The John Medina Interview Roundup

Just because Brain Rules and Brain Rules for Baby have been published doesn't mean that Dr. John Medina has stopped educating the public with his scientifically backed insights on how our brains work. Dr. Medina has kept busy by doing a variety of interviews for the wide audiences of readers who are interested in learning more about the Brain Rules. Here are the links to a few of them:

-At the Positive Business Blog, Dr. Medina discusses how using our brains better leads to doing better business--especially when it comes to Rule #8: stress.

-Stream or download Dr. Medina's interview with independent business radio station BFM 89.9.

-Business blogger Bob Morris sits down with Dr. Medina.

-Watch Dr. Medina's conversation with Microsoft's Mary Cullinane at the Innovative Education Forum.

-Listen to Dr. Medina's in-depth interview about a set of Brain Rules that are especially handy for teachers.

Happy marriage can equal happy baby

People love to give advice to expectant couples. Some of it is trite ("Cherish every moment"); some is useful ("Go to as many movies as you can before the baby comes").

But no one warns couples about what can happen to a marriage after the baby arrives.

Read "Happy marriage can equal happy baby" in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

SOURCES FOR THE STUDIES

From where do the statistics on the transition to parenthood come? The comments in this article probably need to have some nuance added to them in order to make the most sense. These additional comments are enumerated below, including the references for all figures cited here and in the above sections.

It is clear that marital satisfaction declines for both members of the couple, sometimes catastrophically, during the transition to parenthood. The female in the relationship generally achieves the 70% figure first (though in some studies the actual figure is between 40 -70%). The male satisfaction scores starts declining afterward, perhaps as a reaction to female behavior. Here are two relevant references:

Gottman, JM (1999)
The Marriage Clinic: a Scientifically-Based Marital Therapy
Norton Prof Books (NY)
pp. 119 – 133 (see in particular p. 120 – 121)

Belsky, J and Pensky E (1988)
Marital change across the transition to parenthood
Marr and Fam Rev 12: 133 – 156

The nine-fold figure at the half-year mark is actually from unpublished data. The true number has been elusive to determine, even after all these years, probably because different studies use different hostility indices to arrive at their conclusions. Regardless of the methodology employed, the conclusion is very straightforward, and sobering: it is not abnormal to experience a great increase in conflict during the transition to parenthood (for some couples, it is probably much higher than 9x). Here are references filled with the most solidly designed studies:

Wallace, PM & Gotlib IH (1990)
Marital adjustment during the transition to parenthood: stability and predictors of change
J. Mar & Fam 52(1): 21 – 29

Belsky, J and Kelly J. (1994)
The transition to parenthood: How a first child changes a marriage and why some couples grow closer and others apart
Dell (NY)

Learn more about Brain Rules.

This is Your Brain at Work

John Medina was recently interviewed by the New York Post. The complete article, "This is Your Brain at Work," is available here.

How is work an antibrain environment?

We don't very much know how the brain works, but we do know something about its performance envelope. The brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an outdoor setting in unstable meteorological conditions. And to do that in near-constant motion. That's what the brain's good at. So if you wanted to design a work environment directly opposed to what the brain was naturally good at doing, you'd design something like an office.

If you tore the workplace down, what would you replace it with?

We've known for some time that the more fit aerobically you are, the better a particular series of processes called "executive function" in the brain works. It helps your ability to do math. It helps your ability to control your impulses. It helps with Let's say you're a Boeing engineer. Executive function is the very thing that allows you to design a satellite and, at the same time, keeps you from punching your boss in the nose when you get a bad performance review.

If you take somebody who's fat and sedentary and exercise them three times a week for as little as three months, you can get anywhere between an 80 and 120 percent increase in executive function. In our evolutionary history, we were probably walking anywhere between 10 and 20 kilometers per day. If we sat around in the Serengeti for half an hour, we were usually lunch.

Scotch the cubicle, put in a treadmill and do all your computer work while you're walking two miles an hour.

How does sleep, or lack of it, affect the brain at work?

There's a time in the afternoon when your brain wants to do a reset. And during that time it wants to take a 15- to 20-minute nap. We call it the nap zone. If you don't allow yourself to take a nap during that time, you'll fight being sleepy the rest of the afternoon, and productivity can suffer.

It was measured by NASA. They were able to show that by giving their fighter pilots a 20-minute nap in the nap zone, you'd find an increase of about 34 percent in their mean reaction time performances.

Mark Rosekind, the guy who did the study, goes, "Look, what other management technique can I do that, in 20 minutes, gives a 34 percent boost in productivity?"

Related Links:

Interview in the New York Post

Sleep Slide Show

Why do we sleep?

Exercise boosts brain power

Discuss on the Facebook fan page

Brain Rules BNET Podcast

Check out the 8-minute Brain Rules podcast at BNET.com

Other News:

Brain Rules Book Group in Second Life - a weekly (every Monday) gathering for the month of October

Boing Boing review

Brain Rules for PowerPoint & Keynote presenters

Garr Reynolds, author of "Presenation Zen," has a great post on his blog discussing the book: Brain Rules for PowerPoint & Keynote presenters.

Here's what Garr says about the book:

"Brain Rules is one of the most informative, engaging, and useful books of our time. Required reading for every educator and every business person. My favorite book of 2008!"

View Upload your own

Above: here's a slide presentation Garr created based on some of the ideas in Brain Rules.

Brain Rules Webinar - Tuesday, June 3 at 2pm EDT/11am PDT

Join John Medina for a live Brain Rules Webinar covering Exercise, Stress, and Multitasking. The free Webinar is hosted by Alvaro Fernandez, the co-founder of SharpBrains.

Date and time: Tuesday, June 3 at 2pm EDT/11am PDT
Register: Here

SharpBrains Blog Post
Brain Rules

Harvard Business Review Interview - "The Science of Thinking Smarter"

The May issue of Harvard Business Review features an interview with John Medina, author of "Brain Rules." The article is called The Science of Thinking Smarter (click to read the full article on the HBR site). Below is the executive summary.



Neuroscience can show managers ways to improve productivity.
A Conversation with brain expert John J. Medina by Diane Coutu

Advances in neurobiology have demonstrated that the brain is so sensitive to external experiences that it can be rewired through exposure to cultural influences. Experiments have shown that in some people, parts of the brain light up only when they are presented with an image of Bill Clinton. In others, it’s Jennifer Aniston. Or Halle Berry. What other stimuli could rewire the brain? Is there a Boeing brain? A Goldman Sachs brain?

No one really knows yet, says Medina, a developmental molecular biologist, who has spent much of his career exploring the mysteries of neuroscience with laypeople. As tempting as it is to try to translate the growing advances to the workplace, he warns, it’s just too early to tell how the revolution in neurobiology is going to affect the way executives run their organizations. “If we understood how the brain knew how to pick up a glass of water and drink it, that would represent a major achievement,” he says.

Still, neuroscientists are learning much that can be put to practical use. For instance, exercise is good for the brain, and long-term stress is harmful, inevitably hurting productivity in the workplace. Stressed people don’t do math very well, they don’t process language very efficiently, and their ability to remember—in both the short and long terms—declines. In fact, the brain wasn’t built to remember with anything like analytic precision and shouldn’t be counted on to do so. True memory is a very rare thing on this planet, Medina says. That’s because the brain isn’t really interested in reality; it’s interested in survival.

What’s more, and contrary to what many twentieth-century educators believed, the brain can keep learning at any age. “We are lifelong learners,” Medina says. “That’s very good news indeed.”
Read the full interview in Harvard Business Review

Authors@Google, Freakonomics Blog, and More

Last week John spoke at Google about exercise and stress. You can watch the talk on YouTube or below.


John wrote a short essay for the Freakonomics Blog on the New York Times Web site. He addressed the question: How Much Progress Have Psychology and Psychiatry Really Made?

Here are links to other news and sites for Brain Rules readers:

- Seattle Times feature article - "12 rules to boost your brain power"
- Watch John's interview on Northwest Afternoon (KOMO-ABC)
- iTunes - download the exercise chapter from the audio book
- YouTube - watch dozens of videos from the Brain Rules DVD
- Web tutorials for all 12 brain rules.


John Medina testing the Sleep Pod at the Googleplex.