If I ask you what character you would like to be from x-men, I’m sure most of us would like to be wolverine or cyclops or magneto. I would have selected the same too until I read John Medina’s Brain Rules. Guess what would be the character I love to be. That is profession X. Professor X has superhuman mental powers. Sounds boring, right? Please read through this blog and by the end of it, you will understand 12 Brain rules that can make you superhuman too.
Coming to reality, I realized we all human are gifted with one power by birth that is our brain. No supercomputer in the world can beat how human brain process things. The human brain possesses about 100 billion neurons with roughly 1 quadrillion — 1 million billion — connections. Sorry, it’s too much scientific. In simple words, there is no chipset or processor created yet which can beat the power of the human brain.
Dr John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist and research consultant explains the reason to all our problems starts with how our brain thinks and we can tackle these problems if we know how our brain works. According to him, 12 scientific brain rules are using which we can improve our reading, learning and working ability 10 times.
Whether you are playing any role in life or going through any circumference, these 12 brain techniques will help you to boost your performance by improving your brain powers and help you to tackle different challenges that we all face in different phases of life.
Here are the 12 brain rules that have a significant impact on your life:
Table of Contents
RULE 1 | BRAIN IS A SURVIVAL ORGAN WHICH EVOLVING SINCE AGES
Every species on this planet earth have evolved with time to adapt survival. Some of them have developed venom, some can run fast, some has strength. Other species get help from these developments to find food and protect themselves from other predators.
Our (humans) biological body is not developed much like other species. Single snake bite will kill a human. We cannot beat Jaguar in running nor we can knock down trees like an elephant. However, there is one thing gifted to mankind using which we are ruling the world above all species that is our BRAIN. It’s our brain who have developed antidote against poisons, helped us to drive the car with speed more than a Jaguar or invented cranes to knock down trees like an elephant. Though we are not the strongest kind in the world, we have evolved our strongest brain with time and this is the main reason for mankind’s survival.
Our analysing and coordinating power with other humans are our strongest survival strategy since stone ages. Directly or indirectly, it helps to stay alive.
If your surroundings and people support your goal, then your productivity and creativity increase. We feel positivity in our life which helps to meet goals and face challenges.
However, if your connections, relations or decisions with other people are not working, you will feel depressed with many negative thoughts which indirectly affects your efficiency to achieve goals and happiness in life. Sometimes, it impacts someone so badly that it may results into a death.
We need to understand one thing here. There is no set definition of right or wrong. It’s our brain who is deciding that on our behalf the way it was trained to process things for us. Nature is doing it job by evolving your brain however it’s on you how you will train it understand things around you.
RULE 2 | EXERCISE BOOSTS OUR BRAIN POWER
Scientists have done a research study on two kinds of groups
- Group A | People who are doing regular exercises
- Group B | People who are neither involved in much of physical activity nor exercises
And they concluded that cognitive score of group A people are higher than group B.
Usually, our brain has programmed to walk around 20 KM a day however if we do physical exercise 2-3 times a week then we can help our brain to increase the power of reading and learning. Why is so? Because exercise helps deliver blood to the brain and then blood energy eliminate toxic cells from the brain with the help of glucose energy. This phenomenon supports oxygen flow in our brain to remove thinking block, sends more neurons to brains. Neurons play an important role in boosting mental sharpness and creativity.
RULE 3 | SLEEP WELL, THINK WELL
Good sleep makes you thinking right and productive. Our brain malfunctions because of lack of sleep. The brain keeps on damaging your power to focus, memory and logical thinking if you do not sleep well.
According to a study conducted by NASA, only 26 minutes of sleep nap helped NASA pilots to increase their performance by 34%.
If you feel sleepy in the afternoon, then that is normal. Near to 3 PM in the afternoon, our brain keeps on struggling to decide where to sleep or not. If possible then you should take a nap.
According to Dr Medina, our brain never sleeps though we are sleeping. The brain keeps on processing information collected so far and trying to develop by its own. But, it’s mandatory for us to take proper sleep for a productive mind.
It’s like switching your laptop to hibernate where CPU or processor is still running in the background.
RULE 4 | STRESSED BRAIN, DON’T LEARN THE SAME WAY
Our brain is developed to handle stress for 30 seconds and not for long term stress. Stress damages blood vessels of our brain and it might cause a heart attack or heart-related issues.
At home, at school, at college or work, we experience a lot of stress, it also affects the chances of being successful in life. If you have some issues at home, it affects your working life too and eventually damages your performance and productivity.
So, if your relations are not well and you are stressed about it then work towards things that will correct your relations. Don’t carry the burden of your stress from home to office or vice versa. If you can’t control people, then it’s very simple for you. Just don’t take the stress of it and utilize your brain on other productive things for yourself. Trust me, it will not only make you healthy and efficient but also save a lot of your time.
RULE 5 | EVERY BRAIN IS WIRED DIFFERENTLY
Most of the time, we have been told that all human brains are similar however that is not true. After many studies, researchers and scientists concluded that each brain wiring is different than others. We can develop our brain, but it will never match with other person brains like our fingerprints. Different brain system is ignored by our education system and further derived by grade system. Education system judges our intelligence via marks, percentages or grade but, the brain is unique per individual.
Let’s understand this by an example of Amazon E-commerce site. Amazon technology analyses, store and process information about customer’s interest so that even if you are browsing other sites or social media platforms, you will see all products you are intended to buy.
Don’t compare yourself with others because what you have is different than others and it’s you who can unleash the potential of your brain.
RULE 6 | BRAIN DOESN’T PAY ATTENTION TO BORING THINGS
The brain only pays attention to things related to our interest, profit, emotions and culture. It doesn’t matter who you are, your brain is always focusing on these things consciously or subconsciously.
- Can I eat an apple?
- Can Lion eat me?
- Can I make a relation with this girl?
Like this brain develops a lot of questions and tries to find out our interest and reason.
Our brain is not developed for multitasking however we often find ourselves doing multitasking throughout our day. Multitasking increases our chances of mistakes and failures, though it’s depending on how one has achieved skills of multitasking.
Nowadays, it has become necessary to do multitasking and thus you need to identify your core interests whether it’s a job, relation or actions and need to set priority for each of it to avoid multitasking. This will improve your chances to get success in a task that you are performing.
RULE 7 | REPEAT TO REMEMBER
We should repeat actions or information to remember better. Our brain only stores important information for long and delete all temporary information.
The human mind always populates many thoughts or goals for individual thus it’s important that you should instruct your brain what to store permanently and what can be ignored.
Thus, it’s important to have vision boards, written goals or reminders for our brain to identify that this information is important and supposed to save permanently.
If you want to remember something or want to learn something new or want to become a pro in anything, you need to repeat things so that you can practise.
If you keep repeating things, your brain will automatically program itself to do it better next time and this will make a significant impact on things you want to do in your life.
RULE 8 | OUR SENSES WORK TOGETHER, STIMULATE THEM
We absorb information about an event through our senses, translate it into electrical signals disperse those signals to separate parts of the brain, then reconstruct what happened, eventually perceiving the event entirely.
Remember 1st time when you were trying to drive a car. You are focusing individually on each action taken by your body part. Legs for breaks or acceleration, hands to control steering wheel and eyes to keep attention on a road. Initially, your brain finds it difficult to
stimulate all senses in synchronization required however as you practise, you will find yourself comfortable driving a car without focusing much on each body part separately. Why because your brain has developed a pattern in senses to work together for better performance.
Smells have an unusual power to bring back memories. The smell of wet soil in rain takes us back to our childhood or the smell of popcorn takes us the time we had in movie theatres. So if you want to remember something, you can associate any unique fragrance with the task that you are doing and it will help you remember that information. Next time, when you smell the same fragrance, your brain recollects all information saved.
RULE 9 | VISION TRUMPS ALL OTHER SENSES
Vision is our most powerful sense, taking up 50% of our brain’s resources.
Our brain stores information collected by eyes for a long time rather than information we hear or read. Thus, in order to train our brain to store more information, you should watch visuals, infographics or videos related to topics you are interested in.
For example, to remember RULE 9, if you can read and focus on visual provided here. It will be easier for your brain to store this information collectively and in future whenever you will thinking about RULE 9, your brain will 1st select image you memorized for this and then pull all information stored related to this topic from your brain.
RULE 10 | MUSIC CAN MAKE OUR BRAIN SMARTER
Listening to music and creating music helps our brain to become smart and increase our performance indirectly. Dr Medina had studied many musicians and found that our music taste shows our personality. Music can also sharpen our memory and skills. Composing music can enhance our reading ability, math and emotional intelligence. It doesn’t mean that you need to be a music composer however you can tab on a dining table to create your own music for your own brain exercise.
Listing to music helps our brain to improve vocabulary and to change our mood however this works differently depending on ages and interest of an individual.
RULE 11 | MALE AND FEMALE BRAINS ARE DIFFERENT
Once researchers conducted a study where they have shown horror movie to both genders and found that only right hemisphere is actively working for males and left hemisphere is quiet. Whereas for females, results were the opposite. The takeaway from this study is the way of thinking, handling stress and reaction to things are different depending on gender.
Thus, it’s not necessary that you and your partner (male or female) should have the same opinion on the things and it’s worthless to
have fight due to this. Instead of a fight, discuss and understand each other opinion so that to reach a conclusion.
There are many things that women can do, and men can’t or vice versa. Each of us holds the strongest aspect or skills thus never underestimate the power of other’s personality or brain. If you are teaming up whether it’s a relationship, a friendship or a working environment give your best shot to understand and coordinate with other brains. They might not know RULE 11 of the brain but you do so expect things from yourself first than others.
RULE 12 | WE ARE POWERFUL AND NATURAL EXPLORERS
Desire to explore more never keeps us alone. Our brain is developed to explore more and learn. When I was a kid, I always used to dismantle my dad’s ball pen but now I don’t. Why is that? We are more curious about things in our childhood, but this curiosity decreases as we grow.
Google always give 20% of working time to employees to explore things, you will be surprised to know that GMAIL and GOOGLE news was invented from such explorations.
Bottomline of RULE 12 is we should keep our curiosity alive and keep exploring in life.
I have tried to give you a very short summary of these 12 points from the book written by Dr John Medina and have tried to explain them in my way so that I can add value to your life if you are finding it worthy of reading. If you are interested to know more about these rules from Dr John Medina perceptive, you must give it a try by reading Brain Rules.
The motive of this blog to add value in a reader’s life by the fact of how our brain works and how we can get the maximum benefit of one superpower that we are gifted by birth. If you think it’s worth to share or can help someone in their life, I request you to share it across your social platforms.
Until next time, never stop reading…
