Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School
It is literally impossible for our brains to multitask when it comes to paying attention.
stressed brain is significantly less productive.
If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom.
I have come to believe that people with advanced Theory of Mind skills possess the single most important ingredient for becoming effective communicators of information.
existing Theory of Mind tests could be used like Myers-Briggs personality tests to reveal good teachers from
bad, or to help people considering careers as teachers.
The more attention the brain pays to a given stimulus, the more elaborately the information will be encoded—and retained.
For example, urban Asians pay a great deal of attention to the context of a visual scene and to the relationships between foreground objects and backgrounds. Urban Americans don’t. They pay attention to the focal items before the backgrounds, leaving perceptions of context much weaker. Such differences can affect how an audience perceives a given business presentation or class lecture.
Posner hypothesized that we pay attention to things because of the existence of three separable but fully integrated systems in the brain.
Emotionally charged events persist much longer in our memories and are recalled with greater accuracy than neutral memories.
Studies show that emotional arousal focuses attention on the “gist” of an experience at the expense of peripheral details.
Words presented in a logically organized, hierarchical structure are much better
remembered than words placed randomly—typically percent better.
If we can derive the meaning of the words to one another, we can much more easily recall the details. Meaning before details.
“[Experts’] knowledge is not simply a list of facts and formulas that are relevant to their domain; instead, their knowledge is organized around core concepts or ‘big ideas’ that guide their thinking about their domains. (John Bransford, How People Learn)”
Whether you are a waiter or a brain scientist, if you want to get the particulars correct, don’t start with details. Start with the key ideas and, in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions.
Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially.
The most common communication mistakes?
Relating too much information, with not enough time devoted to connecting the dots.
Starting with general concepts naturally leads to explaining information in a hierarchical fashion. You have to do the general idea first.
The linkages [between the main idea and the current details] must be clearly and repetitively explained.
The more repetition cycles a given memory experienced, the more likely it was to persist in his mind.
There are at least two types of memories: memories that involve conscious awareness and memories that don’t.
Declarative memories are those that can be experienced in our conscious awareness.
Nondeclarative memories are those that cannot be experienced in our conscious awareness, such as the motor skills necessary to ride a bike.
The more elaborately we encode information at the moment of learning, the stronger the memory.
The more a learner focuses on the meaning of the presented information, the more elaborately the encoding is processed.
The greater the number of examples in the paragraph, the more likely the information was to be remembered.
The more personal an example, the more richly it becomes encoded and the more readily it is remembered.
Information is more readily processed if it can be immediately associated with information already present in the [reader's mind].
Introductions are everything.
If you are a student, whether in business or education, the events that happen the first time you are exposed to a given information stream play a disproportionately greater role in your ability to accurately retrieve it at a later date.
The process of converting short-term memory traces to longer, sturdier forms is called consolidation.
Thinking or talking about an event immediately after it has occurred enhances memory for that event.
Repeated exposure to information in specifically timed intervals provides the most powerful way to fix memory into the memory.
Dan Schacter to say: “If you have only one week to study for a final, and only times when you can hit the subject, it is better to space out the repetitions during the week than to squeeze them all together.”
Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information if you want to retrieve it later.
Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately if you want the retrieval to be of higher quality.
Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately, and in fixed, spaced intervals, if you want the retrieval to be the most vivid it can be.
[People] learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
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.
two-dimensional pictures are quite adequate; studies show that if the drawings are too complex or lifelike, they can distract from the transfer of information.