Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (10 page)

It isn’t just talking on a cell phone. It’s putting on makeup, eating, rubber-necking at an accident. One study showed that simply reaching for an object while driving a car multiplies the risk of a crash or near-crash by nine times. Given what we know about the attention capacity of the human brain, these data are not surprising.

4) The brain needs a break

Our need for timed interruptions reminds me of a film called
Mondo Cane
, which holds the distinction of being the worst movie my parents reported ever seeing. Their sole reason for hating this movie was one disturbing scene: farmers force-feeding geese to make
pâté de foie gras
. Using fairly vigorous strokes with a pole, farmers literally stuffed food down the throats of these poor animals. When a goose wanted to regurgitate, a brass ring was fastened around its throat, trapping the food inside the digestive tract. Jammed over and over again, such nutrient oversupply eventually created a stuffed liver, pleasing to chefs around the world. Of course, it did nothing for the nourishment of the geese, sacrificed in the name of expediency.

My mother would often relate this story to me when she talked about being a good or bad teacher. “Most teachers overstuff their students,” she would exclaim, “like those farmers in that awful movie!” When I went to college, I soon discovered what she meant. And now that I am a professor who has worked closely with the business community, I can see the habit close up. The most common communication mistakes? Relating too much information, with not enough time devoted to connecting the dots. Lots of force-feeding, very little digestion. This does nothing for the nourishment of the listeners, whose learning is often sacrificed in the name of expediency.

At one level, this is understandable. Most experts are so familiar with their topic that they forget what it is like to be a novice. Even if they remember, experts can become bored with having to repeat the fundamentals over and over again. In college, I found that a lot of my professors, because they had to communicate at such elementary levels, were truly fed up with teaching. They seemed to forget that the information was brand new to us, and that we needed the time to digest it, which meant a need for consistent breaks. How true indeed that expertise doesn’t guarantee good teaching!

Such needs are not the case just in classrooms. I have observed similar mistakes in sermons, boardrooms, sales pitches, media stories—anywhere information from an expert needs to be transferred to a novice.

ideas

The 10-minute rule provides a way out of these problems. Here’s the model I developed for giving a lecture, for which I was named the Hoechst Marion Rousell Teacher of the Year.

Lecture design: 10-minute segments

I decided that every lecture I’d ever give would come in discrete modules. Since the 10-minute rule had been known for many years, I decided the modules would last only 10 minutes. Each segment would cover a single core concept—always large, always general, always filled with “gist,”
and always explainable in one minute
. Each class was 50 minutes, so I could easily burn through five large concepts in a single period. I would use the other 9 minutes in the segment to provide a detailed description of that single general concept. The trick was to ensure that each detail could be easily traced back to the general concept with minimal intellectual effort. I regularly took time out from content to explain the relationship between the detail and the core concept in clear and explicit terms. It was like allowing the geese to rest between stuffings.

Then came the hardest part: After 10 minutes had elapsed, I had to be finished with the core concept. Why did I construct it that way? Three reasons:

1) Given the tendency of an audience to check out 20 percent of the way into a presentation, I knew I initially had only about 600 seconds to earn the right to be heard—or the next hour would be useless. I needed to do something after the 601
^st
second to “buy” another 10 minutes.

2) The brain processes meaning before detail. Providing the gist, the core concept,
first
was like giving a thirsty person a tall glass of water. And the brain likes hierarchy. Starting with general concepts naturally leads to explaining information in a hierarchical fashion. You have to do the general idea
first
. And then you will see that 40 percent improvement in understanding.

3) It’s key that the instructor explains the lecture plan at the beginning of the class, with liberal repetitions of “where we are” sprinkled throughout the hour. This prevents the audience from trying to multitask.

If the instructor presents a concept without telling the audience where that concept fits into the rest of the presentation, the audience is forced to simultaneously listen to the instructor and attempt to divine where it fits into the rest of what the instructor is saying.

This is the pedagogical equivalent of trying to drive while talking on a cell phone. Because it is impossible to pay attention to ANY two things at once, this will cause a series of millisecond delays throughout the presentation. The linkages must be clearly and repetitively explained.

Bait the hook

After 9 minutes and 59 seconds, the audience’s attention is getting ready to plummet to near zero. If something isn’t done quickly, the students will end up in successively losing bouts of an effort to stay with me. What do they need? Not more information of the same type. That would be like geese choking on the food with no real chance to digest. They also don’t need some completely irrelevant cue that breaks them from their train of thought, making the information stream seem disjointed, unorganized, and patronizing. They need something so compelling that they blast through the 10-minute barrier and move on to new ground—something that triggers an orienting response toward the speaker and captures executive functions, allowing efficient learning.

Do we know anything so potentially compelling? We sure do. The ECS—emotionally competent stimuli. So, every 10 minutes in my lecture, I decided to give my audiences a break from the firehose of information and send them a relevant ECS, which I now call “hooks.”

As I did more teaching, I found the most successful hooks always followed these three principles:

1) The hook had to trigger an emotion. Fear, laughter, happiness, nostalgia, incredulity—the entire emotional palette could be stimulated, and all worked well. I deliberately employed Darwin here, describing some threatening event or, with appropriate taste, some reproductive event, even something triggering pattern matching. Narratives can be especially strong, especially if they are crisp and to the point.

2) The hook had to be relevant. It couldn’t be just any story or anecdote. If I simply cracked a joke or delivered some irrelevant anecdote every 10 minutes, the presentation seemed disjointed. Or worse: The listeners began to mistrust my motives; they seemed to feel as if I were trying to entertain them at the expense of providing information. Audiences are really good at detecting disorganization, and they can become furious if they feel patronized. Happily, I found that if I made the hook very relevant to the provided content, the group moved from feeling entertained to feeling engaged. They stayed in the flow of my material, even though they were really taking a break.

3) The hook had to go between modules. I could place it at the end of the 10 minutes, looking backward, summarizing the material, repeating some aspect of content. Or I could place it at the beginning of the module, looking forward, introducing new material, anticipating some aspect of content. I found that starting a lecture with a forward-looking hook relevant to the entire day’s material was a great way to corral the attention of the class.

Exactly what did these hooks look like? This is where teaching can truly become imaginative. Because I work with psychiatric issues, case histories explaining some unusual mental pathology often rivet students to the upcoming (and drier) material. Business-related anecdotes can be fun, especially when addressing lay audiences in the corporate world. I often illustrate a talk about how brain science relates to business by addressing its central problem: vocabulary. I like the anecdote of the Electrolux Vacuum Cleaner company, a privately held corporation in Finland trying to break into the North American market. They had plenty of English speakers on staff, but no Americans. Their lead marketing slogan? “If it sucks, it must be an Electrolux.”

When I started placing hooks in my lectures, I immediately noticed changes in the audience members’ attitudes. First, they were still interested at the end of the first 10 minutes. Second, they seemed able to maintain their attention for another 10 minutes or so, as long as another hook was supplied at the end. I could win the battle for their attention in 10-minute increments.

But then, halfway through the lecture, after I’d deployed two or three hooks, I found I could skip the fourth and fifth ones and still keep their attention fully engaged. I have found this to be true for students in 1994, when I first used the model, and in my lectures to this day.

Does that mean my model has harnessed the timing and power of emotional salience in human learning? That teachers and business professionals everywhere should drop whatever they are doing and incorporate its key features? I have no idea, but it would make sense to find out. The brain doesn’t pay attention to boring things, and I am as sick of boring presentations as you are.

Do one thing at a time

The brain is a sequential processor, unable to pay attention to two things at the same time. Businesses and schools praise multitasking, but research clearly shows that it reduces productivity and increases mistakes. Try creating an interruption-free zone during the day—turn off your e-mail, phone, IM program, or BlackBerry—and see whether you get more done.

Summary

Rule #4
People don’t pay attention to boring things.

•
The brain’s attentional “spotlight” can focus on only one thing at a time: no multitasking.

•
We are better at seeing patterns and abstracting the meaning of an event than we are at recording detail.

•
Emotional arousal helps the brain learn.

•
Audiences check out after 10 minutes, but you can keep grabbing them back by telling narratives or creating events rich in emotion.

Get more at www.brainrules.net/attention

The first mind belongs to Kim Peek. He was born in 1951 with not one hint of his future intellectual greatness. He has an enlarged head, no corpus callosum, and a damaged cerebellum. He could not walk until age 4, and he can get catastrophically upset when he doesn’t understand something, which is often. Diagnosing him in childhood as mentally disabled, his doctors wanted to place him in a mental institution. That didn’t happen, mostly because of the nurturing efforts of Peek’s father, who recognized that his son also had some very special intellectual gifts. One of those gifts is memory; Peek has one of the most prodigious ever recorded. He can read two pages at the same time, one with each eye, comprehending and remembering perfectly everything contained in the pages. Forever.

Though publicity shy, Peek’s dad once granted writer Barry Morrow an interview with his son. It was conducted in a library, where Peek demonstrated to Morrow a familiarity with literally every book (and every author) in the building. He then started quoting ridiculous—and highly accurate—amounts of sports trivia. After a long discussion about the histories of certain United States wars (Revolutionary to Vietnam), Morrow felt he had enough. He decided right then and there to write a screenplay about this man. Which he did: the Oscar-winning film
Rain Man
.

What is going on in the uneven brain of Kim Peek? Does his mind belong in a cognitive freak show, or is it only an extreme example of normal human learning? Something very important is occurring in the first few moments his brain is exposed to information, and it’s not so very different from what happens to the rest of us in the initial moments of learning.

The first few moments of learning give us the ability to remember something. The brain has different types of memory systems, many operating in a semi-autonomous fashion. We know so little about how they coordinate with each other that, to this date, memory is not considered a unitary phenomenon. We know the most about declarative memory, which involves something you can declare, such as “The sky is blue.” This type of memory involves four steps: encoding, storage, retrieval, and forgetting.

This chapter is about the first step. In fact, it is about the first few seconds of the first step. They are crucial in determining whether something that is initially perceived will also be remembered. Along the way, we will talk about our second famous mind. This brain, belonging to a man the research community called H.M., was legendary not for its extraordinary capabilities but for its extraordinary inabilities. We will also talk about the difference between bicycles and Social Security numbers.

memory and mumbo jumbo

Memory has been the subject of poets and philosophers for centuries. At one level, memory is like an invading army, allowing past experiences to intrude continuously onto present life. That’s fortunate. Our brains do not come fully assembled at birth, which means that most of what we know about the world has to be either experienced by us firsthand or taught to us secondhand. Our robust memory can provide great survival advantages—it is in large part why we’ve succeeded in overpopulating the planet. For a creature as physically weak as humans (compare your fingernail with the claw of even a simple cat, and weep with envy), not allowing experience to shape our brains would have meant almost certain death in the rough-and-tumble world of the open savannah.

But memory is more than a Darwinian chess piece. Most researchers agree that its broad influence on our brains is what truly makes us consciously aware. The names and faces of our loved ones, our own personal tastes, and especially our awareness of those names and faces and tastes, are maintained through memory. We don’t go to sleep and then, upon awakening, have to spend a week relearning the entire world. Memory does this for us. Even the single most distinctive talent of human cognition, the ability to write and speak in a language, exists because of active remembering. Memory, it seems, makes us not only durable but also human.

Let’s look at how it works. When researchers want to measure memory, they usually end up measuring retrieval. That’s because in order to find out if somebody has committed something to memory, you have to ask if he or she can recall it. So, how do people recall things? Does the storage space carrying the record of some experience just sit there twiddling its thumbs in our brains, waiting for some command to trot out its contents? Can we investigate storage separately from retrieval? It has taken more than a hundred years of research just to get a glimmer of a definition of memory that makes sense to a scientist. The story began in the 19th century with a German researcher who performed the first real science-based inquiry into human memory. He did the whole thing with his own brain.

Hermann Ebbinghaus was born in 1850. As a young man, he looked like a cross between Santa Claus and John Lennon, with his bushy brown beard and round glasses. He is most famous for uncovering one of the most depressing facts in all of education: People usually forget 90 percent of what they learn in a class within 30 days. He further showed that the majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours after class. This has been robustly confirmed in modern times.

Ebbinghaus designed a series of experimental protocols with which a toddler might feel at ease: He made up lists of nonsense words, 2,300 of them. Each word consisted of three letters and a consonant-vowel-consonant construction, such as TAZ, LEF, REN, ZUG. He then spent the rest of his life trying to memorize lists of these words in varying combinations and of varying lengths.

With the tenacity of a Prussian infantryman (which, for a short time, he was), Ebbinghaus recorded for over 30 years his successes and failures. He uncovered many important things about human learning during this journey. He showed that memories have different life spans. Some memories hang around for only a few minutes, then vanish. Others persist for days or months, even for a lifetime. He also showed that one could increase the life span of a memory simply by repeating the information in timed intervals. The more repetition cycles a given memory experienced, the more likely it was to persist in his mind. We now know that the space between repetitions is the critical component for transforming temporary memories into more persistent forms. Spaced learning is greatly superior to massed learning.

Ebbinghaus’s work was foundational. It was also incomplete. It did not, for example, separate the notion of memory from retrieval—the difference between learning something and recalling it later.

Go ahead and try to remember your Social Security number. Easy enough? Your retrieval commands might include things like visualizing the last time you saw the card, or remembering the last time you wrote down the number. Now try to remember how to ride a bike. Easy enough? Hardly. You do not call up a protocol list detailing where you put your foot, how to create the correct angle for your back, where your thumbs are supposed to be. The contrast proves an interesting point: One does not recall how to ride a bike in the same way one recalls nine numbers in a certain order. The ability to ride a bike seems quite independent from any conscious recollection of the skill. You were consciously aware when you were remembering your Social Security number, but not when riding a bike. Do you need to have conscious awareness in order to experience a memory? Or is there more than one type of memory?

The answer seemed clearer as more data came in. The answer to the first question was no, which answered the second question. There are at least two types of memories: memories that involve conscious awareness and memories that don’t. This gradually morphed into the idea that there were memories you could declare and memories you could not declare. Declarative memories are those that can be experienced in our conscious awareness, such as “this shirt is green,” “Jupiter is a planet,” or even a list of words. Non-declarative memories are those that cannot be experienced in our conscious awareness, such as the motor skills necessary to ride a bike. This does not explain everything about human memory. It does not even explain everything about declarative memory. But the rigor of Ebbinghaus gave future scientists their first real shot at mapping behavior onto a living brain.

Then a 9-year-old boy was knocked off his bicycle, forever changing the way brain scientists thought about memory.

where memories go

In his accident, H.M. suffered a severe head injury that left him with epileptic seizures. These seizures got worse with age, eventually culminating in one major seizure and 10 blackout periods every seven days. By his late 20s, H.M. was essentially dysfunctional, of potential great harm to himself, in need of drastic medical intervention.

The desperate family turned to famed neurosurgeon William Scoville, who decided that the problem lay within the brain’s temporal lobe (the brain region roughly located behind your ears). Scoville excised the inner surface of this lobe on both sides of the brain. This experimental surgery greatly helped the epilepsy. It also left H.M with a catastrophic memory loss. Since the day the surgery was completed, in 1953, H.M. has been unable to convert a new short-term memory into a long-term memory. He can meet you once and then an hour or two later meet you again, with absolutely no recall of the first visit. He has lost the conversion ability Ebbinghaus so clearly described in his research more than 50 years before.

Even more dramatically, H.M. can no longer recognize his own face in the mirror. Why? As his face aged, some of his physical features changed. But, unlike the rest of us, H.M. cannot take this new information and convert it into a long-term form. This leaves him more or less permanently locked into a single idea about his appearance. When he looks in the mirror and does not see this single idea, he cannot identify to whom the image actually belongs.

As horrible as that is for H.M., it is of enormous value to the research community. Because researchers knew precisely what was taken from the brain, it was easy to map which brain regions controlled the Ebbinghaus behaviors. A great deal of credit for this work belongs to Brenda Milner, a psychologist who spent more than 40 years studying H.M. and laid the groundwork for much of our understanding about the nerves behind memory. Let’s review for a moment the biology of the brain.

You recall the cortex—that wafer-thin layer of neural tissue that’s about the size of a baby blanket when unfurled. It is composed of six discrete layers of cells. It’s a busy place. Those cells process signals originating from many parts of the body, including those lassoed by your sense organs. They also help create stable memories, and that’s where H.M.’s unfortunate experience becomes so valuable.

Some of H.M.’s cortex was left perfectly intact; other regions, such as his temporal lobe, sustained heavy damage. It was a gruesome but ideal opportunity for studying how human memory forms.

This baby blanket doesn’t just lay atop the brain, of course. As if the blanket were capable of growing complex, sticky root systems, the cortex adheres to the deeper structures of the brain by a hopelessly incomprehensible thicket of neural connections. One of the most important destinations of these connections is the hippocampus, which is parked near the center of your brain, one in each hemisphere. The hippocampus is specifically involved in converting short-term information into longer-term forms. As you might suspect, it is the very region H.M. lost during his surgery.

The anatomical relationship between the hippocampus and the cortex has helped 21
^st
-century scientists further define the two types of memory. Declarative memory is any conscious memory system that is altered when the hippocampus and various surrounding regions become damaged. Nondeclarative memory is defined as those unconscious memory systems that are NOT altered (or at least not greatly altered) when the hippocampus and surrounding regions are damaged. We’re going to focus on declarative memory, a vital part of our everyday activities.

sliced and diced

Research shows that the life cycle of declarative memory can be divided into four sequential steps: encoding, storing, retrieving, and forgetting.

Encoding describes what happens at the initial moment of learning, that fleeting golden instant when the brain first encounters a new piece of declarative information. It also involves a whopping fallacy, one in which your brain is an active co-conspirator. Here’s an example of this subversion, coming once again from the clinical observations of neurologist Oliver Sacks.

The case involves a low-functioning autistic boy named Tom, who has become quite famous for being able to “do” music (though little else). Tom never received formal instruction in music of any kind, but he learned to play the piano simply by listening to other people. Astonishingly, he could play complex pieces of music with the skill and artistry of accomplished professionals, on his first try after hearing the music exactly once. In fact, he has been observed playing the song “Fisher’s Horn Pipe” with his left hand while simultaneously playing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” with his right hand while simultaneously singing “Dixie”! He also can play the piano backwards, that is, with his back to the keyboard and his hands inverted. Not bad for a boy who cannot even tie his own shoes.

When we hear about people like this, we are usually jealous. Tom absorbs music as if he could switch to the “on” position some neural recording device in his head. We think we also have this video recorder, only our model is not nearly as good. This is a common impression. Most people believe that the brain is a lot like a recording device—that learning is something akin to pushing the “record” button (and remembering is simply pushing “playback”). Wrong. In the real world of the brain— Tom’s or yours—nothing could be further from the truth. The moment of learning, of encoding, is so mysterious and complex that we have no metaphor to describe what happens to our brains in those first fleeting seconds.