Brain Rules for Meetings

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 Rules," Medina said, "as an attempt to say, ‘Look, here's what we do know, here's what we don't know, here are a few things you can try that might have an application in the business world - and the meetings world as well.'"

Not that Brain Rules will tell you how the brain operates. "We don't know squat about how the brain works," said Medina, who has focused on brain research for nearly three decades. He added: "I don't know how you know how to pick up a glass of water and drink it. But we do know the conditions that [the brain] operates best in, even if we don't know all the ins and outs of that operation."

Which of the 12 Brain Rules has the most impact on meetings?
Well, probably, the biggest one would have to be about attentional states. This rule is very simple: People don't pay attention to boring things. So if you really want to have a lousy meeting, make sure it's boring. If you want to have a lousy classroom, make sure it's boring. And if you want to vaccinate against the types of things that really do bore the mind, we have some understanding of that.

So how do you design a good meeting?
Here are the top three "brain gadgets" that probably have a bearing on the question. First, the human brain processes meaning before it processes detail. Many people, when they put meetings together, actually don't even think about the meaning of what it is they're saying. They just go right to the detail. If you go to the detail, you've got yourself a bored audience. Congratulations.
Second, in terms of attentional states, we're not sure if this is brain science or not, but certainly in the behavioral literature, you've got 10 minutes with an audience before you will absolutely bore them. And you've got 30 seconds before they start asking the question, "Am I going to pay attention to you or not?" The instant you open your mouth, you are on the verge of having your audience check out. And since most people have been in meetings - 90 percent of which have bored them silly - they already have an immune response against you, particularly if you've got a PowerPoint slide up there.

How do you then hold attention?
This is what you have to do in 10 minutes. You have to pulse what I just said - the meaning before detail - into it. I call it a hook. At nine minutes and 59 seconds, you've got to give your audience a break from what it is that you've been saying and pulse to them once again the meaning of what you're saying.

What is the third "brain gadget"?
The brain cycles through six questions very, very quickly. Question No. 1 is "Will it eat me?" We pay tons of attention to threat. The second question is "Can I eat it?" I don't know if you have ever watched a cooking show and have loved what they are cooking, but you pay tons of attention if you think there's going to be an energy resource. Question No. 3 is highly Darwinian. The whole reason why you want to live in the first place is to project your genes to the next generation - that means sex. So Question No. 3 is "Can I mate with it?" And Question No. 4 is "Will it mate with me?"

It turns out we pay tons of attention to - it actually isn't sex per se, it's reproductive opportunity. [It is also] hooked up to the pleasure centers of your brain - the exact same centers you use when you laugh at something. Oddly enough, I think that's one of the reasons why humor can work. If you can pop a joke or at least tell an interesting story, it's actually inciting those areas of the brain that are otherwise devoted to sex. You don't become aroused by listening to a joke. I'm saying those areas of the brain can be co-opted. You can utilize them, and a good speaker knows how to do that.

What are Questions 5 and 6?
"Have I seen it before?" and "Have I never seen it before?" We are terrific pattern matchers. There is an element of surprise that comes when patterns don't match, but the reason why that happens is because we are trying to match patterns all the time.

Is there a Brain Rule that addresses whether you should try to control the use of laptops and phones during a meeting session?
I have this rule response, based on data, and then I have a visceral response, also based on data. In other words, I'm about ready to tell you a contradiction. Are you ready?

Yes, I am.
Alrighty. I do believe what you can show is that there are attentional blinks. The brain actually is a beautiful multitasker, but the attentional spotlight, which you use to pay attention to things, [is not]. You can't listen to a speaker and type what they are saying at the same time.

What you can show in the laboratory is that you get staccato-like attentional blinks. Just like you come up for air: You look at the speaker, then when you're writing, you cannot hear what the speaker is saying. Then you come up for air and hear the speaker again. So you're flipping back and forth between those two, and your ability to be engaged to hear what a speaker is saying is necessarily fragmented.
At the same time, if your speaker is boring, you could have checked out anyway. So you see, in many ways it depends upon the speaker.

How so?
If the speaker is really compelling and is clear and is emotion- ally competent, and has gone through those six questions, letting you come up for air every 10 minutes, I've actually watched audiences put their laptops away just to pay attention.

I have a style that is purposely a little speedier. And the rea- son why is that it produces a tension that says, "I need to pay attention closely to him or I'm going to lose what he's saying." I don't make it so fast that it's unintelligible - at least I hope I don't. But I do make it fast, and occasionally I see comments that say, "Great speaker, but you know, you were too freaking fast."

This interview originally appeared in the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA) magazine Convene.

The Business of Pleasure and Pain

The neuroanatomical linkage that emerges from a normal part of business experience—the reaction to success and also to failure (especially if that failure happens to someone else)—is the focus of this post. I am often asked to speak to groups of business executives, mostly to discuss a possible connection between neuroscience and business practices. These meetings are always challenging for me, because I don’t think brain science has much to do with the world of business. My own opinion is that the field of neuroscience is simply not mature enough to tell business executives how to manage their subordinates or how to lure customers into buying their products. “I have nothing real to say to you,” I usually start, “We don’t even understand how humans know how to put their socks on in the morning.”

There are usually some murmurs in the crowd at this point, but since I still have 45 to 60 minutes to burn, I continue, “My perspective isn’t hopeless, though. In fact, almost all of the brain’s neural circuitry can be easily explained—especially if you are looking at people’s interior motivations.” Then I continue with what turns into a Darwinian lecture: “People will do whatever they think will ultimately benefit them. And people will do whatever they can to avoid pain. Almost everything we know about how the brain generates behavior can be couched as combinatorial activations of these 2 broad sets of purpose-driven circuits—seeking pleasure, avoiding pain.”

The human brain as a mass of biological tissue is most clearly understood as a survival organ—the world’s most sophisticated. Given this performance envelope, a great deal of theoretical common ground exists between what we know about the brain and the needs of business. Even though not much of the brain has been mapped, my corporate audiences and I usually end up with lots to say to each other.

This post is all about mapping a specific parcel of this common ground between pleasure and pain and gives a suggestion for a specific investigative direction. We will explore how a subset of these circuits supports the social experience of pleasure and pain.

There is a powerful bridge between pleasure and pain and their social equivalents; indeed, to the brain, they are nearly identical. Recent findings confirm that the same reward circuits are activated during sex and also while delighting in someone else’s misfortune (schadenfreude).¹ Similarly, both physical pain and envy over another person’s success activate these circuits.

The biology of pleasure and pain

We start with a basic review of canonical circuits normally associated with pleasure and pain, and then discuss interesting data from a collaboration of scientists in Japan and the United Kingdom. Much of the brain’s pleasure circuitry has been studied through the lens of reward reception and the establishment of addictive behavior. Invariably, this involves the neurotransmitter dopamine and a number of neural circuits that have been isolated and characterized in surprising detail.

Three networks are briefly reviewed. The first circuit involves the interaction of dopamine in neurons within the ventral tegmental area, especially in response to external rewards (eg, sexual activity, drugs, food). Associated with these circuits, the second network comprises neurons embedded in the nucleus accumbens, within the ventral striatum. The nucleus accumbens has been shown to play a vital role in the learning of reward and the regulation of pleasurable states. The third circuit involves the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in association with the amygdala. These 3 networks are also vital parts of the dopaminergic system and are thought to mediate reward processing and the emotional responses involved in the experience of pleasure.

Association never means causation. If you could somehow temporarily deactivate the ventral striatum, would schadenfreude suddenly disappear?

The various circuits associated with mediating the experience of pain are collectively termed the “cortical pain network” (see Figure). This network consists of specific regions, mostly ventral to the pleasure centers; in turn, these are coupled with 2 subcortical structures. The specific regions are the somatosensory cortex, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), and the insula. The connecting subcortical regions are the periaqueductal gray and the thalamus.

Each region makes unique contributions in the perception of pain. For example, the somatosensory cortex is associated with the localization of the stimulus within the body. The dACC and, to a lesser extent, the insula are associated with the processing of more distressing aspects of pain.

These circuits undergird the twin Darwinian “motivations.” But can I really say that? After all, they have been mostly characterized as physical reactions to rewarding stimuli (such as drugs) or as physical reactions to aversive stimuli (such as an electrical shock). These networks have deep evolutionary roots, which means we share many of these same circuits with other mammals. However, none of this history involves a businessperson’s reaction to marketing strategies or mitigating highbrow office politics that are associated with management.

Does the creation and perception of social rewards and punishments activate the same regions as nucleus accumbens and the dACC? In the past few years, the surprising answer from research is a clear “yes.” Social rewards and punishments appear to hijack the same systems we use to mediate laboratory-based measurements of pleasure and pain. If you are being treated fairly, are feeling cooperative, or have been blessed with a good reputation, you feel so in part because of circuits activating the ventral striatum. This reward network is activated whenever you make a charitable contribution—even more than if you suddenly inherited a lot of money!

Similarly, specific circuits of the cortical pain network become activated whenever you experience social pain, such as grief over the loss of a loved one. The same circuits are activated if you feel you are being treated unfairly. The dACC and insula are recruited whenever you feel socially excluded. The more social pain you feel, the more activity is generated within the dACC.

The bottom line is that the brain appears to treat material physical stimuli and amorphous social perceptions in a manner more similar than previously thought.

The data

Researchers from Japan and the United Kingdom explored 2 specific types of social interactions in a 2-part study1 involving the above data. What they found has potentially high relevance to business practices. While it is beyond the scope of this column to go into specifics, we will say that in general, 19 volunteer participants were supplied with information concerning imaginary target persons. These persons were characterized by levels of possession and self-relevance. The participants underwent functional MRI, more social information was supplied, and the experiments commenced.

When the participants were told that the targets had superior possessions and self-relevance, they reported strong feelings of envy. Surprisingly, the areas of the brain associated with physical pain—particularly the dACC—showed a very strong signal in the people experiencing envy, even though no physical pain was being experienced. The effect appeared to be linear and cumulative. The more envy evinced, the stronger the dACC signal was observed.

For the second part of the study, researchers tested for schadenfreude, or delight in someone else’s misfortune. The participants were told that the “superior” targets had experienced something awful. What did their brains do? The areas associated with pleasure, particularly the ventral striatum, showed an immediate and powerful activation. This effect was also linear and cumulative. The more envy evoked in the first part of study, the greater the pleasure signals were observed in the second. For the first time, research demonstrated a lively and dramatic integration between the experiences of social pleasure and social pain.

Conclusions

There is a lot more work to be done before a clear picture emerges. For one thing, areas of the brain—such as the dACC and the ventral striatum—include a broad range of activities, not all of which fall under the rubric of pleasure and pain mitigation. Experiments will need to rely on the power of future technologies to identify the boundaries of actual neural networks involved. And, of course, association never means causation. If you could somehow temporarily deactivate the ventral striatum, would schadenfreude suddenly disappear? This research has yet to be done.

Still, the data in context with previous research undergird critical insight into the incredible evolutionary importance of social relationships to the human brain. Many researchers believe it was our dependence on relational activities that created the need for this big, unique brain of ours in the first place. As weak as our bodies are, it was more convenient for us to double our biomass by creating a cooperative ally than by creating a bigger body. This meant putting pressure on a relatively small number of neurons in the brain, rather than a large number of cells throughout the body.

Moreover, the brain is an efficient and evolutionary manager of its bioenergetic needs. It is not surprising that regions associated with the physical needs of pleasure and pain might be recruited for the more abstract social versions of the same thing. The gift this gives people interested in the biological roots of behavior is enormous: certain previously considered subjective experiences—such as envy—may not be as subjective as we once thought. If that’s the case, I will eventually owe my business audiences a big apology. Perhaps in a few years, brain scientists will have something to say to business people interested in improving their “bottom lines.”

Reference

1. Takahashi H, Kato M, Matsuura, et al. When your gain is my pain and your pain is my gain: neural correlates of envy and schadenfreude.Science.2009;323:937-939.

This post originally appeared in the November 2010 issue of the Psychiatric Times.

More Resources

This is your brain at work - John Medina featured in New York Post

Brain Rules for Presenters - slideshow on what all presenters need to know

John Medina Facebook - stay in the brain science loop

Brain Rules DVD - watch videos on exercise, stress, sleep, and more

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl Ad

When my mother got angry (which was rare), she went to the kitchen, washing LOUDLY any dishes she discovered in the sink. And if there were pots and pans, she deliberately would crash them together as she put them away. This noise served to announce to the entire household (if not the city block) her displeasure at something. To this day, whenever I hear loudly clanging pots and pans, I experience an emotionally competent stimulus—a fleeting sense of “You’re in trouble now!” My wife, whose mother never displayed anger in this fashion, does not associate anything emotional with the noise of pots and pans. It’s a uniquely stimulated, John-specific ECS.

Universally experienced stimuli come directly from our evolutionary heritage, so they hold the greatest potential for use in teaching and business. Not surprisingly, they follow strict Darwinian lines of threats and energy resources. Regardless of who you are, the brain pays a great deal of attention to these questions:

“Can I eat it? Will it eat me?”

“Can I mate with it? Will it mate with me?”

“Have I seen it before?”

Any of our ancestors who didn’t remember threatening experiences thoroughly or acquire food adequately would not live long enough to pass on his genes. The human brain has many dedicated systems exquisitely tuned to reproductive opportunity and to the perception of threat. We also are terrific pattern matchers, constantly assessing our environment for similarities, and we tend to remember things if we think we have seen them before.

One of the best TV spots ever made used all three principles in an ever-increasing spiral. Stephen Hayden produced the commercial, introducing the Apple computer in 1984. It won every major advertising award that year and set a standard for Super Bowl ads. The commercial opens onto a bluish auditorium filled with robot-like men all dressed alike. In a reference to the 1956 movie 1984, the men are staring at a screen where a giant male face is spouting off platitude fragments such as “information purification!” and “unification of thought!” The men in the audience are absorbing these messages like zombies. Then the camera shifts to a young woman in gym clothes, sledgehammer in hand, running full tilt toward the auditorium. She is wearing red shorts, the only primary color in the entire commercial. Sprinting down the center aisle, she throws her sledgehammer at the screen containing Big Brother. The screen explodes in a hail of sparks and blinding light. Plain letters flash on the screen: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”



All of the elements are at work here. Nothing could be more threatening to a country marinated in free speech than George Orwell’s 1984 totalitarian society. There is sex appeal, with the revealing gym shorts, but there is a twist. Mac is a female, so-o-o … IBM must be a male. In the female-empowering 1980s, a whopping statement on the battle of the sexes suddenly takes center stage. Pattern matching abounds as well. Many people have read 1984 or seen the movie. Moreover, people who were really into computers at the time made the connection to IBM, a company often called Big Blue for its suit-clad sales force.

What most people remember about that commercial is its emotional appeal rather than every detail. There is a reason for that. The brain remembers the emotional components of an experience better than any other aspect.

We do not see with our eyes. We see with our brains.

We do not see with our eyes. We see with our brains.

The evidence lies with a group of 54 wine aficionados. Stay with me here. To the untrained ear, the vocabularies that wine tasters use to describe wine may seem pretentious, more reminiscent of a psychologist describing a patient. (“Aggressive complexity, with just a subtle hint of shyness” is something I once heard at a wine-tasting soirée to which I was mistakenly invited—and from which, once picked off the floor rolling with laughter, I was hurriedly escorted out the door).

These words are taken very seriously by the professionals, however. A specific vocabulary exists for white wines and a specific vocabulary for red wines, and the two are never supposed to cross. Given how individually we each perceive any sense, I have often wondered how objective these tasters actually could be. So, apparently, did a group of brain researchers in Europe. They descended upon ground zero of the wine-tasting world, the University of Bordeaux, and asked: “What if we dropped odorless, tasteless red dye into white wines, then gave it to 54 wine-tasting professionals?” With only visual sense altered, how would the enologists now describe their wine? Would their delicate palates see through the ruse, or would their noses be fooled? The answer is “their noses would be fooled.” When the wine tasters encountered the altered whites, every one of them employed the vocabulary of the reds. The visual inputs seemed to trump their other highly trained senses.

Folks in the scientific community had a field day. Professional research papers were published with titles like “The Color of Odors” and “The Nose Smells What the Eye Sees.” That’s about as much frat boy behavior as prestigious brain journals tolerate, and you can almost see the wicked gleam in the researchers’ eyes. Data such as these point to the nuts and bolts of the Brain Rule: Vision trumps all other senses. Visual processing doesn’t just assist in the perception of our world. It dominates the perception of our world.

Related Links:

Vision

Vision audio clip

Brain Rules Workshops

worth a thousand words

When it comes to memory, researchers have known for more than 100 years that pictures and text follow very different rules. Put simply,the more visual the input becomes, the more likely it is to be recognized—and recalled. The phenomenon is so pervasive, it has been given its own name: the pictorial superiority effect, or PSE.

Human PSE is truly Olympian. Tests performed years ago showed that people could remember more than 2,500 pictures with at least 90 percent accuracy several days post-exposure, even though subjects saw each picture for about 10 seconds. Accuracy rates a year later still hovered around 63 percent. In one paper—adorably titled “Remember Dick and Jane?”—picture recognition information was reliably retrieved several decades later.

Sprinkled throughout these experiments were comparisons with other forms of communication. The favorite target was usually text or oral presentations, and the usual result was “picture demolishes them both.” It still does. Text and oral presentations are not just less efficient than pictures for retaining certain types of information; they are way less efficient. 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.

The inefficiency of text has received particular attention. One of the reasons that text is less capable than pictures is that the brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures. Data clearly show that a word is unreadable unless the brain can separately identify simple features in the letters. Instead of words, we see complex little art-museum masterpieces, with hundreds of features embedded in hundreds of letters. Like an art junkie, we linger at each feature, rigorously and independently verifying it before moving to the next. The finding has broad implications for reading efficiency. Reading creates a bottleneck. My text chokes you, not because my text is not enough like pictures but because my text is too much like pictures. To our cortex, unnervingly, there is no such thing as words.

That’s not necessarily obvious. After all, the brain is as adaptive as Silly Putty. With years of reading books, writing email, and sendingtext messages, you might think the visual system could be trained torecognize common words without slogging through tedious additional steps of letter-feature recognition. But that is not what happens. No matter how experienced a reader you become, you will still stop and ponder individual textual features as you plow through a book, and you will do so until you can’t read anymore. Perhaps, with hindsight, we could have predicted such inefficiency. Our evolutionary history was never dominated by text-filled billboards or Microsoft Word. It was dominated by leaf-filled trees and saber-toothed tigers. The reason vision means so much to us may be as simple as the fact that most of the major threats to our lives in the savannah were apprehended visually. Ditto with most of our food supplies. Ditto with our perceptions of reproductive opportunity.

The tendency is so pervasive that, even when we read, most of us try to visualize what the text is telling us. “Words are only postage stamps delivering the object for you to unwrap,” George Bernard Shaw was fond of saying. These days, there is a lot of brain science technology to back him up.

Learn more:

Vision and the brain

Getty Images video (from Brain Rules DVD)

Death by PowerPoint (from Brain Rules DVD)

7 Observations About the Next Generation -- And What to Do About Them (Part 1)

Arik Korman interviews John Medina about the challenges facing the next generation. Watch the interview on YouTube or below.



1. The database is getting poorer.
Expert notion is shifting from knowing the knowledge outright to simply being reassured that it could be gotten "from somewhere." The students simply know where to get it, but the information is not immediately resident in their own brains.

2. The students' notion of intellectual toughness is shifting.
The amount of material they think is "hard" is growing and they don't like it.

Brain Rules in the News
- John Medina on Bob Rivers (video part 1)
- John Medina on Bob Rivers (video part 2)
- Oprah.com
- New Rules for Saving Your Memory (More magazine)
- Get more on facebook and YouTube
- #8 on New York Times Business bestseller list

The Biological Threat of Stress: From the Jungle to Wall Street

If news about the economy isn’t stressful enough to make you drive your fist through the TV, wait until you hear what stress can do to your brain. Unrelenting stress can hurt the brain’s leading talent — which is learning — and, in its most potent forms, it can even lead to brain damage.

But before you read this admittedly depressing story, would you do me a favor? The article that accompanies this piece provides some practical advice about what you can do to ameliorate the effects of stress. Please promise to read it as well — because you can tame the impact of stress on your life. To underscore how important stress-relieving behaviors are, I am presenting the bad news first. But the bad news is neither the end, nor the most important part, of the story.

Definitions
You might be surprised to know that the negative linkages between stress and learning were not easy to measure in the laboratory. First, most of the time stress does not cause brain damage and, oddly enough, certain stressors can actually be quite good for learning.

Second, no one could find a single grouping of physiological states unique to stress. Indeed, it was discovered that a person’s overall responses to aversive stimuli were the same responses they had to their favorite chocolate bar. Or to sex.

Third, no two people react to stress in exactly the same way, which is another way of saying perceptions of stress were (and are) highly subjective.

So how are we going to define "unrelenting stress"? We actually do have definitions that make sense to a test tube these days, using insights uncovered many years ago and centering around a small but very powerful word: control. The principle is this: The more out of control you feel over some bad thing coming at you, the more likely you are to experience the type of stress that can hurt you.

“Out of control” is measured in two directions: an inability to control the frequency of the bad stuff coming at you, and an inability to control its severity once the bad stuff has arrived. This loss of control has been shown to greatly increase the probability of the brain slipping into an anxiety or clinical depression. That can profoundly affect learning, and even cause neurological harm.

The very kinds of experiences in which recessions are marinated, ranging from layoffs to the current slowdown’s favorite flavor — retirement erosion — can provide a perfect elixir for brain debilitation.

The Stress Response System and the Saber-toothed Tiger
Why should a system embedded so deeply in your psyche be so potentially dangerous to you? Stress responses play an extraordinarily important part in our evolutionary survival, after all.

The answer has less to do with biological systems than it has to do with social ones — and also with timing. The brain is well-adapted for solving stress-related problems that are short-term in duration. The saber-toothed tiger either ate you or you ran away from it, but the whole thing was over in less than five minutes.

Great for a jungle. Lousy for Wall Street. A recession doesn’t last for five minutes. Neither does a bad marriage, or a bad job. When you try to push a system that was adapted only for solving short-term problems into solving long-term ones, the system first becomes over-extended, then it becomes overwhelmed.

There are many lines of evidence supporting this insight. The metabolic machinery that would actually allow you to handle a stressful experience is almost completely exhausted in 30 minutes (a great deal of it consumed in the first five). If the system moves beyond this performance benchmark, it starts to deregulate, like a server with too many demands on its time.

Another line of evidence is a reaction to the first: Stress systems possess negative feedback loops that almost immediately ask the brain if it is OK to shut the systems down, even if it just started revving things up. Why? Because overlong activation hurts things, and your body simply does not have the resources to cope with sustained assaults to its metabolic first responders,

A final line of evidence has to do with the speed of our reactions and our conscious awareness of them. Our stress responses react so quickly that we often do not become aware we are reacting until after we have already started the process. We literally start running away from an aversive stimulus before we are even aware we are moving.

The reason? It simply takes too much time to tell the parts of the brain responsible for consciousness that a big feline is chasing you, time in which you could turn into lunch. So you start running and, in mid-stride, become aware of what you are doing. The delay is about 200 milliseconds.

Milliseconds? That’s less than the time it takes to blink your eyes. The performance envelope of our stress system is designed to solve problems of very short duration.

So what happens when you push a system designed to solve problems lasting less than an hour into an experience where the problems last for months? The answer is depressing. Severe stress experienced over long periods of time can result in physical brain damage.

Danger Zone: Long Term Stress
When you are stressed, your body gives you two options to respond. One option involves deploying a hormone called epinephrine (or, if you are from Great Britain, adrenalin), supervising the so-called fight-or-flight response. The second choice involves the hormone cortisol.

Which system you deploy first may be in part genetically determined, but the goals of both are the same: to shift enough blood flow to your thighs to get you to move out of the arena of danger — and to give your brain a reason for doing so quickly. Hormones rage through your body like a storm surge, energy resources are pumped wildly into far-flung tissues, you dump any excess waste your body is currently carrying, and your brain kicks you into a high state of surveillance.

We are going to follow one of the alert signals, the cortisol we just mentioned, to discuss why an over-exposure causes physical damage to specific regions in the brain.

When stress is moderate in severity, acutely experienced, or both, your stress systems work very well. Cortisol is secreted by your adrenal glands, organs that lie atop of your kidneys. This hormone is part of the Delta Force of your stress response, supervising not only the mission to get you out of danger, but helping to calm you down once the mission is accomplished.

Cortisol even goes into your brain, aiding and abetting regions that are involved in learning (specifically an area of the brain called the hippocampus). That makes sense; you want to learn quickly from the things that could threaten your biological future.

It is this brain access that provides a conduit for the killing, however. Left to its own devices, dumping cortisol onto unprotected hippocampal cells will kill them just as surely as acid burns skin. Fortunately, your brain “knows” this and has left the hippocampus with some pretty good protection. Hippocampal cells have within them an heroic protein called Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (mercifully shortened to BDNF). BDNF can protect a nerve cell from the toxic effects of cortisol. As long as the system is not overwhelmed, BDNF does a pretty good job of buffering against the negative effects of stress.

Watch this video explaining BDNF

When you begin to feel out of control, however, the system short-circuits. If too much cortisol floods into the brain, which is what happens with severe, sustained stress, BDNF cannot keep up the fight. Cells die. Cortisol has a fair number of dirty tricks up its sleeve when produced in large quantities, including the ability to turn off the gene that makes BDNF. Not only can cortisol take the field, it can render its victims incapable of mounting a counter-attack as well.

The Good News About Stress
There are many other issues involved in a complete description of this complex story, including the fact that some people are genetically wired to be more stress-tolerant than others. But the good news is powerful and does not require a genetic explanation.

The brain damage turns out in most cases not to be permanent. You can actually reverse this evil over-regulation in real time, and cure the negative effects listed here. This article discusses some of the ways this seeming miracle can occur.

Learn more about stress and the brain

This is Your Brain at Work

John Medina was recently interviewed by the New York Post. The complete article, "This is Your Brain at Work," is available here.

How is work an antibrain environment?

We don't very much know how the brain works, but we do know something about its performance envelope. The brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an outdoor setting in unstable meteorological conditions. And to do that in near-constant motion. That's what the brain's good at. So if you wanted to design a work environment directly opposed to what the brain was naturally good at doing, you'd design something like an office.

If you tore the workplace down, what would you replace it with?

We've known for some time that the more fit aerobically you are, the better a particular series of processes called "executive function" in the brain works. It helps your ability to do math. It helps your ability to control your impulses. It helps with Let's say you're a Boeing engineer. Executive function is the very thing that allows you to design a satellite and, at the same time, keeps you from punching your boss in the nose when you get a bad performance review.

If you take somebody who's fat and sedentary and exercise them three times a week for as little as three months, you can get anywhere between an 80 and 120 percent increase in executive function. In our evolutionary history, we were probably walking anywhere between 10 and 20 kilometers per day. If we sat around in the Serengeti for half an hour, we were usually lunch.

Scotch the cubicle, put in a treadmill and do all your computer work while you're walking two miles an hour.

How does sleep, or lack of it, affect the brain at work?

There's a time in the afternoon when your brain wants to do a reset. And during that time it wants to take a 15- to 20-minute nap. We call it the nap zone. If you don't allow yourself to take a nap during that time, you'll fight being sleepy the rest of the afternoon, and productivity can suffer.

It was measured by NASA. They were able to show that by giving their fighter pilots a 20-minute nap in the nap zone, you'd find an increase of about 34 percent in their mean reaction time performances.

Mark Rosekind, the guy who did the study, goes, "Look, what other management technique can I do that, in 20 minutes, gives a 34 percent boost in productivity?"

Related Links:

Interview in the New York Post

Sleep Slide Show

Why do we sleep?

Exercise boosts brain power

Discuss on the Facebook fan page

Brain Rules for public speaking

Scott Berkun recently interviewed John Medina for his blog Speaker Confessions. Scott asks the question: what makes public speakers good or bad? He's working on a book to answer that question.

SB: How can a lecturer use attention, but make sure not to abuse it? Or put another way, does repetitive use of phasic alertness, getting an audience to refocus their attention ever few minutes, have declining effects over time?

JM: I do not believe in entertainment in teaching, during the holy time information is being transferred from one person to another. I do believe in engagement, however, and there is one crucial distinction that separates the two: the content of the emotionally competent stimulus (“hook”). If the story/anecdote/case-history is directly relevant to the topic at hand (either illustrating a previously explained point or introducing a new one), the student remains engaged. Cracking a joke for the sake of a break, or telling an irrelevant anecdote at a strategic time is a form of patronizing, and students everywhere can detect it, usually with resentment, inattention or both.

Do you think the size of a classroom has any effect on students ability to pay attention? Does Posner’s model of attention change if we are alone in conversation, vs. in an audience of 99 other people listening to a lecture?

I don’t think the size of the classroom has anything to do with the functional neural architecture proposed by Posner, but there is a universe of difference in how it behaves. The behavior has to do with our confounded predilection for socializing. People behave very differently in large crowds than they do in small crowds or even one on one. Very different teaching strategies must be deployed for each.

Bligh’s book “What’s the use of Lectures?” identifies 18-25 minutes, based on his assesment of psychology studies, as the key breakpoint for human attention in classrooms. Whether it’s 10 or 25, why do you think so few schools or training events use these sized units as the structure for their days, or their lessons?

I don’t know why schools don’t pay attention to attention. Perhaps it is a lack of content knowledge. If I had my way, every teacher on the planet would take two courses: First, an acting course, the only star in the academic firmament capable of teaching people how to manipulate their bodies and voices i to project information. Second, a cognitive neuroscience course, one that teaches people how the brain learns, so teachers can understand that such projections follow specific rules of engagement.

Get brain in gear for new year

People sometimes make New Year's resolutions for the wrong reason.

John Medina knows a lot about how people operate. He doesn't make resolutions, but he does have some advice for anyone who wants to have a better life in 2009. Take care of your brain.
--Read Jerry Large's column in the Seattle Times

--Excerpt below from Compete.com interview

Given the 12 Brain Rules, what advice do you have for marketers?

Three pieces of advice:
1. The brain is not interested in learning. And it is not interested in buying. It is interested in surviving.

2. It fleshes out this pre-occupation by creating and responding to two internal motivations, both strikingly Darwinian. The brain is interested in anything that will provide it a benefit. And it will do whatever it can to avoid pain.

3. Both motivations are related to a single goal: passing our genes onto the next generation. That sounds like it all comes down to sex, but it really comes down to endurance – in terms of millions of years. We barely survived our womb in the Serengeti, but we did so because of the overwhelming dictatorship of these twin interior forces.

Oxytocin and the Bottom Line

Trust can be a scary proposition. Among other characteristics, trusting someone involves the ability to measurably predict a behavior on the basis of nothing more than a memory, an impression, or a whim. For creatures like us, who spend a ridiculous amount of time with unpredictable strangers, brokering trust is an oddly important survival strategy.

Trusting behaviors have fascinated a broad swath of the behavioral research community, from social scientists and evolutionary theorists to cellular and molecular biologists. This community has, over the past few years, acquired insight from unlikely corners of academia, including, of all places, business schools. This column is all about an interesting collision between biologists, economists, and the human capacity to rely on the character or integrity of other people.

Those of you who are already familiar with the topic know I am about to discuss one of biology’s most ancient neurotransmitters: oxytocin. Its molecular mechanisms have become increasingly well characterized and have strong links to behaviors that involve the seemingly subjective experience of trust. Oxytocin has even been hypothesized to influence economic decisions. Can it?

To read the rest of the column, download the PDF (it's too long to post on the blog). "Oxytocin and the Bottom Line" was published in the August issue of Psychiatric Times. You can download all the 2008 "Molecules of the Mind" columns below or here.

Oxytocin and the Bottom Line (August 2008)

Of Stress and Alcoholism, Of Mice and Men (July 2008)

The Biology of Recognition Memory (June 2008)

Why Emotional Memories Are Unforgettable (May 2008)

Schizophrenia, DISC1, and Animal Models (April 2008)

Neurobiology of PTSD—Part 3 (March 2008)

Neurobiology of PTSD—Part 2 (February 2008)

Neurobiology of PTSD—Part 1 (January 2008)

Brain Rules for PowerPoint & Keynote presenters

Garr Reynolds, author of "Presenation Zen," has a great post on his blog discussing the book: Brain Rules for PowerPoint & Keynote presenters.

Here's what Garr says about the book:

"Brain Rules is one of the most informative, engaging, and useful books of our time. Required reading for every educator and every business person. My favorite book of 2008!"

View Upload your own

Above: here's a slide presentation Garr created based on some of the ideas in Brain Rules.

Harvard Business Review Interview - "The Science of Thinking Smarter"

The May issue of Harvard Business Review features an interview with John Medina, author of "Brain Rules." The article is called The Science of Thinking Smarter (click to read the full article on the HBR site). Below is the executive summary.



Neuroscience can show managers ways to improve productivity.
A Conversation with brain expert John J. Medina by Diane Coutu

Advances in neurobiology have demonstrated that the brain is so sensitive to external experiences that it can be rewired through exposure to cultural influences. Experiments have shown that in some people, parts of the brain light up only when they are presented with an image of Bill Clinton. In others, it’s Jennifer Aniston. Or Halle Berry. What other stimuli could rewire the brain? Is there a Boeing brain? A Goldman Sachs brain?

No one really knows yet, says Medina, a developmental molecular biologist, who has spent much of his career exploring the mysteries of neuroscience with laypeople. As tempting as it is to try to translate the growing advances to the workplace, he warns, it’s just too early to tell how the revolution in neurobiology is going to affect the way executives run their organizations. “If we understood how the brain knew how to pick up a glass of water and drink it, that would represent a major achievement,” he says.

Still, neuroscientists are learning much that can be put to practical use. For instance, exercise is good for the brain, and long-term stress is harmful, inevitably hurting productivity in the workplace. Stressed people don’t do math very well, they don’t process language very efficiently, and their ability to remember—in both the short and long terms—declines. In fact, the brain wasn’t built to remember with anything like analytic precision and shouldn’t be counted on to do so. True memory is a very rare thing on this planet, Medina says. That’s because the brain isn’t really interested in reality; it’s interested in survival.

What’s more, and contrary to what many twentieth-century educators believed, the brain can keep learning at any age. “We are lifelong learners,” Medina says. “That’s very good news indeed.”
Read the full interview in Harvard Business Review

The brain cannot multitask

The following is an excerpt from John Medina's new book, "Brain Rules." You can also listen to the excerpt.





Above is a clip from the Brain Rules DVD about multitasking.



Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time. At first that might sound confusing; at one level the brain does multitask. You can walk and talk at the same time. Your brain controls your heartbeat while you read a book. Pianists can play a piece with left hand and right hand simultaneously. Surely this is multitasking. But I am talking about the brain’s ability to pay attention. It is the resource you forcibly deploy while trying to listen to a boring lecture at school. It is the activity that collapses as your brain wanders during a tedious presentation at work. This attentional ability is not capable of multitasking.



Recently, I agreed to help the high-school son of a friend of mine with some homework, and I don’t think I will ever forget the experience. Eric had been working for about a half-hour on his laptop when I was ushered to his room. An iPod was dangling from his neck, the earbuds cranking out Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, and Green Day as his left hand reflexively tapped the backbeat. The laptop had at least 11 windows open, including two IM screens carrying simultaneous conversations with MySpace friends. Another window was busy downloading an image from Google. The window behind it had the results of some graphic he was altering for MySpace friend No. 2, and the one behind that held an old Pong game paused mid-ping.



Buried in the middle of this activity was a word-processing program holding the contents of the paper for which I was to provide assistance. “The music helps me concentrate,” Eric declared, taking a call on his cell phone. “I normally do everything at school, but I’m stuck. Thanks for coming.” Stuck indeed. Eric would make progress on a sentence or two, then tap out a MySpace message, then see if the download was finished, then return to his paper. Clearly, Eric wasn’t concentrating on his paper. Sound like someone you know?



To put it bluntly, research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously. Eric and the rest of us must jump from one thing to the next. To understand this remarkable conclusion, we must delve a little deeper into the third of Posner’s trinity: the Executive Network. Let’s look at what Eric’s Executive Network is doing as he works on his paper and then gets interrupted by a “You’ve got mail!” prompt from his girlfriend, Emily.



step 1: shift alert

To write the paper from a cold start, blood quickly rushes to the anterior prefrontal cortex in Eric’s head. This area of the brain, part of the Executive Network, works just like a switchboard, alerting the brain that it’s about to shift attention.



step 2: rule activation for task #1

Embedded in the alert is a two-part message, electricity sent crackling throughout Eric’s brain. The first part is a search query to find the neurons capable of executing the paper-writing task. The second part encodes a command that will rouse the neurons, once discovered. This process is called “rule activation,” and it takes several tenths of a second to accomplish. Eric begins to write his paper.



step 3: disengagement

While he’s typing, Eric’s sensory systems picks up the email alert from his girlfriend. Because the rules for writing a paper are different from the rules for writing to Emily, Eric’s brain must disengage from the paper-writing rules before he can respond. This occurs. The switchboard is consulted, alerting the brain that another shift in attention is about to happen.



step 4: rule activation for task #2

Another two-part message seeking the rule-activation protocols for emailing Emily is now deployed. As before, the first is a command to find the writing-Emily rules, and the second is the activation command. Now Eric can pour his heart out to his sweetheart. As before, it takes several tenths of a second simply to perform the switch.



Incredibly, these four steps must occur in sequence every time Eric switches from one task to another. It is time-consuming. And it is sequential. That’s why we can’t multitask. That’s why people find themselves losing track of previous progress and needing to “start over,” perhaps muttering things like “Now where was I?” each time they switch tasks. The best you can say is that people who appear to be good at multitasking actually have good working memories, capable of paying attention to several inputs one at a time.



Here’s why this matters: Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50 percent longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50 percent more errors.

Source: Rogers RD & Monsell, S (1995) Depth of processing and the retention of words in episodic memory Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 124(2): 207 - 231 Table 2 of Experiment Cluster #1 (crosstalk conditions)

Notes: These trials involved uninterrupted (single-focus) tasks and interrupted (multiple-focus) tasks. Data are shown for experiments involving number-based manipulations and letter-based manipulations.

Some people, particularly younger people, are more adept at task-switching. If a person is familiar with the tasks, the completion time and errors are much less than if the tasks are unfamiliar. Still, taking your sequential brain into a multitasking environment can be like trying to put your right foot into your left shoe.



A good example is driving while talking on a cell phone. Until researchers started measuring the effects of cell-phone distractions under controlled conditions, nobody had any idea how profoundly they can impair a driver. It’s like driving drunk. Recall that large fractions of a second are consumed every time the brain switches tasks. Cell-phone talkers are a half-second slower to hit the brakes in emergencies, slower to return to normal speed after an emergency, and more wild in their “following distance” behind the vehicle in front of them. In a half-second, a driver going 70 mph travels 51 feet. Given that 80 percent of crashes happen within three seconds of some kind of driver distraction, increasing your amount of task-switching increases your risk of an accident. More than 50 percent of the visual cues spotted by attentive drivers are missed by cell-phone talkers. Not surprisingly, they get in more wrecks than anyone except very drunk drivers.



Watch the video below from the Brain Rules DVD.





It isn’t just talking on a cell phone. It’s putting on makeup, eating, rubber-necking at an accident. One study showed that simply reaching for an object while driving a car multiplies the risk of a crash or near-crash by nine times. Given what we know about the attention capacity of the human brain, these data are not surprising.



Do one thing at a time

The brain is a sequential processor, unable to pay attention to two things at the same time. Businesses and schools praise multitasking, but research clearly shows that it reduces productivity and increases mistakes. Try creating an interruption-free zone during the day—turn off your e-mail, phone, IM program, or BlackBerry—and see whether you get more done."