Read Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School Online
Authors: John Medina
Tags: #Self-Help
This individuality has fascinated Ojemann for years. He once combined the brain maps for 117 patients he had operated on over the years. Only in one region did he find a spot where most people had a critical language area, or CLA, and “most” means 79 percent of the patients. Data from electrical stimulation mapping give probably the most dramatic illustration of the brain’s individuality. But Ojemann also wanted to know how stable these differences were during life, and if any of those differences predicted intellectual competence. He found interesting answers to both questions.
First, the maps are established very early in life, and they remain stable throughout. Even if a decade or two had passed between surgeries, the regions recruited for a specific CLA remained recruited for that same CLA. Ojemann also found that certain CLA patterns could predict language competency, at least as measured by a pre-operative verbal IQ test. If you want to be good at a language (or at least perform well on the test), don’t let the superior temporal gyrus host your CLA. Your verbal performance will statistically be quite poor. Also, make sure your overall CLA pattern has a small and rather tightly focused footprint. If the pattern is instead widely distributed, you will have a remarkably low score. These findings are robust and age-independent. They have been demonstrated in people as young as kindergartners and as old as Alan Greenspan.
Not only are people’s brains individually wired, but those neurological differences can, at least in the case of language, predict performance.
ideas
Given these data, does it make any sense to have school systems that expect every brain to learn like every other? Does it make sense to treat everybody the same in business, especially in a global economy replete with various cultural experiences? The data offer powerful implications for how we should teach kids—and, when they grow up and get a job, how we should treat them as employees. I have a couple of concerns about our school system:
1) The current system is founded on a series of expectations that certain learning goals should be achieved by a certain age. Yet there is no reason to suspect that the brain pays attention to those expectations. Students of the
same age
show a great deal of intellectual variability.
2) These differences can profoundly influence classroom performance. This has been tested. For example, about 10 percent of students do
not
have brains sufficiently wired to read at the age at which we expect them to read. Lockstep models based simply on age are guaranteed to create a counterproductive mismatch to brain biology.
What can we do about this?
Smaller class size
All else being equal, it has been known for many years that smaller, more intimate schools create better learning environments than megaplex houses of learning. The Brain Rule may help explain why smaller is better.
Given that every brain is wired differently, being able to read a student’s mind is a powerful tool in the hands of a teacher. As you may recall from the Survival chapter, Theory of Mind is about as close to mind reading as humans are likely to get. It is defined as the ability to understand the interior motivations of someone else and the ability to construct a predictable “theory of how their mind works” based on that knowledge. This gives teachers critical access to their students’ interior educational life. It may include knowledge of when students are confused and when they are fully engaged. It also gives sensitive teachers valuable feedback about whether their teaching is being transformed into learning. It may even be the definition of that sensitivity. 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.
Students comprehend complex knowledge at different times and at different depths. Because a teacher can keep track of only so many minds, there must be a limit on the number of students in a class—the smaller, the better. It is possible that small class sizes predict better performance simply because the teacher can better keep track of where everybody is. This suggests that an advanced skill set in Theory of Mind predicts a good teacher. If so, 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.
Customized instruction
What of that old admonition to create more individualized instruction within a grade level? It sits on some solid brain science. Researcher Carol McDonald Connor is doing the first work I’ve seen capable of handling these differences head-on. She and a colleague combined a standard reading program with a bright and shiny new computer program called A2i. The software uses artificial intelligence to determine where the user’s reading competencies lie and then adaptively tailor exercises for the student in order to fill in any gaps.
When used in conjunction with a standard reading class, the software is wildly successful. The more students work with the program, the better their scores become. Interestingly, the effect is greatest when the software is used in conjunction with a normal reading program. Teacher alone or software alone is not as effective. As the instructor teaches the class in a normal fashion, students will, given the uneven intellectual landscape, experience learning gaps. Left untreated, these gaps cause students to fall further and further behind, a normal and insidious effect of not being able to transform instruction into apprehension. The software makes sure these gaps don’t go untreated.
Is this the future? Attempting to individualize education is hardly a new idea. Using code as a stand-in for human teaching is not revolutionary, either. But the combination might be a stunner. I would like to see a three-pronged research effort between brain and education scientists:
1) Evaluate teachers and teachers-to-be for advanced Theory of Mind skills, using one of the four main tests that measure empathy. Determine whether this affects student performance in a statistically valid fashion.
2) Develop adaptive software for a variety of subjects and grade levels. Test them for efficacy. Deploy the ones that work in a manner similar to the experiment Connor published in the journal
Science.
3) Test both ideas in various combinations. Add to the mix environments where the student-teacher ratio is both typical and optimized, and then compare the results.
The reason to do this is straightforward: You cannot change the fact that the human brain is individually wired. Every student’s brain, every employee’s brain, every customer’s brain is wired differently. That’s the Brain Rule. You can either accede to it or ignore it. The current system of education chooses the latter, to our detriment. It needs to be torn down and newly envisioned, in a Manhattan Project-size commitment to individualizing instruction. We might, among other things, dismantle altogether grade structures based on age.
Companies could try Theory of Mind screening for leaders, along with a method of “mass customization” that treats every employee as an individual. I bet many would discover that they have a great basketball player in their organization, and they’re asking him or her to play baseball.
Summary
Rule #3
Every brain is wired differently.
•
What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like—it literally rewires it.
•
The various regions of the brain develop at different rates in different people.
•
No two people’s brains store the same information in the same way in the same place.
•
We have a great number of ways of being intelligent, many of which don’t show up on IQ tests.
That experience lasted only 45 seconds, but aspects of it are indelibly impressed in my memory, from the outline of the young man’s coat to the shape of his firearm.
Does it matter to learning if we pay attention? The short answer is: You bet it does. My brain fully aroused, I will never forget that experience as long as I live. The more attention the brain pays to a given stimulus, the more elaborately the information will be encoded—and retained. That has implications for your employees, your students, and your kids. A strong link between attention and learning has been shown in classroom research both a hundred years ago and as recently as last week. The story is consistent: Whether you are an eager preschooler or a bored-out-of-your-mind undergrad, better attention always equals better learning. It improves retention of reading material, accuracy, and clarity in writing, math, science— every academic category that has ever been tested.
So I ask this question in every college course I teach: “Given a class of medium interest, not too boring and not too exciting, when do you start glancing at the clock, wondering when the class will be over?” There is always some nervous shuffling, a few smiles, then a lot of silence. Eventually someone blurts out:
“Ten minutes, Dr. Medina.”
“Why 10 minutes?” I inquire.
“That’s when I start to lose attention. That’s when I begin to wonder when this torment will be over.” The comments are always said in frustration. A college lecture is still about 50 minutes long.
Peer-reviewed studies confirm my informal inquiry: Before the first quarter-hour is over in a typical presentation, people
usually
have checked out. If keeping someone’s interest in a lecture were a business, it would have an 80 percent failure rate. What happens at the 10-minute mark to cause such trouble? Nobody knows. The brain seems to be making choices according to some stubborn timing pattern, undoubtedly influenced by both culture and gene. This fact suggests a teaching and business imperative: Find a way to arouse and then hold somebody’s attention for a specific period of time. But how? To answer that question, we will need to explore some complex pieces of neurological real estate. We are about to investigate the remarkable world of human attention—including what’s going on in our brains when we turn our attention to something, the importance of emotions, and the myth of multitasking.
can i have your attention, please?
While you are reading this paragraph, millions of sensory neurons in your brain are firing simultaneously, all carrying messages, each attempting to grab your attention. Only a few will succeed in breaking through to your awareness, and the rest will be ignored either in part or in full. Incredibly, it is easy for you to alter this balance, effortlessly granting airplay to one of the many messages you were previously ignoring. (While still reading this sentence, can you feel where your elbows are right now?) The messages that do grab your attention are connected to memory, interest, and awareness.
memory
What we pay attention to is often profoundly influenced by memory. In everyday life, we use previous experience to predict where we should pay attention. Different environments create different expectations. This was profoundly illustrated by the scientist Jared Diamond in his book
Guns, Germs, and Steel.
He describes an adventure traipsing through the New Guinea jungle with native New Guineans. He relates that these natives tend to perform poorly at tasks Westerners have been trained to do since childhood. But they are hardly stupid. They can detect the most subtle changes in the jungle, good for following the trail of a predator or for finding the way back home. They know which insects to leave alone, know where food exists, can erect and tear down shelters with ease. Diamond, who had never spent time in such places, has no ability to pay attention to these things. Were he to be tested on such tasks, he also would perform poorly.
Culture matters, too, even when the physical ecologies are similar. 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.
interest
Happily, there are some commonalities regardless of culture. For example, we have known for a long time that “interest” or “importance” is inextricably linked to attention. Researchers sometimes call this arousal. Exactly how it relates to attention is still a mystery. Does interest create attention? We know that the brain continuously scans the sensory horizon, with events constantly assessed for their potential interest or importance. The more important events are then given extra attention. Can the reverse occur, with attention creating interest?
Marketing professionals think so. They have known for years that novel stimuli—the unusual, unpredictable, or distinctive—are powerful ways to harness attention in the service of interest. One well-known example is a print ad for Sauza Conmemorativo tequila. It shows a single picture of an old, dirty, bearded man, donning a brimmed hat and smiling broadly, revealing a single tooth. Printed above the mouth is: “This man only has one cavity.” A larger sentence below says: “Life is harsh. Your tequila shouldn’t be.” Flying in the face of most tequila marketing strategies, which consist of scantily clad 20-somethings dancing at a party, the ad is effective at using attention to create interest.
awareness
Of course, we must be aware of something for it to grab our attention. You can imagine how tough it is to research such an ephemeral concept. We don’t know the neural location of consciousness, loosely defined as that part of the mind where awareness resides. (The best data suggest that several systems are scattered throughout the brain.) We have a long way to go before we fully understand the biology behind attention.
One famous physician who has examined awareness at the clinical level is Dr. Oliver Sacks, a delightful British neurologist and one terrific storyteller. One of his most intriguing clinical cases was first described in his bestselling book
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
. Sacks describes a wonderful older woman in his care, intelligent, articulate, and gifted with a sense of humor. She suffered a massive stroke in the back region of her brain that left her with a most unusual deficit: She lost the ability to pay attention to anything that was to her left. She could pick up objects only in the right half of her visual field. She could put lipstick only on the right half of her face. She ate only from the right half of her plate. This caused her to complain to the hospital nursing staff that her portions were too small! Only when the plate was turned and the food entered her right visual field could she pay any attention to it and have her fill.
Data like these are very useful to both clinicians and scientists. When damage occurs to a specific brain region, we know that any observed behavioral abnormality must in some way be linked to that region’s function. Examining a broad swath of patients like Sacks’s gave scientists a cumulative view of how the brain pays attention to things. The brain can be divided roughly into two hemispheres of unequal function, and patients can get strokes in either. Marcel Mesulam of Northwestern University found that the hemispheres contain separate “spotlights” for visual attention. The left hemisphere’s spotlight is small, capable of paying attention only to items on the right side of the visual field. The right hemisphere, however, has a global spotlight. According to Mesulam, getting a stroke on the left side is much less catastrophic because the right side can pitch in under duress.
Of course, sight is only one stimulus to which the brain is capable of paying attention. Just let a bad smell into the room for a moment or make a loud noise and people easily will shift attention. We also pay close attention to our psychological interiors, mulling over internal events and feelings again and again with complete focus, with no obvious external sensory stimulation. What’s going on in our heads when we turn our attention to something?
red alert
Thirty years ago, a scientist by the name of Michael Posner derived a theory about attention that remains popular today. Posner started his research career in physics, joining the Boeing Aircraft Company soon out of college. His first major research contribution was to figure out how to make jet-engine noise less annoying to passengers riding in commercial airplanes. You can thank your relatively quiet airborne ride, even if the screaming turbine is only a few feet from your eardrums, in part on Posner’s first research efforts. His work on planes eventually led him to wonder how the brain processes information of any kind. This led him to a doctorate in research and to a powerful idea. Sometimes jokingly referred to as the Trinity Model, Posner hypothesized that we pay attention to things because of the existence of three separable but fully integrated systems in the brain.
One pleasant Saturday morning, my wife and I were sitting on our outdoor deck, watching a robin drink from our birdbath, when all of a sudden we heard a giant “swoosh” above our heads. Looking up, we caught the shadow of a red-tailed hawk, dropping like a thunderbolt from its perch in a nearby tree, grabbing the helpless robin by the throat. As the raptor swooped by us, not 3 feet away, blood from the robin splattered on our table. What started as a leisurely repast ended as a violent reminder of the savagery of the real world. We were stunned into silence.
In Posner’s model, the brain’s first system functions much like the two-part job of a museum security officer: surveillance and alert. He called it the Alerting or Arousal Network. It monitors the sensory environment for any unusual activities. This is the general level of attention our brains are paying to our world, a condition termed Intrinsic Alertness. My wife and I were using this network as we sipped our coffee, watching the robin. If the system detects something unusual, such as the hawk’s swoosh, it can sound an alarm heard brain-wide. That’s when Intrinsic Alertness transforms into specific attention, called Phasic Alertness.
After the alarm, we orient ourselves to the attending stimulus, activating the second network. We may turn our heads toward the stimulus, perk up our ears, perhaps move toward (or away) from something. It’s why both my wife and I immediately lifted our heads away from the robin, attending to the growing shadow of the hawk. The purpose is to gain more information about the stimulus, allowing the brain to decide what to do. Posner termed this the Orienting Network.
The third system, the Executive Network, controls the “oh my gosh what should I do now” behaviors. These may include setting priorities, planning on the fly, controlling impulses, weighing the consequences of our actions, or shifting attention. For my wife and me, it was stunned silence.
So we have the ability to detect a new stimulus, the ability to turn toward it, and the ability to decide what to do based on its nature. Posner’s model offered testable predictions about brain function and attention, leading to neurological discoveries that would fill volumes. Hundreds of behavioral characteristics have since been discovered as well. Four have considerable practical potential: emotions, meaning, multitasking, and timing.
1) Emotions get our attention
Emotionally arousing events tend to be better remembered than neutral events.
While this idea may seem intuitively obvious, it’s frustrating to demonstrate scientifically because the research community is still debating exactly what an emotion is. One important area of research is the effect of emotion on learning. An emotionally charged event (usually called an ECS, short for emotionally competent stimulus) is the best-processed kind of external stimulus ever measured. Emotionally charged events persist much longer in our memories and are recalled with greater accuracy than neutral memories.
This characteristic has been used to great effect, and sometimes with great controversy, in television advertising. Consider a television advertisement for the Volkswagen Passat. The commercial opens with two men talking in a car. They are having a mildly heated discussion about one of them overusing the word “like” in conversation. As the argument continues, the viewer notices out the passenger window another car barreling toward the men. It smashes into them. There are screams, sounds of shattering glass, quick-cut shots showing the men bouncing in the car, twisted metal. The exit shot shows the men standing, in disbelief, outside their wrecked Volkswagen. In a twist on a well-known expletive, these words flash on the screen: “Safe Happens.” The spot ends with a picture of another Passat, this one intact and complete with its five-star side-crash safety rating. It is a memorable, even disturbing, 30-second spot. And it has these characteristics because its centerpiece is an ECS.
How does this work in our brains? It involves the prefrontal cortex, that uniquely human part of the brain that governs “executive functions” such as problem-solving, maintaining attention, and inhibiting emotional impulses. If the prefrontal cortex is the board chairman, the cingulate gyrus is its personal assistant. The assistant provides the chairman with certain filtering functions and assists in teleconferencing with other parts of the brain—especially the amygdala, which helps create and maintain emotions. The amygdala is chock full of the neurotransmitter dopamine, and it uses dopamine the way an office assistant uses Post-It notes. When the brain detects an emotionally charged event, the amygdala releases dopamine into the system. Because dopamine greatly aids memory and information processing, you could say the Post-It note reads “Remember this!” Getting the brain to put a chemical Post-It note on a given piece of information means that information is going to be more robustly processed. It is what every teacher, parent, and ad executive wants.