"If you really want to take seriously how the brain actually performs, you’re going to have to rethink how you think about the entire classroom."
For the January 2010 executive briefing we spoke with molecular biologist John Medina about what we know about the brain today and what it can teach us about the most effective ways to learn. Dr. Medina, author of the bestseller Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, suggests specific ways that our knowledge about the brain can be used to boost learning and retention. The following is an abridged version of our interview with Dr. Medina.
Q: You begin by talking about how our brains have developed over millennia. While we are a long way from understanding all those mysteries, what we do know can help predict the most effective ways to teach in the classroom.
John Medina: We brain scientists don’t even know how the brain knows how to pick up a glass of water and drink it, let alone make a series of prescriptions that could actually tell really good teachers, really experienced education professionals, how to do their job.
But having said that, we’re not clueless about how the brain processes information. For example, we know something about the brain’s performance envelope, which is as follows: The brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an outdoor setting in unstable meteorological conditions and to do so in near constant motion. As I was writing Brain Rules, it hit me [that] if you wanted to design a learning environment that was directly opposed to what the brain is naturally good at doing, you would design something like a classroom.
Q: Your first Brain Rule is: Exercise Boosts Brain Power. But now, in many places, it is first school then play, or worse, it is all school and no play. But the research into brain development suggests that it should be the other way around.
John Medina: We get that backwards a lot. I think it’s because we fundamentally don’t understand the kinds of things that actually can boost brain performance.
We know from our evolutionary history that [our ancestors] probably were walking anywhere between 10 to 20 kilometers per day. We grew up and made our really fancy, really big fat brains based on the single idea that we were constantly in motion, aerobic motion.