Brain Rules - John Medina (part 2)

Rule 3 - Wiring

Our learning process is determined by neurons, whose connections engorge and/or re-route based on our experience.

The brain's wiring is determined by both a experience independent factor and the experience dependent. While the experience independent is the the type of wiring that we all undergo based on our common experience (walking, balance, breathing, etc), the experience dependent is obviously dependent on what our life experiences have been. For example, a violinist will have a different brain wiring to that of a mathmatician.

Apparently, the information on the brain is stored in certain actual physical locations, and what is even more interesting is that this information is stored in different places of the brain for each person. In fact, apparently one could predict how developed certain knowledge or skill is capable of being based on the place where the information is stored in the brain of the individual. Moreover, this doesn't change with age, so once we store something in certain part of our brain, we'll keep it there forever.

Another interesting point of the chapter is that most of the brain wiring happens in two particular ocassions: early childhood and puberty. It's up until the early 20's that we continue developing neurons and re-wiring our brain, although some more activity happens till the mid 40s.

Rule 4 - Attention

There wasn't really too much interesting in this chapter, but here are some notes

Attention is driven by three things

• awareness: we are, of course, only able to pay attention to things we are aware of both physically and mentally speaking
• interest: things that are unusual trigger our interest and attention
• memory: things we remember are important and that we should pay attention to. That way, if by not knowing something we got hurt, we will remember to pay attention next time.

Retention is driven, in part, by the emotional charge of the event. However, emotionally charged events have the particularity of having their details fade away in time, with only the gist of the matter remaining. That way, sometimes certain associated events can trigger a particular emotion, without the individual really being able to tell what exactly is triggering the feeling.

Brains can't multitask in attention. While we can multitask in bodily functions (breathe and walk), we can't really do that in terms of actually paying attention. While habit will make it so that we don't need to pay attention to perform certain acts (they become, sort of speak, background processes), for things we don't know, there is no way our brain can process multiple focal points at once.

Finally I really liked this phrase, although I don't remember the context:

Experts knowledge is not simply a list of facts and formulas that are relevant to their domain, instead their knowledge is organized based on core concepts or "big ideas" that guide their thinking of their domains.