I've just finished reading a book by John Medina, called "brain rules: 12 principles for surviving and thriving at work, home, and school". I must say that, based on the title, I was looking for concrete ways to make my brain work better, and found that and much more. The author's style is calid and and entertaining, yet he seems to know very well what he's speaking about.
The book focuses a lot on how to transport this rules from the academia into the actual shaping of the learning, from elementary school onwards. It does indeed have a lot of pretty radical ideas that would totally change the way we teach and learn at schools and colleges - i hope this teaching method will find some echo on some experimental school, where they could be tested and perfectioned.
The book also has a pretty entertaining website with lots of information -check it out: http://www.brainrules.net/
At any rate, here are the takeaways:
1) Rule 1 - Exercise
It looks like, based on our origins as a species, we have a strong correlation between exercising and our cognitive development. Tests on the young and old seem to prove that cognitive capacity can indeed improve with exercise.
One of the most interesting points in this chapter is how the aging process works. Apparently, when we eat, our body tears apart the food so that it can obtain glucose, which is one of the body's energy sources. This process is done in such a molecularly violent way, that atoms are ripped and electrons are released, who slam against other molecules within the cells and transform the latter into free radicals. These free radicals are harmful to the body and is what degenerates the cells with age.
The only reason we don't die of electron/free radicals overdose, is that we inhale oxygen, which absorbs this free radicals through the blood stream, turning into carbon dioxide, which we later release.
Exercise helps build more and more fluid blood vessels, that help keep the body irrigated, and thus help keep our bodies young. In other words, those who don't exercise, age faster because of being less able to absorb electrons/free radicals quickly.
In turns out that our species walked on average 12 miles per day - several million years of evolution have made us dependent on exercise in order to be in full capacity. The few hundred years of civilization can turn that genetic disposition apart, so exercising is not really a plus - it's simply how it should be.
2) Rule 2 - Survival
One of the things that differentiates the human race from others is the ability to perform symbolic reasoning. What this means is that we can attribute multiple meanings to certain representations. In a way this is what lies behind our ability to do math, communicate through words and language, although in the core, it relates to our ability to fantasize and represent what doesn't exist in what does. This ability actually doesn't come with us right away - experiments have shown that we develop this after 1 year and a half of life.
Another interesting point is the speed of evolution. Man is supposed to be on earth for around 4 million years (not sure), but only 100k years ago we began moving around, migrating to other places. 40k years later, we began we taking up sculpture and painting, creating jewelry and art, 37k years later, we were making pyramids, and 5k years later, rocket fuel. In the big scheme of things, this seems like a pretty fast and exponential evolution.
This made me think if indeed there isn't something strange around such a steep evolution - was it we needed to surpass certain tipping point in intelligence and/or language development ?
One of the possible explanations, beyond symbolic reasoning, is climate change - apparently we've developed an ability to adapt above all things, give how much our environment changed around us. According to some scientists, there is proof about 17 ice ages. The goldilocks theory explains that the speed of the changes was not enough to kill us but good enough to shake this up drastically.
Another big change seems to be the fact that we became bi-pedal (walked on two feet as opposed to four). This became more useful in the plains as opposed to the jungle, and allowed us to both stick our heads out to see more in distance, and to save energy that could be used to fee the brain function.
Finally, our ability to work together, made a big difference in survival. For that to happen, we had to develop a sense for what other people's interests and motivations were, so as to get them to do what we want. This is what nowadays is called the Theory of the Mind.
