everywhere can detect it, usually with resentment, inattention or both.

Do you think the size of a classroom has any effect on students ability to pay attention? Does Posner’s model of attention change if we are alone in conversation, vs. in an audience of 99 other people listening to a lecture?

I don’t think the size of the classroom has anything to do with the functional neural architecture proposed by Posner, but there is a universe of difference in how it behaves. The behavior has to do with our confounded predilection for socializing. People behave very differently in large crowds than they do in small crowds or even one on one. Very different teaching strategies must be deployed for each.

Bligh’s book “What’s the use of Lectures?” identifies 18-25 minutes, based on his assesment of psychology studies, as the key breakpoint for human attention in classrooms. Whether it’s 10 or 25, why do you think so few schools or training events use these sized units as the structure for their days, or their lessons?

I don’t know why schools don’t pay attention to attention. Perhaps it is a lack of content knowledge. If I had my way, every teacher on the planet would take two courses: First, an acting course, the only star in the academic firmament capable of teaching people how to manipulate their bodies and voices i to project information. Second, a cognitive neuroscience course, one that teaches people how the brain learns, so teachers can understand that such projections follow specific rules of engagement.