John Medina, author of the New York Times bestseller "Brain Rules" and the national bestseller "Brain Rules for Baby," is a developmental molecular biologist and research consultant. He is an affiliate professor of bioegineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
We know that it takes you about 10 minutes to lose an audience if you’re just giving a normal talk. So at the nine-minute-and-59-second mark, you have to do something fairly radical. In fact, you should do it within 30 seconds of your first words, but certainly at nine minutes and 59 seconds. And here is where we can get into some brain science.
I think anybody who does speeches at all ought to really understand that the brain processes meaning before it p
How does the brain work? We have no idea. We are still in the very beginning stages of understanding most of the basics. From a researcher's perspective, it's a very exciting time to be a scientist, because you get to rummage around on the ground floor. But from an overall perspective, most of it is spooky.
Let me give you some examples of how little we know about how the brain works. We know that you use the left-side of your brain for speech. Under normal circumstances, if
Theory of Mind is about as close to mind-reading as people can get. Most formal definitions go along the lines of the ability to discern the intentions, and motivations of yourself or another person. To develop a Theory of their Mind, hence the term. I think it has two components to it, especially if you're talking about one person trying to understand another's behavioral space.
First, it's the ability to penetrate inside someone else's psychological interiors and unders
How does memory work? To begin with, we have to destroy the premise behind the question. We don't just have a memory system - like a computer has a hard-drive. We have various memory systems, each in charge of different types of learning. And they work in a semi-independent way from each other.
Though we've spent a long time looking, we don't actually know much about how these individual systems work. We know even less about
Though we really don't know very much about how the brain processes information - we have yet to be able to determine why you know your name - to give just one flagrant example - we are not clueless about how the brain works.
We know about its evolutionary performance envelope, for example.
These are the conditions upon which the brain processes information in the best way. The most efficient way. The most accurate way.
It turns out we need a nap during the afternoon. And historically, it seems we've always needed one. There is the Spanish concept of siesta. Italians call it riposo. If you go to China, you are likely many businesses shut down between 11:30 - 2:00 pm. They take a combination lunch and siesta before going back to work. Americans used to call it a power nap, but the research world calls this a nap zone.
As John Medina’s editor, I worked closely with him to shape Brain Rules and then Brain Rules for Baby. It’s been a thrill to watch both books climb onto the bestseller lists while getting rave reviews from you. I’m grateful for the books on a personal level as well. I imagine you feel the same way.
Brain Rules for Baby is the one book I asked my husband to read before our baby was born. (I even considered threatening that we couldn’t have a baby until he read it.)
The second edition of Brain Rules is here! You made it a bestseller. Now we’ve made it even better, with a fresh edit and a new chapter on how music affects the brain.
Want to read the music chapter now? Get it at https://gumroad.com/l/musicbrainruleOr get the full ebook or audiobook Each ebook comes in PDF format, which you can send to your Kindle or other reading device.
We also have great new videos with Dr. Medina to share in the coming weeks. Watch to find out why
Many parents are concerned about the sleep patterns of their children but in some cultures (Argentina, Spain), staying up late seems not to be a problem. Finally, is there any impact of bedtime or sleep pattern on babies and toddler’s cognitive development?
The most important factor appears to be establishing a consistent bedtime rhythm, regardless of what schedule you follow.
There is room for variation. Different people have different internal clocks – under partial genetic control
John Medina talks with Sixty&Me about the importance of exercise, managing stress, sleep, visual learning and how to use tricks and tips to address and reduce memory loss. He explains how understanding the brain can be applied to education and business. Dr. Medina explains the difference between simple forgetfulness and more serious brain disease and also surprises us with a 13 ‘rule’ that he would add if he was updating his best-selling book – power of nostalgia to improve brain function.
There's a great ongoing conversation over at the Brain Rules for Baby Facebook page amongst new parents who have learned from Brain Rules for Baby. Author Dr. John Medina recently shared his 5 essential Brain Rules for Parents:1. You are going to make lots of mistakes.2. That’s okay. 3. If you pay close attention to the safety needs of your children, – both the emotional and physical ones - you will almost always win.
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 be
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:
You can always find Dr. John Medina's latest writing on brain research and how it affects our daily lives over at Brainstorm. Recently, Dr. Medina has been writing about how new knowledge about the brain could start having a direct impact on America's most popular sport: the NFL.
Like many of us, Dr. Medina is a long-time football fan, but the sport's future looks grim. Since so many current and former football players suffer from the debilitating brain injury CTE, there has been a
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 t
Molecular biologist John Medina, speaker and author of the best-selling book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, didn't set out to become a media star. But he got so fed up with encountering myths about the brain - that you use only 10 percent of it, for example, or that there are right- and left- brain personalities - that he once threw a magazine across a seat on an airplane. (The flight, he notes, wasn't full.) "So I decided to write Brain Ru
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. T
I am often asked why Brain Rules for Baby doesn't include advice on how to get your child to sleep through the night. The omission is deliberate, and my recent answer to one reader's question via e-mail explains the reasoning. I thought you would like to see the answer, too. Thanks for all of your interest in the book. It means a great deal.
You raise an important issue regarding sleep, one of the most critical in the early months of child-rea
If children are born with a sense of right and wrong, as brain science shows, why don't they just do the right thing?
Part of the reason it's tough is that the moment children observe bad behavior, they have learned it. Even if the bad behavior is punished, it remains easily accessible in the child's brain. Psychologist Albert Bandura was able to show this with help from a clown.
In the 1960s, Bandura showed preschoolers a film involving a Bobo doll, one of those inflat
It is ironic that an attempt to do a molecular end-run around a politically hot topic could result in an important breakthrough in the treatment of neurological disease with potentially strong implications for the psychiatric community. Ironic maybe, but true.
In this column, we explore how the judicious use of neural stem cells (NSCs) has led to a research Holy Grail: the creation of research-ready, patient-specific neurons. This technology did not use the famously controversial embryoni
One of the most interesting research efforts of the past few years seems to have taken a page from the preoccupations of the self-help magazine world: the cognitive decline of the brains of aging baby boomers and the obese nature of their grandchildren. These topics have been united by the well-established finding that restricting caloric intake leads to an increased life span in almost every animal tested. Because eating habits are formed early in life, the prediction is that a sensible
Perhaps the seminal component of any clinician’s behavioral repertoire is the ability to understand the conscious motivations and intentions of their clients. This article addresses the work of conscious motivations at the neuroanatomical level.
I seldom address the notion of consciousness—let alone motivations—in this column for a very good reason. Nobody really knows what they are or even if there is a “they.” The literature is confusing, but it hasn’t stopped researchers from speculati