 Hello, once again, Dr. Nathan Gation at the Natural Family Health Clinic here with my weekly book review. This is my chance to share a book that I've read recently, or way, way, way in the past, which is the case today, and five lessons that I've learned from that book. I am in a different place today. I'm at the Natural Family Health Clinic, but just hanging out in our infusion lounge, which is where Dr. Kay has his patients get infusions of a variety of things. But the book that I want to share with you today is probably my favorite nonfiction book of all time, and it is Brain Rules, 12 Principles for Thriving and Surviving at Work Home and School by Dr. John Medina. Now, he is a developmental biologist. He looks at the neurological underpinnings of growth in the brain of how children who perhaps have developmental disabilities or learning disabilities, what is going on in their brains that may be different from other brains. This book came out quite a while ago, 2008, so it's getting on a little bit, but it's still so valuable for anybody who just wants to have a better functioning brain, who wants to understand their brain better, and perhaps a student who needs to do better in school. So I want to share with you five lessons from Brain Rules, and number one, this should not be a surprise if you've been watching my other books, but number one is our brain is built to move. Our brain is built to move in chapter two under, I think it's on page 31 here. He has what he calls the brain's performance envelope. So this is the circumstances, the environment, the activities in which the brain functions to its optimum based on the research, what we know about how the brain has developed. And it is this. The brain appears to be designed to solve problems in, sorry, let me do that one again. I've been practicing this. The brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to survival in an unstable outdoor environment, and to do so while in constant motion. So that's four parts there. So the main purpose of the brain is to solve problems. And the environment that it is built for, that it has evolved in, is unstable outdoor conditions, meteorological conditions as well as predatory conditions around us. And the problems that it solves are related to survival. It doesn't really care. Our brain doesn't care about anything other than survival and passing along our genes. But the thing that I find most interesting, of course, is that it has been built to do this while in constant motion. Our ancestors traveled 10 to 20 kilometers a day. That's about 12 miles per day for men, women a little bit less because they were staying at base camp where that was tending to children. But we need to move and today we don't. So this is certainly what I'm all about in my practice is getting people to move. This takes me to lesson number two, which is brain rule number one. So lesson number two, I just took brain rule number one, which is exercise boosts brain power. How does exercise boost brain power? Well, in the book, he shares one thing, which is consistent aerobic activity, 30 minutes, three times a week helps release something called brain derived neurotrophic factor as BDNF. Brain derived neurotrophic factor. And what BDNF is, is literally a fertilizer for the brain. It is the chemical, it is the substance that is released into the brain that allows neurons to grow, to expand, to synapse, to connect with other neurons, other brain cells, to form memories, to improve what is called executive function, which is the prefrontal cortex and making decisions and that type of thing. So exercise boosts brain power is lesson number two. Number three is repeat to remember. We must repeat to remember. If you are exposed to a piece of information, somebody tells you something and you just hear it the once you don't hear it again, especially if you don't hear it again within 30 seconds or reemphasize that material within 30 seconds, it's likely to be forgotten. This is crucial for students to understand, but this is also why I repeat things a lot. It's because it needs to be repeated 30 seconds, hours and then days after your first exposure for it to then begin the process of being converted to a long-term memory. And I say begin because the encoding of a long-term memory can actually take up to 10 years. So it's crucial that we repeat things to remember them. Lesson number four from brain rules is that vision trumps all other senses. Our sight, our vision and the part of the brain that is related to vision takes up somewhere around 60% of the brain's metabolic capacity throughout the day at rest. So as long as our eyes are open and oftentimes even when they're not, the brain is processing visual input and that is a larger portion of the brain than just about any other sense, even some others combined. So I love one of his recommendations based on this rule. It is throw out your PowerPoint presentations because PowerPoint is six hierarchical levels of text. It is not images. Even if you use clipart, just little pictures, it's not true images. And so this is why I started a little project in undergraduate called Brain Slides where I helped professors to redesign their slides to make them more effective at following these brain rules and following what we know about how the brain works. That has now converged or converted to a project where I'm creating visually appealing and educational and informative and inspiring clinical artwork. So check out Brain Slides, my page on Facebook for more on that coming up. So this oftentimes leads us to the question of learning styles. So this idea that you can be a kinesthetic learner, auditory learner, visual learner. This has been shown time and time again to be a myth. So the idea of learning styles is a myth in that an individual person does not have a style that they must be taught to be able to learn information well. There are many, many styles of teaching of information transfer, but you don't have to have a particular one to be able to learn it. That said, the best way to learn information is through multiple senses, multiple styles of teaching or learning. And so that's another brain rule is stimulate more of your senses. Write some smell, listen, read, write, do all of those ways will help improve your memory. And number five, we are natural and powerful explorers. So the other 11 brain rules are very specific. He talks about sleep, stress, male versus female brains, how the brain is wired. And this last one is a little more broad. It kind of takes a step back to say we know some things about the brain, but there's a lot that we don't. But the nature of the brain, the nature of our species of infants is curiosity, is exploration, is play. And we do know that these forms of learning are some of the most powerful. So we are natural explorers, we're curious about everything, and we should harness that. We should take advantage of that. I try to do that with my patients in the clinic as we're going through different movements. It's all about playing. It's experiencing the movement. It's trying something new, even if you may not do it well. This is why I encourage people to take up different activities like dancing, Tai Chi, Chi Gong, mountain climbing, yoga, whatever it might be to stimulate the brain with a novel movement. Really crucial for our health and for our cognitive, our mental well-being. So Brain Rules is a great book. He talks about many other things, like I said, stress, sleep. He talks about the difference between male and female brains. And because this book is some years old, he recently updated it. I don't know if it comes in the print version yet, but you can get online with a thirteenth rule. And his thirteenth rule is music. Music is very powerful. He was always involved in music growing up. And so that's another thing that can help enhance our brain function and improve our memory. So I hope you enjoyed this five lessons from Brain Rules, my weekly book review. Check it out. Down below, there are links to get on Amazon and on Audible. I recommend both, but certainly Audible. He's very entertaining when he reads it. Thanks again for watching. Keep moving, and I'll see you next week.