 We're really excited today because we have a guest who's been joining us and we spent a whole day at Kapa'a Lama, a whole day on the Maui campus and is actually spending mid-morning through this afternoon at the Ke'au campus. And she is speaking to administrators, curriculum coordinators, counselors, coon about neuroscience and learning. She is from Haya and she is glad to be back. She currently resides in Quito, Ecuador, and she is a Harvard University Extension School professor. She has published six books, 144 presentations, 34 countries that she works with. What was the other staff? All kinds of stats, like if you watch basketball like the Russell Wetsbrook James Hardin. So I'm really excited and just to introduce her last is to share with you her philosophy. It's a very simple philosophy and I think it's emblematic of what you'll hear today in terms of learning about how education is very different than it was when we all went to school. It looks different, it feels different, and as a result we sometimes are not really sure we buy into it, but the difference of education today is that it's either science or philosophy is simple. It's the philosophy of one, one student, one teacher. So let's welcome Tracy Tokulama Espinosa. It's really like a homecoming, you know. I love this so much. I ended up, my father went off to California, so that's where I spent most of my time, and I went further east coast, then down south, but every time I come back here it's like, oh, so wonderful to be back here. So thank you so much for giving me your time this morning. I know that you're such busy people, so carving out this little niche to learn about some things, learn about our own brains is really something I hope will be beneficial for all of us. The first question, why do human beings write? To remember, and one thing we're going to learn today is that there is no learning without memory and without attention. So you don't have something to write with, right? You don't make sure that you ask the person next to you, because I'm going to ask you to write a couple things. The very first thing I'm going to ask you to write down is my email. I love corresponding with people who care about learning more about this information, and this morning we're going to introduce a bunch of things, but we probably won't go really deep into any one, and you might feel like that I want to know more about how the sleep, how sleep impacts my learning. I really want to understand how emotions influence cognition, or I really want to go deeper into that information about the, is there really a big change in adolescent brains or not or whatever. So we know that memory is important, this is why I'm asking to write down the email, but I also want you to explore on the web page, thelearningsciences.com. In the courses I teach at Harvard, we do this in what's called a flipped manner, so I would recommend this for mediums too. You send a video beforehand that explains all of the core concepts, information, facts that we want to make sure everybody gets, so that when we come together, we can have a discussion around that information, right? So all the videos that I have for my course are also uploaded there for free, in case you would like to go deeper into memory, or attention systems, or how nutrition influences learning, or things like that. Okay? Okay, so that's the first thing. So everybody got something to write with? Yes? Okay. What we're going to do is spend about a few minutes, maybe five, ten minutes. I want to explain something about the context of education, and I'm going to dive really into the brain. But I'm going to warn you that at the very end, when we have just a few minutes left, I'm going to ask you for something that's called three to one. Three things that you didn't know before we began today. Two things that you said, this is so interesting, I want to do more. And one thing that you're going to think about, well maybe I'm going to change this in my personal professional life based on the information that I've learned. And I ask you to do this because anytime you go to any kind of a session where somebody pretends to be going to be teaching you something, you better walk out feeling satisfied. Oh God, I really learned something. I'm really curious about something new. And now, what am I going to do about it? How can this be usable knowledge? And that's a big deal in my profession is that there's a lot of information coming out of science. But how does that translate into real life? What does that really look like when you try to apply it? Okay, so I want to see if we can link to that point of actual application. Okay, we know that there have been a lot of changes in education. Do you think your educational system is perfect? Is it perfectable? Yes, we can get better, right? Okay, so does anybody remember who this fellow is? Do you know who Griffin Winkle is? What did he do? When he woke up, everything had changed. Transportation had changed. He figured out banking is all different. You can tweet people in and out of government now. Elections are different. Supermarkets are different. And schools? Which is 2010. They are both 2010. That's what's so depressing. Okay, I have anti-community schools that do not look like this. Okay, but still, what's the point? What's the point of this? Education is the slowest institution in society to catch up with real, real change, the real possibilities of what it could be. Other industries that really move forward really quickly, but education is so slow to adapt to these things. Okay, so I want to tell you, I want to give you four reasons why we must change general education, because what I'm going to tell you about your range should become a knowledge from here on out. Okay, so why should we change education? We know that we need to change education for four reasons. One is that we have different expectations of what school is for. And there's a lot of them listed here. We're not going to go, oops, we're not going to go into all of them. But the idea is that before when you and I were going to school, to know was enough, right? The teachers came in and they knew a lot of stuff and you were like, whoa, this guy knows so much and he's so smart. Okay, so you think that was enough. But now it's going to school and on their telephones, they might know more stuff than the teacher would know. They might know more about topics, right? So we know that education is shifted drastically in terms of what we expect schools to do. We expect schools to help kids have transdisciplinary thinking, to have different types of value systems, to learn how to collaborate, we expect different types of things that are not necessarily a part of traditional education. So expectations on the whole have changed, okay? They've also changed is what we think of what the student does and what the teacher does. What do we expect is the end deal. What is the quality of our teacher really measured by? And if you look at the sum of the literature on these 21st century schools, but now that we're 17, 18 years into the 21st century, we should have figured out what this means. We talked about people who know, who have intellectual curiosity, people having intellectual courage, and they have a difference of opinion that they're able to save. I don't agree with that, right? People who have intellectual generosity, they go across something and say, oh, this is not for me, but I bet you'd be interested in it. I'll just send this over to you, just in case you find it interesting. You share what you know, right? We want people who embrace complexity. The world is not simple, right? There's a lot of complexity out there. We want people who know how to work with people who are different from ourselves, who look different, who act different, who have different value systems. Can you live along with those people? Can you work on time honestly? Yeah, not the president, okay? That's a lost cause. Oh, that's on tape, okay? So we know that we have different types of goals, but what we tell the teachers when we work with them is that if we're looking that this is also part of school, it's just not math, reading, writing. It is also forming this individual we want to live with in society, right? That's a very big shift from what we used to put on schools, okay? But I tell teachers we can't get there unless they themselves have all of these characteristics and more. So most teachers have a hard time and they think, let me think about what it is I need to improve there. What is the piece of this that most teachers have a hard time saying, well, I can do that? Which is the one that's the biggest challenge for most teachers? What would you guess? Act autonomously in some school systems, because they have been so used to just waiting for, okay, what is the principal's site? What is the principal's site? Some schools, but there's some pretty autonomous teachers, especially in your schools. So I think that's not one. What would be another one? Tech savvy. That's actually the number one around the world. The average teacher in the world today is 40 years old and most of them have never had a class in anything related to technology. Most of them have never experienced even the basics of understanding how to do everything work, for example. They just don't know how to do this. So we know that that's a big challenge for our teachers because the kids are super tech savvy and they oftentimes know far more and they actually feel very bored sometimes in schooling systems because their teachers can't keep up with the latest after they can do other things or reverse mathematical learning or whatever, faster than the teacher can. Okay, so anyways, this is another change. The third change is basically what you guys are here for. Information has changed drastically thanks to better technology about the brain and how it learns. And this means that we've gone from things like these cartoon drawings, every single one of those things that's up there is a myth. Okay, there's no right brain, left brain, 10% brain, boys and girls brains, reptilian brains, learning styles, multitasking, all that is out. Okay, we've gone from that because when we have better technology, we now know how complex the brain really is. We look at things that show blood flow, we look at things that show changes in chemical compositions, we look at things that change the structure of the brain. And we can even measure what's called, you guys know what white matter is? You've heard of white matter and green matter? Yeah? No, I've never heard of that. Brain matter is just the cell body in your brain. Okay, all the cells that you have. So this would be in your, in the nervous system, a cell is called a neuron. So that's why it's called a neuron, right? So you have neurons that are cells in your nervous system. And the body is what is gray matter. But when you learn something, you basically have new connections between these areas. And that's strengthened. Plial cells, this is called myelination. And the speed of the electrical signal that goes from one part of your brain to the other gets faster with more white matter. Okay? So we can measure increases in white matter that show us if somebody has learned something. Okay? So we can mix all of these things together now and you come up with the most modern type of a technology on the bottom there. It's called the connect tone project. If you look online, it's very cool because it's this multimillion international project to join brain imagery to come up with single scans in which they compare fMRIs with head scans, with EEGs, with all these other things together. So you have a better sense of where the networks are in the brain. How is the brain actually learning things? So then you can go to these ideas and expand this by understanding there is no such thing as oh, language is your left hemisphere and spaces in your right hemisphere or creativity or whatever. There is no such thing as localizationalism anymore. We don't say something is one part of your brain. Okay? But we now talk about these really fabulous networks that have to all be primed before that particular learning is visible in behavior. Okay? So what we will see are things when you have these bigger bubbles here, this is sort of reinforcing that that's a key hub. And hubs are where the message goes through many times through that same space. So with old technology, for example, we used to see things like Roka's area would light up with all these things. So this would be for language, right? Roka or any of these things. We think, oh, language is there. But that's just because it's a key hub. With better and more intricate technology, it's obviously important, but it's not where language is. We know that humor interpretation or intonation, other things are in far other completely distinct networks from Roka. So we no longer say that some piece of learning is in one part of your brain or another. We always talk about networks from here on out. Okay? You're making a face at me. What does that mean? What's the question? So I have an answer to some. You've had so much challenges. And just to let you know, you can only conduct so much. It just makes me wonder are these applications available and for doing great. Exactly. Had you known this before? Well, this is the one thing that's so fantastic. It's never too late. When does your brain stop learning? Okay, so you have time to learn things. Obviously, I always say the earlier, the better. Just because the longer, the more time you have with an intervention, the better the benefits can be for the whole rest of your life. But it's never the end of things. And I want you to write me because I'm 18 this semester. So we know that there's different ways that the brain is going to be connected for different types of abilities. The powerful thing we tell teachers, it takes at least 16 different neural networks which branch out into 109 different pathways, which branch out into more or less 171 visible behaviors. 109 different types of things have to be stimulated before a kid can even read. Now, if that's the complexity of something like reading, can you imagine? Think about your jobs, which I think they're a lot more intense than old reading. You guys do reading and all kinds of other things, right? Which means the complexity of the brain is what we try to impress upon teachers. It is not as simplistic as, you know, wiggle your ears and you'll feel like reading, which Ranger does. That's a myth, okay? Yes, it's on tape, okay? And why some people feel that it is, oh, but it worked for me. It's because of something called the placebo effect, okay? If the little kid is so desperate, he really wants to leave and he thinks, okay, I'm going to be better, I'm going to be better. It's better. So there's a small percentage of people who will actually be top, they can top themselves into the silly things working, which really have no science at all, okay? And the fourth big change that has occurred is that we now have better information to measure what really influences learning. How do people learn best? So we now have more longitudinal studies looking, tracking different types of people over their lifespan and how they learn or not learn. We can now compare internationally what differences might or might not exist. What is true for all brains, all human brains, all ages, and what might have slight variations based on culture, the meaning of cultural artifacts, like how we write. So for example, in Japanese, if you write 21, you write knee, jeans, eachie, right? That looks two, 10, one. That sounds totally logical. Compared to 21, which now in our stylized versions of Arabic numerals, the kid thinks three. Because it doesn't make any sense, the numbers that we have in Arabic numerals. So the pathways might be different from how the Japanese might interpret numbers from how we might interpret Arabic numerals. Did you know that before when Arabic numerals were first written, it made sense? Because one had one angle. Two had two angles. Three or three. But we don't, now we write, you know, all different ways. So there's no logic in the brain for that, right? Okay. So we know what we try to teach teachers is there's a really, really complexity here. And that there is things that are going to be unique about different types of populations, too. And finally, we can finally compare, thanks to John had his really monumental work in educational research, comparing quantitative and qualitative methodologies. He has what he calls the basic effect size, what has a stronger impact based on a thousand meta, he's done any meta analysis for more than a thousand meta analysis of what influences student learning outcomes. And using that scale, we can say, well, yes, being born low birth weight or in poverty can have certain impacts on your potential to learn. And so can teacher clarity in the classroom, as well as communication skills, or different methodologies of teaching. So he's put on a single scale, looking at all of these different things together. So combined, information from neuroscience and better information about what really makes people learn, that's the new vision of where education is going. So this means, I'm going to skip this one. The one thing that has bubbled to the surface that's kind of exciting and kind of scary is that we found, even though if you begin to teach teachers or teach humans, anybody, anybody who's learning some of this factual information, many people will still cling to what they believe, because it's a part of you. More or less about the age of eight or nine, we come up with this idea of a theory of brain. I know how I learned. I know how I learned. And you think about that in confirm this throughout your lifespan. They go, I need to listen to that. And if I write it down three times, I say it over and over again. That's how I invest. You figure it out. And you basically reinforce that year after year after year until you're 20, 30, 40, 58, and you're so stuck in the way of thinking that even if I present all the facts in the world right now, some of you are going to still say, that's not true. That's not true for me. At least that's not true for me. I can tell you learning styles is an if. But if you have been told throughout your lifespan and in school, until you got here, somebody says that you're a very auditory person or you're a very visual learner, but you've been told that so long, it's really hard for you to let go of it because it's almost part of your identity, right? So I'm going to ask what those of you who are here earlier this morning with you seem so beautiful. Can you suspend your beliefs for a second? Just listen, hear me out. And let's think if you can open your mind a little bit and think, is it possible? And I can tell you something that just sort of totally clashes what you have thought for the past 40 years. Let it go for a minute. And let's just see if we can get some new information in here to sort of mix it around, think about it a little bit more, okay? So open yourself up to that idea. The key idea here is what we've been working with your teachers on is that to get them to go, old school is old school. Before it was enough to know things and to show up, now we are asking teachers to deal with the most complex organism in the universe, their brains. They have to think, you guys use your brains every single day. How many of you have thought about how you really are learning? Most of us never take the time even to think. How do I know? How do I learn? That's the first exercise I do with my students in the class of Harvard, the first discussion board is, how do you think you, how do you learn best? When are your best learning moments? How do you learn best? And most of them say, well, since I'm such a visual learner, I really need to be a little bit better than I need to have a cup in the morning and ask them, the lecture show is like a meeting process or whatever. And they have these things that they read in the magazines or whatever and they've been told or whatever. But after 15 weeks of class, they have very different answers, right? Because they really appreciate how complicated the brain is and they're able to think in a different way, okay? So this is what we're trying to get teachers to do, is to appreciate that designing anything in education without knowing the brain is kind of like asking you to sew a glove without understanding the hand. How can we do this? How can teachers pretend to be the most efficient in intervening in classrooms without understanding the brain, at least at the basics? So this is the big shift that's occurring now in education around the world. So this combines information from this field of mind, brain, health and education, what we know from psychology, education, neuroscience, nutrition, chemistry, biology, taking the learning sciences, combining it with the information you might have from Hattie, and coming up with a whole new way that teachers will be trained in a hierarchical fashion instead of just throwing spaghetti at the wall of professional development, whatever, whatever, whatever. We have an order of things that they need to learn, okay? So this new order is, it's pretty powerful and it actually is a new way of thinking about it. And this is, I'm so pleased to hear that in the primary high schools we're reviewing this, okay? Where do we begin with each of the groups? And they're excited about it too, so hopefully this is going to take off within your group. Because it's a direct reflection of what was recommended to 34 nations for the OECD report, I did the, the honor of working on part three of this and looking at, okay, so what is now new, teachers' new pedagogical knowledge? What do teachers now need to know in the modern era to be able to be, you know, petition teachers? Okay, so that's where we're going with this. We explained to the teachers that this is where it comes down to you. The first thing is to get rid of the myths in society, what people think about the brain that just isn't true, but it's been repeated so often. I don't know if you've ever heard of this phenomenon, when people get into an echo chamber of information and they hear the same thing over and over again, they believe it. Ever heard of that happening? Like in modern politics? So this is the idea, how do we get away from just what I'm used to reading, hearing this over and over, seeing 10% of your brain is used in this paper every other day? How can I get away from that and get to the real science? So the first thing we teach teachers is to get rid of the bad information. The second thing we teach teachers are only six core principles, six things that the neuroscientists, this is only last year, 2017, agreed. We can tell teachers, this is valid information from the laboratory that is true for human beings, for all human beings, these six little things. And these 21 other things, so the six things include things like your brain is classic until you die. There's no set, no learning without memory and attention. All the learning passes through the filter of prior experience. The brain changes every day at a molecular level, even before you have changes in the paper. So there's six things there, and Chad will share them with you because I already should have told you. So there's a video for each of one of the principles of the six things. And then there's 21 things that are also true, but there's a huge amount of human variation, so you have to be very careful. For example, do you think motivation is important for learning? Yes. But what motivates you might not motivate him, right? So motivation is important, but there's a big variation. Do you think that sleep is important for learning? Yes. Oh yeah, you feel it right now. We know that sleep is vital for learning, but we also know that anywhere between four and a half and 12 hours is normal. Eight hours is average. So nobody can dictate to another person what they need in terms of sleep, right? So we know that there's these 21 things that have this variability and humanity, but that's all true, right? After that, we ask them, okay, let's integrate the element of culture. Then we can say, this is what you should be doing in your classroom, okay? So it's a different kind of a process to help teachers get up to speed here. So what we're going to ask you to do right now, help me out here. Got that piece of paper? This is something called a one-minute essay. On any piece of paper you have or on your computer, on your telephone, I'm going to give you 60 seconds and you only have to do two things. Name at least one thing you know about your brain and learning and one thing you want to know or you think might be a myth and you want clarification, okay? So something you know and something you want to know. You have 60 seconds individually. Please do this. Go. With one of the person next to you, maximum two. Just say, I know this and I want to know this. Here's the deal. The other person, if they say, oh, you want to know why math is in the right hemisphere or something and the other person says no, don't you remember? She said there's no such thing as localization. If you could answer with the person, the person knows something that is wrong, correct them. And if they want to know something and you know the answer, tell them, okay? But we're looking for things that bubble to the surface, things that nobody knows, okay? So go. You have two minutes just to share with one other person, please. Something you know and something you want to know. Let's give you some practice information. I can fulfill the title of this talk. So they'll do, I'm just going to use some practice information that might respond to some of your questions, okay? Basically, how does your brain learn? All learning occurs through what? Think yourself. It occurs through the senses. All learning occurs through your senses or the memory of your senses, right? So what happens is that you receive stimulus, stimuli that come up, they go through your brainstem, they hit the bottom of your brainstem and they branch out into 12 cranial nerves, okay? These cranial nerves are related to different senses, okay? 11 of them are together, which is so interesting. Only one is sort of out there, which is strange, which is, believe it or not, which sense do you think is not connected to the other ones? Which sense do you now know elicits the strongest members? Smell. So weird. So the, so the cranial nerve related to smell is actually not with all the other ones, which is kind of strange to me. But anyways, enters your brainstem. What is the first stop that any, any stimulus makes? The first thing it does is your brain looks and says, in the mid-billa, is this anything I should be afraid of? Should I run away from the situation? What do we have to do about this fear? Why? Because it's self-preservation. The brain is out to save the body because the body is where the brain is, right? So the first stop, immediately, is a something careful. Then less than a split second later, it goes front of lobes and bounces back to the hippocampus, the hippocampus, one or the other, looking at my, to actually figure out, do I really, really true? Like if you, if you jump, have you ever been startled and you didn't know why? But you jump because it's, you know, try to, try to, it's easier to be, you know, air on the side of caution, right? It looks like a snake, I'm going to jump, right? So you make them as you jump, but less than a second later, the hippocampus says, no, it's not, that's a key chain, okay? So then you calm down, right? So basically, you know that what's going on in your brain is a first check through vital memory hubs because there's no, one of the six principles, there's no new learning that does not pass through the filter of prior experience. The first thing your brain does because it's so smart is it tries to know what it already knows about the information. Can I relate this to anything that they already know? Because why? It economizes energy. The brain demands so much energy. It's two percent in your body weight that uses like around 20 percent of its calories. So it's basically like diet, or good diet. The biggest thing is check out, do I know there's anything about this? Because it's so smart that it economizes the energy to learn. And we'll understand later this is called cognitive load. The cognitive load that you deal with in order to learn something, that energy that you're using in order to learn something, can be economized if you already know something about the new thing. So the first thing your brain does is checks for those things. So those are the, that's the simplest answer about how did your brain learn anything versus checking for prior knowledge and then it's looking for information. So with that as a premise, I want to know what is something you want to know? All that chatter nobody wants to know. Yes, okay. Very interesting question. So we know that there are multiple networks that are required for learning. Okay, sorry. So the question is that we know that there's multiple networks that are required for learning. So is there any moment in the brain that you come overloaded by so much happening at the same time? Okay, which is precisely why that within schooling, for example, for reading, let's use that as an example, there's one network related to symbol to sound, right? One network does something like that, right? Another network is for semantic memory. What is the meaning of that word? Another network relates to working memory. And I remember the beginning of the letter of the word by the end of the word. So those things have to happen simultaneously. Normally in school, we try to rehearse each of these networks with different activities. Each network requires a different kind of stimulus for it to work, right? So therefore, normally within school settings, we're actually doing things actually one at a time, we're enforcing certain networks at different times. But in order to have the action, to be able to show you can read, you have to remind all of us. And this is what's so interesting. A brain that's just learning something new is all over the place. You look at a brain scan of a new reader, and it's a mess. They're kind of connecting all kinds of stuff all over the place, right? But if you look at a efficient reader, somebody who reads really well, they basically pulled away all the extra fluff, and they're so efficient. You use as far less energy in your brain when you are an expert in something, okay? So when you first learn to drive, your brain will go. You are all over the place, heavy energy load, total focus, right? Wait, you don't have to drive, right? Okay, so you remember when you learned how to drive? Was it T-Fall? A little bit, yeah. Okay, so we know there's a lot of energy that is used for new learning. But now, you probably don't even think about it. Sometimes you can get in the car, especially on Friday. You get home, you don't even know how you got there, right? Because it's automated, right? It's totally, it's something that has been perpetuated. This in the brain is because that myelin sheath, that white matter, has been enforced, reinforced so much that the speed of the signal is so quick, it's automated, okay? So your learning becomes automatic. The more rehearsal you have, the less energy your brain has to spend to find that information, okay? So can it become overwhelmed? Typically, because we do not always stimulate all of them at the same time, except for when the sheaths were staged and we're combining those to do another slow set, normally you're not overwhelmed, okay? However, this gets to another question, does anybody have anything about emotions? Okay, look at that. So I just wanted to know about the implications that we can try to tell ourselves to be rational. Okay, she's asking about whether or not you can separate irrationality or being rational with emotional states. Write this down. There is no decision for how to motion. In fact, it's physiologically impossible to grade. The way the circuits go, the first stop is in the amygdala and in emotional memory cats. The first stop is that you cannot make any decision without emotions. Now, can you learn, I think it was Plato who said, learn to react to the right person and the right moment and the right way at the right time with the right tone of voice. That is something that you can do top down and sort of think about that. But the fact that the emotion will always be there is very important to remember. There's nobody, there's no such thing as pretending to be totally rational. I'm thinking that the full head is a better way to make a decision. Maybe that's a better way to interact with other people, but it's not true that you're not going to be experiencing that emotion. Okay, something you want to know about the brain. So if your brain is always learning and telling you that your brain is always making new connections, what's happening in the brain of somebody who might have Alzheimer's? Alzheimer's is misnamed as a neuro-cognitive or neuro-generative disease. That's kind of not exactly right. The neuron, the neuronal body often stays intact. What ends up faltering is that from the neuron body you have dendrites that stick out and you have the synapses to other neurons, right, where your memories, the connections are there, right. What happens is the neuronal body may stay intact, but the dendrites start to wither. They start to falter. Two things that are very important to know about this, the concept, write this down, use it or lose it. Okay, one of the main problems that we have between the loving communities that we have is that maybe mom or dad serves good things and they say, hey, come and live with me, okay, fine. And then they sit down and they step, the lunchtime comes around, they say, oh, let me help you. You say, no, no, mom, it's okay, sit down. Okay, so mom sits there like a vegetable and you have just been entered to a faster decline. Use it or lose it. They looked at studies and said, okay, what helps prolong a person's life? Taking care of a dog, taking care of a plant, doing Sudoku, doing posture puzzles, or learning or using a foreign language. Which one of these helps you live longer? All of them, all of them. Because the first two, like it's total guilt, you die, the dog dies, right? So you say, okay, so the second two, Sudoku and Pawsford are good for your mind, but it's the same thing over and over and over again. Sudoku and Pawsford are just the same kind of stimulation, right? But using or learning a foreign language into old age has been shown by only the outside to save off the natural cognitive decline between four, five, six years. A person will go in, he can't stop it forever, but it will slow down the natural cognitive decline because you can never really protect the language. The language has so many elements to it, right? So you're always, you know, learning something new. So you don't know why you hit, you better learn it now. Okay, so that's it. Okay, something else, on the back. There's a, that's a great question. There is something that's called default mode network, which is really cool and discovered kind of by accident. When they were doing brain scans, you know, they put somebody in a machine and they say, do nothing for a second, okay? Okay, now, put your fingers on the keyboard and let's take an MRI to see what parts of your brain are working. So what they do is, it's a subtraction problem. They take what you're doing minus what you, when you were not doing anything. What they discovered crazy is that your brain is never not doing anything. It's like impossible to not do anything. They should still don't think of anything. See, you ever think of nothing? This is like, oh, yeah, you think you're thinking you're never thinking of nothing, never. And what they find is almost 90% of the energy of the brain is still intact, is still being used doing nothing, okay? Related to the second part, having to sleep or whatever. Sleep is one of the number one difficulties that we find in society today. It is almost, let me just try here, a little pull. How many of you feel you sleep enough, you sleep well? All one of you, all two of you, three of you of the three. Here's the problem, when you, it is one of the greatest public health problems we have today, is that most people do not feel rested enough, they do not feel they slept well enough. Part of it is getting to bed, okay? One of the things that's getting to bed. One of the great recommendations is this, you know it's floating around in there, you know what? Then take it out of there and make a piece of paper to live on. So just write out anything that you might be thinking, just let it go. Then you're not worried about tomorrow you won't remember, take it out, it's there. It's there, you will get back to it at some point. So sort of give yourself some space. The other thing is, there's a wonderful new area of study that's called sleep hygiene, you know like hygiene, but this is for sleep. It means your bed is not for men for anything, for two things. Got it? No TV, that is not what your bed is for, okay? So part of sleep hygiene is creating, you know, the atmosphere, where do you go to sleep best, okay? The other thing, the other half of this has to do with sleep and what happens during sleep. Many of you wake up feeling like none to the world because sleep occurs in cycles and the cycles are related to brain waves, right? And the brain waves when they're the most exciting, you're sort of in this dream state, but then you go back down, you go to deep sleep, that's when you can't wake anybody up, right? That's as close to death as you did in your life. And you do these cycles several times a night, okay? The difficulty is, is if you are waking up naturally, okay, go home tomorrow, Saturday, no alarm, anytime you are waking up naturally, you're waking up from the dream state, okay? That's the norm, okay? Now, what is so important about sleep and learning is that there's a consolidation of memories only during dream state because there's a combination of neurotransmitters, chemicals in the brain that consolidate memory, but only during dream state. And then when you go into the other state, it helps you rest and become focused. This is why mantra of learning, two of the important things for learning are memory and attention. So, which does which? Dreaming or sleep, which does which? One of them does memory and one of them does attention. Which does which? Memory is when you're dreaming and sleep is when you can pay attention. So, if you slept well enough, you can pay attention. And if you had gone into dream state, you could consolidate your memory. This is why in school, you kind of, you probably could just do when you were a kid, right? You study all my loans or something, you keep pulling them all night, or it's like the broken thing to do, and you get to class and you steal all these answers and you get a good grade. But I ask you the same questions 24 hours later. You don't remember anything, right? Basically, because we have not consolidated that memory, which is a longer memory where it can become learning, but it can be really used in that sort of other context. So pulling all nighters is not good for anybody. You might have good short-term results, but it's very bad. When you are sleep deprived, what is your body and what come to do? It's sickness. There are so many wrong things about not sleeping well, guys. So, how do you learn? Now, here's the thing that most people don't accept or believe or understand, but once you tell them that they, oh, that makes sense. Sleep is a behavior. And like any behavior, it can be modified. So if you decide I'm going to be a better sleeper, you can learn to do that. You can learn to sleep better. And I highly recommend it. It's one of the best things we can ever do. Many people, though, since you're not able, you can teach yourself. There's an app that's called Sleep Title. It's free for the first month. Learn quickly. You can learn in the first month. I promise. What does it do? It basically says, you write in. The latest that you can wake up is like 6.45, okay? So what does the app do? Because when you're deep sleep, you're like not moving at all. And when you're in dreamscape, you're moving a bit more. It figures out if your sleep cycle is more like 70 minutes or more like 90 minutes or whatever it is, the average. And then it wakes you up right after you finish your dreamscape, which would be the most natural way to wake up. Try it. It's so cold. I've been cold because I don't have one. I don't have one because since I was 13, I trained myself to wake up. I always set an alarm just in case, but I never have to wake up with my alarm, even when I should be just like, right? I said, okay, I gotta get up. I had to take a plane yesterday at 5. So I had to wake up at 4.25. So I wake up at 4.17 because that was as close to the dreamscape as the natural way to wake up. You can train yourself to sleep better. Think about that, okay? So first thing is getting to bed nicely. The other thing is going to sleep hygiene. The other thing is how do you wake up? All of those things are unfortunate as far as learning is concerned. Okay? Somebody in the back? Somebody you want to know? Yes. Here is your moment that you have the best conditions for remembering and attention is your best time for learning. It is not that everybody is most alert at nine in the morning or most alert at whatever. Another parentheses is about sleep. Al J. Hobson and Herbert have spent like 40 years only studying sleep. If we put everybody into dark rooms with no sound and just let people sleep at the pace that they'd like to, the average human being does not sleep eight hours for the work, eight hours and have eight hours of leisure time. That is contrived by society. If we could do whatever we wanted to do, it's more or less four hours, I suppose. So this is why I think people say, well, I'm a morning person. I'm a night person. Yeah, but that's totally individual. It's the moment you will feel most alert. There's no such thing as blankly saying everybody is most alert and certain. You see sometimes I say, well, how come it brings brain questions that localized when somebody had traumatic brain injury or somebody had stroke, they lost flexibility. One of the biggest problems that we have in our therapeutic interventions after traumatic brain injury, for example, or after stroke, is that it's very short. You usually take somebody for like six weeks to intensive therapy and say, okay, here's that. Take them home. That's as good as it gets. We found now that with more intensive and long-term therapy and interventions, recuperation is far higher. For example, the best person who writes on this is Norman Deutsch. He's got a whole case studies and the brain appeals itself and brain's way of healing or something like that. He tells the story of Paul Bacchimita. He was a med student at the time. His father had a stroke. He can't, his entire right side of his body is paralyzed. He can't speak. So after about six weeks, they take him home and because he doesn't believe that's all there is to it. He makes dad wash out empty pots to sort of get his barriers again. He thinks of a small room so dad has to crawl to learn how to get his bearings again. After about a year of intense therapy, that looks good. He got married again. Nobody can tell he's had stroke, right? Seven and a half years later, he dies and so what is Paul Bacchimita? I want to see the brain. Very dad. Okay, good night. Okay, let me say, okay, I want to see the brain. And he looks and it is stunning that he finds that a third of the brain has gone. The entire 90% of the brain is gone. Things that you would look at this and say, okay, this person's going to be a vegetable for the rest of their life. What else did he find? He found that in exactly cross lateral areas in the brain, there was increased white matter which shows that other parts of the brain have taken on the duties of the other companies. The bigger problem we have with traumatic brain injuries, depending when it happens. If it happens from a car accident, it's a one-time thing, depending on the gravity of it, the recuperation can be crazy. If it's something as crazy as the Superbowl, when you are banging your head, this is staying over and over and over again, with very little time for recuperation, that your brain is like stopped swelling and all the rest, then you go back and you bend it again, there's a higher, there's a less likely probability of recuperation just by doing their recuperation. So very, very unfortunate. I think we have time for maybe, because I need to do another exercise, so one more. He would be desperate. Yes, go ahead. That's a great question. What is your brain? Is your brain a muscle? No, Ontario, all popular cartoons, your brain is not a muscle. What is your brain? An organ. What's another important organ in your body? Heart. Your heart, okay? Gull of thumb. What's good for your heart is good for your brain. Okay, second rule. As close to the source as possible. Supplements do not do the same thing as workers. Third thing, everything in moderation. So I had somebody asking, oh, and what about red wine? I was like, hey, red wine was actually an antioxidant. He was, okay, I'm going to say it. You said, no, it's not like binge drinking. It's like a glass of red wine or whatever. There are some things that are considered antioxidants, okay? So those three things are basic. There's all these books that say the perfect diet for your brain, blah, blah, blah, blah. Nutrition is one of the 21 tenets, okay? It's true that good nutrition influences your ability to learn. But dietary needs, there's a certain thing that, okay, all humans need certain kinds of things. But different people want to eat two times a day. Other people want to eat eight times a day. And some people want to eat way more carbs than happens to the other people. Different people have different balances. So yes, nutrition is important, but you can't really dictate exactly where. Just one more. Did you want to say something? Okay, how can memory be improved? The good news is that everything, everything can always, always, independent of your starting point, everything can always be improved, okay? The point is how, how do you, how committed are you to doing this, okay? So when we looked at the only, there's only one longitudinal brain scan of people from pre-adolescence into 26 years of age, just as JP and UCLA, sort of saying what a brain change that happened. He's the guy who's sort of alarmist. He said, the brain is, we're organizing a self-adolescence in a private school. The brain is still, we're organizing itself in the early 20s. And he's the one who upped your insurance. He said, the brain is organizing itself until 25 years of age, right? That's when they're moving a camera to carve. Okay, what we figured out, this is what was so interesting about this shift, is that what, what do we stop doing around 20, doing 24, what, what do we stop doing? Going to school, okay? So if you were to have managed to keep watching these brains, which he is, into later life, again, use it or lose it. So the more you continually are learning new things, are curious about things, reading on something else, diving deeper into some new information, keeping your brain active, the better gets at whatever your, whatever it is you're practicing. If you say, I need to enhance my recall, then practice. There's a woman in my class last semester, lover, seven years old. And when I told her this, she says, okay, when she sat out, she just sent me to New Alaska. She is the memory champion of Florida now. She, you know that one where they call the, the cars, like, I mean, I was going to record it, but you have to like, memorize. She's the champion. Because you can do it, okay? Anybody can let, let, you know, she spent the past year doing this, okay? So her devotion to the past was also unique, right? Just be happy, aware of the great news and all of this is your brain is incredibly plastic throughout the lifetime. Our challenge is to decide, okay, how much am I going to commit to this new learning? Because, I'll be too slow to say, oh, there's hearts to learners, okay? But that's okay. Get over that hump. The more you do it, the easier things get. The problem is just to accept, you know, learning is not the easiest thing in the world. We sell this network. It's a lot of stuff has to happen, right? But it is always possible to learn more, okay? To go deeper. So you're going to do something for me now. Remember I said you were going to have to do a three, two, one. Is it possible you heard three things that you didn't know before? Two things that you're like, oh, I want to know more about this other thing. Especially since you didn't ask that question because we didn't have enough time. One hour of time. Two things I want to know more about and one thing that you might think, I'm going to do differently in my own life, professionally or personally, based on this information about how my brain learns. Just take it time to write this down. And, uh, make them cascade. I'm going to say, the three things that are new, that could be the two things that are going to go about, which could be the one thing that you do. So, they don't have to use a separate thing. I'm going to wrap up by telling you one thing. Your brain cannot not learn. That's kind of a powerful thing to understand. That's basically evolution. You just can't. It's survival we learn just because that's what your brain does. Okay? But you guys will understand, and you know this on a daily basis, that there are things that are called risk factors and protective factors. Some things that will block the way you're able to learn, your natural flow of things, and some things that protect you from that. And I just want to motivate you to identify and also flip. Risk and protective factors always have the same roots. And what you do is, when you can identify where your risk factor is, can we flip that to the other side? How do you do that? That's one of the best ways to sort of get over this and to be able to learn throughout our lifespan. That's what our job is. That's what life is to learn. So, how can we make this the most natural thing possible? Okay? If any of you feel brave when you walk back up to your office, say out loud, somebody else, well, I'm going to change this. And the minute you said it, that's a promise, right? So, that might be a little bit too much for some people, but if you feel comfortable and would like to, I highly, highly motivate you to write to me and to say, well, these are the two things I want to follow up on. And where do I start? Where's the good information? Or I was reading this. Is this really junk? Or is this really good stuff? I just ask. Because maybe I won't know it, but I will know other people who might know it, and I will try to help you find the highest quality evidence to base the information on and count out. Okay? Thank you so much for your time.