Brain Rules.page

# Exercise

Exercise.

suggestion: morning aerobic, afternoon strength building, gym clothes all day

do everything on a treadmill

# Survival

Variability Selection Theory: need both 'database instincts' and 'improvisational instincts'

wild environment made us smarter than classrooms and cubicles

# Wiring

great deal of intellectual variability of students at the same age due to development differences

smaller class sizes to allow teachers to have a good Theory of Mind for each of their students

A2i: software to determine reading competancies

combination of adaptive software and real teachers

# Attention

memory and culture affect what we pay attention to

emotions get our attentions

we try to determine meaning before details

words in a logically organized, hierarchical structure are much better remembered

experts' knowledge is organized around big ideas and core concepts, not simply a list of facts

we cannot multitask -- and having too much going on increases the amount of time many times over because of shifting alert, rule activation,and disengagement

Me:

> what elements can we display on the screen without it requiring students to constantly shift attention? there is also such thing as secondary functions -- e.g. research shows that doodling helps concentration. but we don't want the act of note-taking to distract from the lecture watching

Neal:

> Hmm.. we should think about what sort of basic functionality we need for the students to learn, and keep it clean and elegant. Think gmail vs. say, hotmail... the functions are clearly laid out, easy to use, and don't require a lot of hunting around to get to what you want. The less brain time the student needs to dedicate to finding a certain function, the better.

professors usually relate too much information without enough time to connect the dots

10-minute segments for lectures
each segment: single core concept that is explanation in a minute. remaining 9 minutes: descriptive details that can easily be traced back

Neal:

> Unless we can find evidence to the contrary, this should be our default lecture format I think, and we should encourage professors to upload content in this format.


if the audience does not know where a concept fits in, trying to figure that out acts as a distraction

emotionally competent stimuli ("hooks") - trigger an emotion, relevant, beginning or end of a module

after two or three segments with hooks, fourth or fifth can be skipped without losing engagement

turn off distractions (email, cell phone) and do one thing at a time

# Short-term memory

spaced learning is greatly superior to massed learning

first spacing effect experiments: Ebbinghaus

four steps of declarative memory: encoding, storing, retrieving, forgetting

binding problem: thoughts bound together by the brain to provide continuity

some encoding is automatic, some is not

some types of encoding: semantic (using definition of words), phonemic (comparision between sounds of words), structural (visual inspection)

better memory when we encode something, especially if it's personalized

unintuitively, more complexity means greater learning

Neal:

> What does this mean exactly? What sort of complexity?

Me:

> basically building up a structure for something, or remembering various connections to things. the example he gives is remembering the word 'apple' in a list of random words. he says if you rate the words from 1 to 10 you'll remember them better. you might think of a delicious apple pie and then rate it 10. so a lot more complexity than just the word 'apple', but more likely to remember it.

rather than having a central storage device, memories are distributed over the surface of the cortex

replicate the environment to improve retrieval [how to deal with needing the information in a different environment? does improved learning in a limited environment scale after it is deeply embedded?]

don't try to memorize information by rote

research: greater number of real-world examples improved memory

Neal:

> How to work this into our content?

# Long-term memory

astounding working memory abilites -- Migeul Najdorf plays 45 mental chess games at once

different types of retrieval systems for long-term memory

memorization experiments - Robert Wagner

talking about something immediately afterward dramatically improves retaining the memory

Neal:

> Maybe encourage some sort of (virtual?) "discussion" of the lecture immediately after viewing? Although, perhaps just trying to rewrite key ideas and create a summary of the lecture/content would be really advantageous.

Solomon Shereshevskii -- could remember everything but couldn't make sense of anything; forgetting allows us to prioritize events

types of forgetting - Dan Schacter

idea: 25-minute lecture repeated three times, separated by 90 minutes; every third or fourth day for review; repetitions extended to the long term

Neal:

> I kind of like this idea, and definitely plays into all of the research behind spaced repetition. (i read some articles, i think they are in the learnstream dropbox folder, about remembering content by reading the same passage a few times spaced over 90 minutes or so. The repeated lectures would be the same idea. The study found however, that the recall was the same as reading a "summary" paragraph without doing any sort of spacing. Not quite sure what to make of that, but i'm a big fan of primary source content because it would be impossible to create summaries of every piece of information out there.) Anyways, i wonder how students would respond to such a program? I could see 10 minute lectures (see format above) repeated three times separated by 90 minutes, etc., with the option to "skip to SRS" instead of forcing the student to re-watch something if they feel they really understand/will remember the content.
> I'm going to add this idea to the ideal student / ideal school wave.

# Sleep

sleep is good

ideal amount of sleep is not known

some people are on different sleep schedules (different chronotypes) and thus get screwed over by work and school

there exists a "nap zone" in the mid-afternoon regardless of big lunches

research: 26 minute naps increased performance by 34 percent

# Stress

stress harms learning

learned helplessness: Marty Seligman

research: stress causes companies to lose between $200 and $300 billion a year

new system of education for newborn children and parents, companies should provide onsite child care

# Sensory Integration

Introduce more senses to improve learning. Smell, in particular, assists in long-term memories.

# Vision

visual processing dominates the perception of our world. ex: wine experts were tricked by odorless, tasteless red dye inserted into white wines

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.

Neal:

> Did the author mention what the statistic is for reading the same material presented orally? But i totally agree with the picture part, from personal experience... I wonder if there is some easy way to include visuals in the answers to SRS flashcards? Also, mind mapping/concept mapping i think is a good visualization tool that would be easy to include.

Donald in Mathmagic Land -- visual imagery to convince someone of the power and beauty of mathematics http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_ssR7M5Px0

teachers should use computer animations

(see also: Presentation Zen?)

# Gender

"It is logically, mathematically, and scientifically impossible to pull them apart" - Stephen Jay Gould on nature vs nurture

data about boys vs girls interpreted as competition vs cooperation, but it's actually cooperation through competition

women who lead are often considered bossy

performance gap between 3rd grade boys and girls in math developed from boys competing with each other; separating by gender fixed it

Neal:

> This is all rather interesting... I wonder how it would be impacted by the sorts of social networking/quizzes we've talked about? Although perhaps the fact that people aren't actually competing in person would make shyer individuals more comforatble?

# Exploration

model to encourage life-long curiousity and exploration (based on medical school):

* consistent exposure to the real world
* consistent exposure to people who operate in the real world
* consistent exposure to practical research programs

specific instance: college of education that studies the brain with onsite school