Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (4 page)

Recall that our evolutionary ancestors were used to walking up to 12 miles
per day.
This means that our brains were supported for most of our evolutionary history by Olympic-caliber bodies. We were not used to sitting in a classroom for 8 hours at a stretch. We were not used to sitting in a cubicle for 8 hours at a stretch. If we sat around the Serengeti for 8 hours—heck, for 8
minutes
—we were usually somebody’s lunch. We haven’t had millions of years to adapt to our sedentary lifestyle. That means we need a comeback. Removing ourselves from such inactivity is the first step. I am convinced that integrating exercise into those 8 hours at work or school will not make us
smarter
. It will only make us
normal
.

ideas

There is no question we are in an epidemic of fatness, a point I will not belabor here. The benefits of exercise seem nearly endless because its impact is systemwide, affecting most physiological systems. Exercise makes your muscles and bones stronger, for example, and improves your strength and balance. It helps regulate your appetite, changes your blood lipid profile, reduces your risk for more than a dozen types of cancer, improves the immune system, and buffers against the toxic effects of stress (see Chapter 8). By enriching your cardiovascular system, exercise decreases your risk for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. When combined with the intellectual benefits exercise appears to offer, we have in our hands as close to a magic bullet for improving human health as exists in modern medicine. There must be ways to harness the effects of exercise in the practical worlds of education and business.

Recess twice a day

Because of the increased reliance on test scores for school survival, many districts across the nation are getting rid of physical education and recess. Given the powerful cognitive effects of physical activity, this makes no sense. Yancey, the model-turned-physican/scientist/basketball player, describes a real-world test:

“They took time away from academic subjects for physical education … and found that, across the board, [physical education] did not hurt the kids’ performance on the academic tests. … [When] trained teachers provided the physical education, the children actually did better on language, reading and the basic battery of tests.”

Cutting off physical exercise—the very activity most likely to promote cognitive performance— to do better on a test score is like trying to gain weight by starving yourself. What if a school district inserted exercise into the normal curriculum on a regular basis, even twice a day? After all of the children had been medically evaluated, they’d spend 20 to 30 minutes each morning on formal aerobic exercise; in the afternoon, 20 to 30 minutes on strengthening exercises. Most populations studied see a benefit if this is done only two or three times a week. If it worked, there would be many ramifications. It might even reintroduce the notion of school uniforms. Of what would the new apparel consist? Simply gym clothes, worn all day long.

Treadmills in classrooms and cubicles

Remember the experiment showing that when children aerobically exercised, their brains worked better, and when the exercise was withdrawn, the cognitive gain soon plummeted? These results suggested to the researchers that the level of fitness was not as important as a steady increase in the oxygen supply to the brain (otherwise the improved mental sharpness would not have fallen off so rapidly). So they did another experiment. They found that supplemental oxygen administered to young healthy adults without exercise gave a similar cognitive improvement.

This suggests an interesting idea to try in a classroom (don’t worry, it doesn’t involve oxygen doping to get a grade boost). What if, during a lesson, the children were not sitting at desks but walking on treadmills? Students might listen to a math lecture while walking 1 to 2 miles per hour, or study English on treadmills fashioned to accommodate a desktop. Treadmills in the classroom might harness the valuable advantages of increasing the oxygen supply naturally and at the same time harvest all the other advantages of regular exercise. Would such a thing, deployed over a school year, change academic performance? Until brain scientists and education scientists get together to show real-world benefit, the answer is: Nobody knows.

The same idea could apply at work, with companies installing treadmills and encouraging morning and afternoon breaks for exercise. Board meetings might be conducted while people walked 2 miles per hour. Would that improve problem-solving? Would it alter retention rates or change creativity the same way it does in the laboratory?

The idea of integrating exercise into the workday may sound foreign, but it’s not difficult. I put a treadmill in my own office, and I now take regular breaks filled not with coffee but with exercise. I even constructed a small structure upon which my laptop fits so I can write email while I exercise. At first, it was difficult to adapt to such a strange hybrid activity. It took a whopping 15 minutes to become fully functional typing on my laptop while walking 1.8 miles per hour.

I’m not the only one thinking along these lines. Boeing, for example, is starting to take exercise seriously in its leadership-training programs. Problem-solving teams used to work late into the night; now, all work has to be completed during the day so there’s time for exercise and sleep. More teams are hitting all of their performance targets. Boeing’s vice president of leadership has put a treadmill in her office as well, and she reports that the exercise clears her mind and helps her focus. Company leaders are now thinking about how to integrate exercise into working hours.

There are two compelling business reasons for such radical ideas. Business leaders already know that if employees exercised regularly, it would reduce health-care costs. And there’s no question that cutting in half someone’s lifetime risk of a debilitating stroke or Alzheimer’s disease is a wonderfully humanitarian thing to do. But exercise also could boost the collective brain power of an organization. Fit employees are capable of mobilizing their God-given IQs better than sedentary employees. For companies whose competitiveness rests on creative intellectual horsepower, such mobilization could mean a strategic advantage. In the laboratory, regular exercise improves—sometimes dramatically so— problem-solving abilities, fluid intelligence, even memory. Would it do so in business settings? What types of exercise need to be done, and how often? That’s worth investigating.

Summary

Rule #1
Exercise boosts brain power.

•
Our brains were built for walking—12 miles a day!

•
To improve your thinking skills,
move
.

•
Exercise gets blood to your brain, bringing it glucose for energy and oxygen to soak up the toxic electrons that are left over. It also stimulates the protein that keeps neurons connecting.

•
Aerobic exercise just twice a week halves your risk of general dementia. It cuts your risk of Alzheimer’s by 60 percent.

Get illustrations, audio, video, and more at
www.brainrules.net/exercise

Heavy stuff for a 4-year-old. Other animals have powerful cognitive abilities, too, and yet there is something qualitatively different about the way humans think about things. The journey that brought us from the trees to the savannah gave us some structural elements shared by no other creature—and unique ways of using the elements we do have in common. How and why did our brains evolve this way?

Recall the performance envelope: The brain appears to be designed to (1) solve problems (2) related to surviving (3) in an unstable outdoor environment, and (4) to do so in nearly constant motion. The brain adapted this way simply as a survival strategy, to help us live long enough to pass our genes on to the next generation. That’s right: It all comes down to sex. Ecosystems are harsh, crushing life as easily as supporting it. Scientists estimate 99.99% of all species that have ever lived are extinct today. Our bodies, brains included, latched on to any genetic adaptation that helped us survive. This not only sets the stage for all of the Brain Rules, it explains how we came to conquer the world.

There are two ways to beat the cruelty of the environment: You can become stronger or you can become smarter. We chose the latter. It seems most improbable that such a physically weak species could take over the planet not by adding muscles to our skeletons but by adding neurons to our brains. But we did, and scientists have spent a great deal of effort trying to figure out how. Judy DeLoache has studied this question extensively. She became a well-respected researcher in an era when women were actively discouraged from studying investigative science, and she is still going strong at the University of Virginia. Her research focus, given her braininess? Appropriately, it is human braininess itself. She is especially interested in how human cognition can be distinguished from the way other animals think about their respective worlds.

One of her major contributions was to identify the human trait that really does separate us from the gorillas: the ability to use symbolic reasoning. That’s what my son was doing when he brandished his stick sword. When we see a five-sided geometric shape, we’re not stuck perceiving it as a pentagon. We can just as easily perceive the U.S. military headquarters. Or a Chrysler minivan. Our brain can behold a symbolic object as real all by itself and yet, simultaneously, also representing something else. Maybe some
things
else. DeLoache calls it Dual Representational Theory. Stated formally, it describes our ability to attribute characteristics and meanings to things that don’t actually possess them. Stated informally, we can make things up that aren’t there. We are human because we can fantasize.

Draw a vertical line in your hand. Does it have to stay a vertical line? Not if you know how to impute a characteristic onto something it does not intrinsically possess. Go ahead and put a horizontal line under it. Now you have the number 1. Put a dot on the top of it. Now you have the letter “i.” The line doesn’t have to mean a line. The line can mean anything you darn well think it should mean. The meaning can become anchored to a symbol simply because it is not forced to become anchored to anything else. The only thing you have to do is get everybody to agree on what a symbol should mean.

We are so good at dual representation, we combine symbols to derive layers of meaning. It gives us the capacity for language, and for writing down that language. It gives us the capacity to reason mathematically. It gives us the capacity for art. Combinations of circles and squares become geometry and Cubist paintings. Combinations of dots and squiggles become music and poetry. There is an unbroken intellectual line between symbolic reasoning and the ability to create culture. And no other creature is capable of doing it.

This ability isn’t fully formed at birth. DeLoache was able to show this in a powerful way. In DeLoache’s laboratory, a little girl plays with a dollhouse. Next door is an identical room, but life-size. DeLoache takes a small plastic dog and puts it under the dollhouse couch, then encourages the child to go into the “big” living room next door and find a “big” version of the dog. What does the little girl do? If she is 36 months of age, DeLoache found, she immediately goes to the big room, looks under the couch, and finds the big dog. But if the child is 30 months old, she has no idea where to look. She cannot reason symbolically and cannot connect the little room with the big room. Exhaustive studies show that symbolic reasoning, this all-important human trait, takes almost three years of experience to become fully operational. We don’t appear to do much to distinguish ourselves from apes before we are out of the terrible twos.

a handy trait

Symbolic reasoning turned out to be a versatile gadget. Our evolutionary ancestors didn’t have to keep falling into the same quicksand pit if they could tell others about it; even better if they learned to put up warning signs. With words and language, we could extract a great deal of knowledge about our living situation without always having to experience its harsh lessons directly. So it makes sense that once our brains developed symbolic reasoning, we kept it. The brain is a biological tissue; it follows the rules of biology. And there’s no bigger rule in biology than evolution through natural selection: Whoever gets the food survives; whoever survives gets to have sex; and whoever has sex gets to pass his traits on to the next generation. But what stages did we go through to reach that point? How can we trace the rise of our plump, 3-pound intellects?

You might remember those old posters showing the development of humankind as a series of linear and increasingly sophisticated creatures. I have an old one in my office. The first drawing shows a chimpanzee; the final drawing shows a 1970s businessman. In between are strangely blended variations of creatures with names like Peking man and Australopithecus. There are two problems with this drawing. First, almost everything about it is wrong. Second, nobody really knows how to fix the errors. One of the biggest reasons for our lack of knowledge is that so little hard evidence exists. Most of the fossilized bones that have been collected from our ancestors could fit into your garage, with enough room left over for your bicycle and lawn mower. DNA evidence has been helpful, and there is strong evidence that we came from Africa somewhere between 7 million and 10 million years ago. Virtually everything else is disputed by some cranky professional somewhere.

Understanding our intellectual progress has been just as difficult. Most of it has been charted by using the best available evidence: tool-making. That’s not necessarily the most accurate way; even if it were, the record is not very impressive. For the first few million years, we mostly just grabbed rocks and smashed them into things. Scientists, perhaps trying to salvage some of our dignity, called these stones hand axes. A million years later, our progress still was not very impressive. We still grabbed “hand axes,” but we began to smash them into other rocks, making them more pointed. Now we had sharper rocks.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough to begin untethering ourselves from our East African womb, and indeed any other ecological niche. Things got more impressive, from creating fire to cooking food. Eventually, we migrated out of Africa in successive waves, our first direct
Homo sapien
ancestors making the journey as little as 100,000 years ago. Then, 40,000 years ago, something almost unbelievable happened. They appeared suddenly to have taken up painting and sculpture, creating fine art and jewelry. No one knows why the changes were so abrupt, but they were profound. Thirty-seven thousand years later, we were making pyramids. Five thousand years after that, rocket fuel.

What happened to start us on our journey? Could the growth spurt be explained by the onset of dual-representation ability? The answer is fraught with controversy, but the simplest explanation is by far the clearest. It seems our great achievements mostly had to do with a nasty change in the weather.

new rules for survival

Most of human prehistory occurred in climates like the jungles of South America: steamy, humid, and in dire need of air conditioning. It was comfortably predictable. Then the climate changed. Scientists estimate that there have been no fewer than 17 Ice Ages in the past 40 million years. Only in a few places, such as the Amazonian and African rainforests, does anything like our original, sultry, millions-of-years-old climate survive. Ice cores taken from Greenland show that the climate staggers from being unbearably hot to being sadistically cold. As little as 100,000 years ago, you could be born in a nearly arctic environment but then, mere decades later, be taking off your loincloth to catch the golden rays of the grassland sun.

Such instability was bound to have a powerful effect on any creature forced to endure it. Most could not. The rules for survival were changing, and a new class of creatures would start to fill the vacuum created as more and more of their roommates died out. That was the crisis our ancestors faced as the tropics of Northern and Eastern Africa turned to dry, dusty plains—not immediately, but inexorably— beginning maybe 10 million years ago. Some researchers blame it on the Himalayas, which had reached such heights as to disturb global atmospheric currents. Others blame the sudden appearance of the Isthmus of Panama, which changed the mixing of the Pacific and Atlantic ocean currents and disturbed global weather patterns, as El Niños do today.

Whatever the reason, the changes were powerful enough to disrupt the weather all over the world, including in our African birthplace. But not too powerful, or too subtle—a phenomenon called the Goldilocks Effect. If the changes had been too sudden, the climatic violence would have killed our ancestors outright, and I wouldn’t be writing this book for you today. If the changes had been too slow, there may have been no reason to develop our talent for symbolism and, once again, no book. Instead, like Goldilocks and the third bowl of porridge, the conditions were just right. The change was enough to shake us out of our comfortable trees, but it wasn’t enough to kill us when we landed.

Landing was only the beginning of the hard work, however. We quickly discovered that our new digs were already occupied. The locals had co-opted the food sources, and most of them were stronger and faster than we were. Faced with grasslands rather than trees, we rudely were introduced to the idea of “flat.” It is disconcerting to think that we started our evolutionary journey on an unfamiliar horizontal plane with the words “Eat me, I’m prey” taped to the back of our evolutionary butts.

jazzin’ on a riff

You might suspect that the odds against our survival were great. You would be right. The founding population of our direct ancestors is not thought to have been much larger than 2,000 individuals; some think the group was as small as a few hundred. How, then, did we go from such a wobbly, fragile minority population to a staggering tide of humanity 7 billion strong and growing? There is only one way, according to Richard Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. You give up on stability. You don’t try to beat back the changes. You begin not to care about consistency within a given habitat, because such consistency isn’t an option. You adapt to variation itself.

It was a brilliant strategy. Instead of learning how to survive in just one or two ecological niches, we took on the entire globe. Those unable to rapidly solve new problems or learn from mistakes didn’t survive long enough to pass on their genes. The net effect of this evolution was that we didn’t become stronger; we became smarter. We learned to grow our fangs not in the mouth but in the head. This turned out to be a pretty savvy strategy. We went on to conquer the small rift valleys in Eastern Africa. Then we took over the world.

Potts calls his notion Variability Selection Theory, and it attempts to explain why our ancestors became increasingly allergic to inflexibility and stupidity. Little in the fossil record is clear about the exact progression—another reason for bitter controversy—but all researchers must contend with two issues. One is bipedalism; the other has to do with our increasingly big heads.

Variability Selection Theory predicts some fairly simple things about human learning. It predicts there will be interactions between two powerful features of the brain: a database in which to store a fund of knowledge, and the ability to improvise off of that database. One allows us to know when we’ve made mistakes. The other allows us to learn from them. Both give us the ability to add new information under rapidly changing conditions. Both may be relevant to the way we design classrooms and cubicles.

Any learning environment that deals with only the database instincts or only the improvisatory instincts ignores one half of our ability. It is doomed to fail. It makes me think of jazz guitarists: They’re not going to make it if they know a lot about music theory but don’t know how to jam in a live concert. Some schools and workplaces emphasize a stable, rote-learned database. They ignore the improvisatory instincts drilled into us for millions of years. Creativity suffers. Others emphasize creative usage of a database, without installing a fund of knowledge in the first place. They ignore our need to obtain a deep understanding of a subject, which includes memorizing and storing a richly structured database. You get people who are great improvisers but don’t have depth of knowledge. You may know someone like this where you work. They may look like jazz musicians and have the appearance of jamming, but in the end they know nothing. They’re playing intellectual air guitar.

standing tall

Variability Selection Theory allows a context for dual representation, but it hardly gets us to the ideas of Judy DeLoache and our unique ability to invent calculus and write romance novels. After all, many animals create a database of knowledge, and many of them make tools, which they even use creatively. Still, it is not as if chimpanzees write symphonies badly and we write them well. Chimps can’t write them at all, and we can write ones that make people spend their life savings on subscriptions to the New York Philharmonic. There must have been something else in our evolutionary history that made human thinking unique.