Inter­ested a good, non-technical, sum­mary of the impli­ca­tions of recent brain sci­ence in our daily lives? Biol­o­gist John Med­ina offers that in his arti­cle below (as part of our Author Speaks Series) and in his new book: Brain Rules: 12 Prin­ci­ples for Sur­viv­ing and Thriv­ing at Work, Home, and School. Enjoy!

(Note: John will be in the Bay Area on April 8 and 9th, speak­ing at Google and San Jose Rotary).

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Brain Rules

– By John Medina

Go ahead and mul­ti­ply the num­ber 8,388,628 x 2 in your head. Can you do it in a few sec­onds? There is a young man who can dou­ble that num­ber 24 times in the space of a few sec­onds. He gets it right every time. There is a boy who can tell you the exact time of day at any moment, even in his sleep. There is a girl who can cor­rectly deter­mine the exact dimen­sions of an object 20 feet away. There is a child who at age 6 drew such life­like and pow­er­ful pic­tures, she got her own show at a gallery on Madi­son Avenue. Yet none of these chil­dren could be taught to tie their shoes. Indeed, none of them have an IQ greater than 50.

The brain is an amaz­ing thing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stephanie West Allen kindly alerted us of her impres­sive new ini­tia­tive and blog, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Dr. Jef­frey M. Schwartz, titled Brains On Pur­pose. They have part­nered to bring a series of sem­i­nars on neu­ro­science and con­flict res­o­lu­tion: Port­land, Ore­gon, in Novem­ber 2007, and San Fran­cisco Bay Area in Jan­u­ary 2008-so far. Dr. Schwartz has pre­vi­ously par­tic­i­pated in a sim­i­lar and fruit­ful ini­tia­tive on The Neu­ro­science of Lead­er­ship with David Rock. We wish them best luck in this excit­ing initiative.

Stephanie writes a great blog post on “What are you feel­ing?” “What am I feel­ing?” These ques­tions are tools for brain tam­ing, explain­ing how “A flurry of arti­cles appeared this week (such as this one in Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can: “Name that feel­ing: You’ll feel bet­ter”) about the neu­ro­science research show­ing that label­ing your feel­ings can quiet your brain and increase impulse control”

adding that…

“In our recent arti­cle “Lead Your Brain Instead Of Let­ting It Lead You,” we talk about the prac­tice of mak­ing men­tal notes (first described by Jeff in his book Dear Patrick: Life is Tough — Here’s Some Good Advice). Devel­op­ing your skill in mak­ing men­tal notes can bring relief when high con­flict occurs.” and “The more skilled you get at label­ing, the more quickly no mat­ter the sit­u­a­tion you can return to equa­nim­ity and composure.”

Check her post to learn more about the label­ing tech­nique. Devel­op­ing men­tal notes can be a very pow­er­ful way to self-regulate behav­ior, not too dif­fer­ent from cog­ni­tive ther­apy and emo­tional self-regulation tech­niques.

Excit­ing to see more sci­en­tists and prac­ti­tion­ers bring­ing research into prac­tice! As we have men­tioned, Brain Fit­ness is some­thing that applies to dif­fer­ent ages and dif­fer­ent pur­poses, and this is a great exam­ple for lawyers.