Tedded - Business Book Review

“Though we have been stuffing them into classrooms and cubicles for decades, our brains actually were built to survive in jungles and grasslands. We have not outgrown this.”

In the recent years, there are many new books on brain science and social science. There are far too many. Brain Rules by John Medina is one of them. However, while most other brain science (neuroscience or however you call it) books always tell us amazing mysteries of our brains, “Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School” by John Medina tells us amazing mysteries and it will also sometimes tell you… “well, we don’t really know about that yet!”. If you are looking for a secret of the universe book (which no one knows it yet), this might not be a book for you. But if you want to know about your brain, how it works, and how can you improve your life, this book is a safe bet.

Contents (The Rules)

1. Exercise: Exercise boosts brain power

Our evolutionary history can be summed up into two words: “We moved” (Yes, We Moved!…). We moved from Africa to all over the world. We didn’t take the low-cost flight. Human development was in jungles and grasslands. David Medina told us how exercise improve the performance of your brain, and it is astoundingly significant in terms of thinking as well as aging.

2. Survival: The human brain evolved, too.

“We learned to grow fangs not in our mouth but in the head”, in this chapter, the author wrote about “symbolic reasoning” and described our brain for those (like me) who are not familiar with the science of brain.

3. Wiring: Every brain is wired differently

In the beginning, John Medina familiarises us with the metaphors of DNA and neurons. There was a story about “Jennifer Aniston neuron” which is interesting and funny in a way. The chapter also tells us that verious regions of the brain develop at different rates in different people and what we do in life literally changes the way it looks like.

4. Attention: We don’t pay attention to boring things

The title says it all, this chapter is about attention and how we are aware of things. Dr. David Medina then elaborate the better way of teaching to improve the education of our children.

5. Short-term memory: Repeat to remember

This chapter is about memory, where it goes to and where it is processed. This is quite complicated to conventional thought (like me, duh) because memory (and our brain) is not like computer, it has no hard drive to store data. There are many other interesting findings. The author also suggest a better way for school and business to improve memory and learning.

6. Long-term memory: Remember to repeat

David Medina wrote about how our brain works; there are more than one ways to retrieve the long-term memory. We also tend to mix new knowledge with the past memories. There is also a compelling story of a Russian journalist Solomon Shereshevskii who has a virtually unlimited memory capacity. He can recall a complex formula of letters and numbers containing about 30 items… after 15 years… (not a typo, 15 years).

7. Sleep: Sleep well, think well

This is one of my favourite chapters. The author wrote about how different people have a need to sleep differently and the benefit of taking a nap during the daytime (my ex-boss won’t like that). Insufficient sleep will undermine your brain and the chapter also tells us that sleep might actually be the key to the process of learning.

8. Stress: Stressed brains don’t learn the same way

From the opposite view of sleep, stress hurts us. The evolution of the brain defines stress as an immediate circumstance, fighting a polar bear or running away from a jaguar, for example. Our brains are not shaped to cope with long-term stresses such as credit crunch or failed marriage. The chapter tells us how stress can hurt us and the author suggests an excellent way to improve the education system, lowering children’s stress by teaching parents, among others.

9. Sensory integration: Stimulate more of the senses

In learning, we always do better in a multi-sensory environments and smells have an unusual power to bring back memories, strange but true.

10. Vision: Vision trumps all other sense

“We do not see with our eyes. We see with our brains.” The fist story of this chapter is about wine experts. Wine specialists have a way of describing the taste of white and red wines differently. A cheeky researcher put an odorless red dye into white wine. All 54 expert tasters described it by the vocabularies of the red wine. Vision is the most dominant sense.

11. Gender: Male and female brains are different

The chapter is about the difference between genders. How different our brains are, how different we communicate, develop social relationship and so on.

12. Exploration: We are powerful and natural explorers

This is a conclusion chapter telling us that we learn and evolve. We have learnt and we will continue learning. We moved and we will move on.

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I’ll compare “Brain Rules” to my personal ideal business book; a book that is easy to understand, distinct, practical, credible, insightful, and provides great reading experience

Ease of Understanding: 7/10: I have to divide it in two parts, the structure of the content and the content itself. The structure is very sound, each chapter is devoted to different topics but the content itself, the brain science, is not very easy to understand. If you read the book, you will know that the author tried and did an amazing job to simplify them but still, as a layman in this subject, I find it hard to understand all of it. But if you are a brain scientist or someone who did well in brain anatomy (as opposed to a person who nearly failed biology in a high school like me), it might be a walk in the park.

Distinction: 6/10: I have to be fair to say that there are many books of this kind available. The good thing is that each chapter can be a book of itself but Dr. David Medina did a great job synthesising and writing the brief key findings of each of them.

Practicality: 8/10: One of the best things of “Brain Rules” is towards the end of the most chapters, the author wrote “idea” of how to implement it mostly for the companies and schools. For individuals, we can easy grasp what we read from the book and implement as well.

Credibility: 10/10: A brain scientist writing a brain science book is better than a journalist writing about it, obviously. But the key is that this book is, or at least sounds, sincere and honest. There are many books that claim the new finding of our brain is the secret of the universe (I might exaggerate here but you know what I mean). This book does not. When the author does not know or does not have the evidence on a particular subject that is relevant, he says “we don’t know it yet”. It is better to not have an information than a false one.

Insight: 8/10: In each chapter, there are many short stories related to the topic. These stories might be researches, personal stories, brain metaphors, brain diseases, and so forth. They are all very interesting and I wish they were longer.

Reading Experience: 9/10: It would be ironic if a writer who wrote a chapter on “Attention: We don’t pay attention to boring things”, actually wrote boring stuffs. And this book is far from it and it really gets your attention. It is a fun read with a great sense of humour from the author.

Overall: 8.0/10: How much will you understand more about your brain? You will understand much more on how it has been evolved, how it functions, and how it should be treated. How much will it change your life? It depends, it you really value your brain, there are obvious things such as exercise more, sleep well, and less stress and there are things that will enhance your learning. There is no step-by-step instruction to power up your brain but you will know the rules.