John Medina’s Brain Rules: An Application of Wiring Rule and Attention Rule
John Medina does an excellent job and presenting his 12 principles for surviving and thriving in his book,Brain Rules. It has become extremely apparent the effect and importance of learning and understanding how your brain works. From his 12 principles, the ones that stood out to me the most and I found essential to add to my toolkit were wiring and attention.
I find it extremely important to understand that not one human brain is wired the same. In Brain Rules, Medina states that “various regions of the brain develop at different rates in different people.” It is important to understand that although one person may completely understand one theme or theory or lesson, that does not necessarily mean that is the same for the other. Therefore, integrating lessons that are applicable to the learners speed is something that I would add to my tool kit. Medina also states that our brains do not store information in the same way, or the same place. To combat this, I think creating a chunking learning structure, with different approaches to learning like a mix of videos, reading, exploring, etc. would assist in securing that the information is being processed and understood correctly for every type of learner.
Medina touches many points on attention, but what stood out to me the most was that the brain pays more attention to the gist of something first, before it tries to attain the details of the emotional experience. That, if the brain does not know or understand the meaning of the information it is processing, then it is not going to pay attention to the details that follow, because the brain first looks for meaning. This is where structuring lessons and presenting big ideas comes in. Presenting the overall understanding (big idea) helps learners better prepare for what they are going to learn in detail, leading to better understanding and retention of the lessons main objective. Presenting things in order following the big idea, allow the learner to derive meaning from one lesson to another.
I guess the Bee Gees knew what they were talking about when they sing that ‘emotions take over,” because they really do! Medina states that emotions get our attention, and that “emotionally charged events are remembered better, for longer, and with more accuracy than neutral events.” Experiencing emotion releases dopamine in the brain, and dopamine helps with memory and processing. Presenting real life examples that relate to an emotional stimulus (like Medina’s example of the car accident commercial) will assist in the learner retaining the information, and grabs their attention.
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