Brain Rules by John Medina is an analysis of principles that govern the working of our brain. It details the functioning of the brain, the intriguing research behind specific aspects and then offers insights into how we can apply these rules to life. This post is a short summary of 5 of these 12 rules that I think are slightly more important than others in the life of an entrepreneur or a business manager.
Stress
In a study of homes where parents regularly fought with each other, it was observed that children’s stress levels (measured by the amount of stress hormones in urine tests) were a direct indicator of their learning disabilities. Stress is the enemy number one for the brain. It has the ability to undo all other positive effects of diet and exercise. The first thing to realize (and this one is a common theme throughout the book), is that people react differently to different kinds of stressful conditions. Some people love to skydive, others may get heart palpitations at the thought of it.
When you feel stressed, your body pumps adrenaline and triggers the fight or flight response. In this regard the stress one feels in the workplace is physiologically, no different from the stress, one would feel in the wild being chased by a tiger. This is especially important to internalize as sometimes stress is often considered a soft issue in traditionally hard-nosed industries).
There are three indicators that help you spot if someone is stressed.
- Aroused physiological response that a third party can observe.
- If they could, would they turn down the severity of, or totally avoid, the feelings they’re experiencing.
- The person does not feel control of the situation.
The workplace stress is usually a result of a simple two part problem -> A. a great deal is expected of you and B. you have no control over how you can perform. Incorrect expectation setting along with lack of control is a recipe for mental fatigue. To ensure your people are not stressed, you need to think hard and deep about their goals and provide agency that makes people feel they are in control.
Another important point to understand is that humans don’t have separate brain centres for home and work life. The stress in family life, isn’t limited to affect the family life related functions. Stress in family or home related matters is bound to affect office productivity and vice versa. Stressful work life affects families too. Expecting people to park their family matters with the car while coming to work is incorrect.
Wiring
This rule isn’t necessarily all that applicable in a work setup but absolutely blew my mind and I thought it worth mentioning here. It may perhaps come in handy when you on-board new employees or design a boot camp.
Eric Kendall, a neuroscientist, won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for discovering how the brain changes physically with learning. He explained how neurons changed their connections and alignment when we learn things. We literally have a wiring system in the brain. Even simple pieces of information alter the physical structure of neurons in the brain. These physical changes determine the functioning of your brain. How the wiring in the brain changes with information is specific to individuals. Given the same information, the wiring may occur differently in different brains depending on the personal experience of a person. This is the crux of this rule. Your personal experiences, memories and countless other factors affect the physical wiring of your brain when you learn. Based on the wiring, the memories and information that are available to the brain while evaluating a sentence or doing a math problem is different and so the functioning of the brain is different. This is why we all learn things differently and why teaching or instructing is such a hard job. So what can we do? We can have smaller classrooms and teaching environments. Intimate instruction environments make it easy for a teacher to keep track of where everyone is.
Attention
This was my favourite part of the book. The underlying principle of how we pay attention to anything is based on how we react to an emotionally charged event. Whenever we come across an event that causes us to experience emotions, the body releases the hormone dopamine. This release sort of attaches a post-it note on the event with the words ‘remember this’. Emotionally charged events are therefore organised separately in memory and are more easily available to us than other events. This has very clear applications in learning, advertising, public speaking and any place where you need people’s attention. The book also explains in detail why the 1984 macintosh ad was so successful. It made references to the big brother from the 1984. It also bought in some sex appeal and by showing suits, it made an underhanded dig at IBM. It also piggy backed on the feminism movement which is why the key protagonist in the film is a woman. This also brings us to another key point of attention, which is the relevance of meaning before details. Emotional arousal focusses attention to the gist of the experience. In time the gist stays with us but the details fade away. Like everything else, the attention that we can attach to something is limited. The typical period attention period is 10 minutes.
The lessons in this chapter have a great many applications ranging from designing an effective lecture to a great marketing campaign. In fact, Medina goes on to explain the anatomy of a great lecture. He says every lecture needs to be divided into 10 minute modules. Each 10 minute includes one broad concept (the gist) which can be explained in 1 minute. The rest of the 9 minutes are about detailing out the gist and building the hierarchy of information. Every 10 minutes, you need to buy the next 10 minutes of attention with a reset. This is where an emotionally charged event comes in. It’s a great place to put in a joke or a story. Medina calls these hooks. A good hook has three components.
- It espouses emotions – fear, laughter, happiness, nostalgia, etc.
- It needs to be relevant – something related to the subject matter.
- Forward looking or backward looking – hooks can be about the topic you’ve just finished or future looking about the new material to be covered in the next 10 minutes.
Vision
95% of the information we perceive comes from our eyes. Pictures are the most efficient information delivery mechanism for the brain. The old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words is about as scientifically accurate as it gets. Visual perception trumps every other sensory perception. A brilliant study observing seasoned wine tasters explains this. A red die was added to white wine and served to experienced wine tasters. 80% of the tasters were fooled into believing they were consuming red wine. This simple test underscores the importance of vision. Our mind remembers pictures better than words and any pictorial representation of information has multiplicative effects on memory and recall. A great testament to the power of images is the rise of USA Today as a newspaper. What started off as a small newspaper in 1982 is today America’s biggest newspaper, largely due to its novel use of pictures.
In the world today when so many things are constantly vouching for your attention, the easiest way to do the job of information transfer efficiently, is to use pictures. This is why infographics, pictorial representations and charts are so important. Plain old text based powerpoint are useless no matter how great your material is. Leverage imagery to drive home your point quickly and in a way that sticks.
Exploration
Humans are natural explorers. We have an internal information-gathering strategy. We hypothesize, observe, and then make inferences. Since childhood, we push our boundaries and test how people and things around us will react when we mess with them. This is one of our most powerful inherent instincts.
When properly used, this makes for a great learning aid. This is why the medical field, according to Medina, is way ahead of every other field in terms of practical knowledge. In medicine, students are taught by practicing doctors on real-world cases in real-world hospitals. This intermingling of bookish knowledge and practical work is what makes for the best kind of learning. Wherever we can, we should try and emulate experimental systems and leverage practical learning methods. Think internships, apprenticeships over theoretical online courses, and certifications.
I run a startup called Harmonize. We are hiring and if you’re looking for an exciting startup journey, please write to jobs@harmonizehq.com. Apart from this blog, I tweet about startup life and practical wisdom in books.