Read Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School Online
Authors: John Medina
Tags: #Self-Help
Educators should know how pictures transfer information. There are things we know about how pictures grab attention that are rock solid. We pay lots of attention to color. We pay lots of attention to orientation. We pay lots of attention to size. And we pay special attention if the object is in motion. Indeed, most of the things that threatened us in the Serengeti
moved
, and the brain has evolved unbelievably sophisticated trip-wires to detect it. We even have specialized regions to distinguish when our eyes are moving versus when our world is moving. These regions routinely shut down perceptions of eye movement in favor of the environmental movement.
Teachers should use computer animations
Animation captures the importance not only of color and placement but also of motion. With the advent of web-based graphics, the days when this knowledge was optional for educators are probably over. Fortunately, the basics are not hard to learn. With today’s software, simple animations can be created by anybody who knows how to draw a square and a circle. Simple, two-dimensional pictures are quite adequate; studies show that if the drawings are too complex or lifelike, they can distract from the transfer of information.
Test the power of images
Though the pictorial superiority effect is a well-established fact for certain types of classroom material, it is not well-established for all material. Data are sparse. Some media are better at communicating some types of information than others. Do pictures communicate conceptual ideas such as “freedom” and “amount” better than, say a narrative? Are language arts better represented in picture form, or are other media styles more robust? Working out these issues in real-world classrooms would provide the answer, and that takes collaboration between teachers and researchers.
Communicate with pictures more than words
“Less text, more pictures” were almost fighting words in 1982. They were used derisively to greet the arrival of
USA Today,
a brand-new type of newspaper with, as you know, less text, more pictures. Some predicted the style would never work. Others predicted that if it did, the style would spell the end of Western civilization as the newspaper-reading public knows it. The jury may be out on the latter prediction, but the former has a powerful and embarrassing verdict. Within four years,
USA Today
had the second highest readership of any newspaper in the country, and within 10, it was the number one. It still is.
What happened? First, we know that pictures are a more efficient delivery mechanism of information than text. Second, the American work force is consistently overworked, with more things being done by fewer people. Third, many Americans still read newspapers. In the helter-skelter world of overworked Americans, more-efficient information transfer may be the preferred medium. As the success of
USA Today
suggests, the attraction may be strong enough to persuade consumers to reach for their wallet. So, pictorial information may be initially more attractive to consumers, in part because it takes less effort to comprehend. Because it is also a more efficient way to glue information to a neuron, there may be strong reasons for entire marketing departments to think seriously about making pictorial presentations their primary way of transferring information.
The initial effect of pictures on attention has been tested. Using infrared eye-tracking technology, 3,600 consumers were tested on 1,363 print advertisements. The conclusion? Pictorial information was superior in capturing attention— independent of its size. Even if the picture was small and crowded with lots of other non-pictorial elements close to it, the eye went to the visual. The researchers in the study, unfortunately, did not check for retention.
Toss your PowerPoint presentations
The presentation software called PowerPoint has become ubiquitous, from corporate boardrooms to college classrooms to scientific conferences. What’s wrong with that? It’s text-based, with six hierarchical levels of chapters and subheads—all words. Professionals everywhere need to know about the incredible inefficiency of text-based information and the incredible effects of images. Then they need to do two things:
1) Burn their current PowerPoint presentations.
2) Make new ones.
Actually, the old ones should be stored, at least temporarily, as useful comparisons. Business professionals should test their new designs against the old and determine which ones work better. A typical PowerPoint business presentation has nearly 40 words
per slide
. That means we have a lot of work ahead of us.
Summary
Rule #10
Vision trumps all other senses.
• Vision is by far our most dominant sense, taking up half of our brain’s resources.
• What we see is only what our brain tells us we see, and it’s not 100 percent accurate.
• The visual analysis we do has many steps. The retina assembles photons into little movie-like streams of information. The visual cortex processes these streams, some areas registering motion, others registering color, etc. Finally, we combine that information back together so we can see.
• We learn and remember best through pictures, not through written or spoken words.
The results of the experiment could be summarized in those two sentences. Three researchers created a fictitious assistant vice president of an aircraft company. Four groups of experimental subjects, with equal numbers of men and women in each group, were asked to rate this fictional person’s job performance. Each group was given the vice president’s brief job description, but the first group also was told that the vice president was a man. They were asked to rate both the competence and the likability of the candidate. They gave a very flattering review, rating the man “very competent” and “likable.” The second group was told that the vice president was a woman. She was rated “likable” but “not very competent.” All other factors were equal. Only the perceived gender had changed.
The third group was told that the vice president was a male superstar, a stellar performer on the fast track at the company. The fourth group was told that the vice president was a female superstar, also on the express lane to the executive washroom. As before, the third group rated the man “very competent” and “likable.” The woman superstar also was rated “very competent.” But she was not rated “likable.” In fact, the group’s descriptions included words such as “hostile.” As I said, the man was a hot dog. The woman was a bitch.
The point is, gender biases hurt real people in real-world situations. As we hurtle headlong into the controversial world of brains and genders, keeping these social effects in mind is excruciatingly important. There is a great deal of confusion regarding the way men and women relate to each other, and even more about why. There is confusion about the terms as well, blurring the line between the concepts of “sex” and “gender.” Here, sex will generally refer to biology and anatomy. Gender will refer mostly to social expectations. Sex is set into the concrete of DNA. Gender is not. The differences between men’s and women’s brains start with how they got that way in the first place.
the x factor
How do we become male and female? The road to sex assignment starts out with all the enthusiasm sex usually stimulates. Four hundred million sperm fall all over themselves attempting to find one egg during intercourse. The task is not all that difficult. In the microscopic world of human fertilization, the egg is the size of the Death Star, and the sperm are the size of X-wing fighters. X is a good letter for this enterprise—the name of that very important chromosome that half of all sperm and all eggs carry. You recall chromosomes from biology class, those writhing strings of DNA packed into the nucleus that contain the information necessary to make you. It takes 46 of them to do it, which you can think of as 46 volumes in an encyclopedia. Twenty-three come from Mom, and 23 come from Dad. Two are sex chromosomes. At least one of those chromosomes has to be an X chromosome, or you will die.
If you get two X chromosomes, you go into the ladies locker room all your life; an X and Y puts you forever in the men’s. This sex assignment is controlled by the male. Henry VIII’s wives wish he’d known that. He executed one of them for being unable to produce a boy as heir to the throne, but he should have executed himself. The Y can be donated only by sperm (the egg never carries one), so the male determines the sex.
Gender differences can be divided into three areas: genetic, neuroanatomical, and behavioral. Scientists usually spend their whole careers exploring only one—each difference is like a separate island in a common research ocean. We’ll tour all three, starting with a molecular explanation of why Henry VIII owes Anne Boleyn a big fat apology.
One of the most interesting facts about the Y chromosome is that you don’t need most of it to make a male. All it takes to kick-start the male developmental program is a small snippet near the middle, carrying a gene called SRY. In our tour, we immediately notice Gene Island is dominated by a single scientist, David C. Page. He is the researcher who isolated SRY. Though in his 50s, Page looks to be about 28 years old. As director of the Whitehead Institute and a professor at MIT, he is a man of considerable intellect. He also is charming and has a refreshingly wicked sense of humor. Page is the world’s first molecular sex therapist. Or, better, sex broker. He discovered that you can destroy the SRY gene in a male embryo and get a female, or add SRY to a female embryo and turn her into a male (SR stands for “sex reversal”). Why can you do this? In a fact troubling to anybody who believes males are biologically hard-wired to dominate the planet, researchers discovered that the basic default setting of the mammalian embryo is to become female.
There is terrible inequality between the two chromosomes. The X chromosome does most of the heavy developmental lifting, while the little Y has been shedding its associated genes at a rate of about five every one million years, committing suicide in slow motion. It’s now down to less than 100 genes. By comparison, the X chromosome carries about 1,500 genes, all necessary participants in embryonic construction projects. These are not showing any signs of decay.
With only a single X chromosome, males need every X gene they can get. Females, however, have double the necessary amount. You can think of it like a cake recipe calling for only one cup of flour. If you decide to put in two, things will change in a most unpleasant fashion. The female embryo uses what may be the most time-honored weapon in the battle of the sexes to solve the problem of two X’s: She simply ignores one of them. This chromosomal silent treatment is known as X inactivation. One of the chromosomes is tagged with the molecular equivalent of a “Do Not Disturb” sign. Since there are two X’s from which to choose, Mom’s or Dad’s, researchers wanted to know who preferentially got the sign.
The answer was completely unexpected.
There were no preferences.
Some cells in the developing little girl embryo hung their sign around Mom’s X. Neighboring cells hung their sign around Dad’s. At this point in research, there doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason, and it is considered a random event. This means that cells in the female embryo are a complex mosaic of both active and inactive mom-and-pop X genes. Because males require all 1,500 X genes to survive, and they have only one X-chromosome, it would be stupid for them to hang up “Do Not Disturb” notes. They never do it. X inactivation does not occur in guys. And because males must get their X from Mom, all men are literally, with respect to their X chromosome, Momma’s Boys—unisexed. That’s very different from their sisters, who are more genetically complex. These bombshells describe our first truly genetic-based findings of potential gender differences.
We now know the function of many of the 1,500 genes that reside on the X chromosome. Swallow hard here. Many of those genes involve brain function. Many of them govern how we
think
. In 2005, the human genome was sequenced, and an unusually large percentage of the X chromosome genes were found to create proteins involved in brain manufacture. Some of these genes may be involved in establishing higher cognitive functions, from verbal skills and social behavior to certain types of intelligence. Researchers call the X chromosome a cognitive “hot spot.”
These findings represent one of the most important regions on Gene Island. But it is hardly the only important region, and not even the most important island.
is bigger better?
The purpose of genes is to create molecules that mediate the functions of the cells in which they reside. Collections of these cells create the neuroanatomy of the brain (which in turn creates our behavior). Leaving Gene Island, our next stop is Cell Island, a region where scientists investigate large structures in the brain, or neuroanatomy. Here, the real trick is finding structures that
aren’t
affected by sex chromosome dosage.
Labs—headed by scientists of both sexes, I should perhaps point out—have found differences in the front and prefrontal cortex, areas of the brain that control much of our decision-making ability. This cortex is fatter, in certain parts, in women than in men. There are sex-based differences in the limbic system, which controls our emotional life and mediates some types of learning. Prominent differences lie in the amygdala, controlling not only the generation of emotions but also the ability to remember them. Running counter to current social prejudice, this region is much larger in men than it is in women. At rest, female amygdalas tend to talk mostly to the left hemisphere, while male amygdalas do most of their chatting with the right hemisphere. Brain cells communicate via biochemicals, and these have not escaped sex differences, either.
The regulation of serotonin is particularly dramatic. Serotonin is key in regulating emotion and mood (Prozac works by altering the regulation of this neurotransmitter). Males can synthesize serotonin about 52 percent faster than females. Do these physical differences mean anything? In animals, the size of structures is thought to reflect their relative importance to survival. Human examples at first blush seem to follow a similar pattern. We already have noticed that violinists have bigger areas of the brain devoted to controlling their left hand than their right. But neuroscientists nearly come to blows over how structure relates to function. We don’t yet know whether differences in neurotransmitter distributions, or in the size of a brain region, mean anything substantial.
Such cautions have not stopped brain scientists from going after the question of behavior differences, and they won’t stop us, either. Fasten your seat belts and strap on the Kevlar, for we are about to land on the noisiest, most intellectually violent island on our imaginary itinerary: Behavior Island.
battle of the sexes
I didn’t really want to write about this. Characterizing gender-specific behaviors has a long and mostly troubled history. Even institutions holding our best minds aren’t immune. Larry Summers was
Harvard’s
president, for Pete’s sake, when he attributed girls’ lower math and science scores to behavioral genetics, comments that cost him his job. And he is in exceptionally good intellectual company. Consider these three quotes:
“The female is an impotent male, incapable of making semen because of the coldness of her nature. We therefore should look upon the female state as if it were a deformity, though one that occurs in the ordinary course of nature.”
Aristotle (384–332 bc)
“Girls begin to talk and to stand on their feet sooner than boys because weeds always grow up more quickly than good crops.”
Martin Luther (1483–1546)
“If they can put a man on the moon ... why can’t they put them all there?”
Jill (1985, graffiti on a bathroom wall, in response to Luther’s quote)
And so the weary battle of the sexes continues. Almost 2,400 years of history separate Aristotle from Jill, yet we seem to have barely moved. Invoking planet metaphors like Venus and Mars, some purport to expand perceived differences into prescriptions for relationships. And this is the most scientifically progressive era in human history.
Mostly, I think, it comes down to statistics. There may very well be differences in the way men and women think about some things. But when people hear about measurable differences, they often think scientists are talking about individuals, such as themselves. That’s a
big
mistake. When scientists look for behavioral trends, they do not look at individuals. They look at populations. Statistics in these studies can never apply to individuals. Trends emerge, but there are variations within a population, often with significant overlaps between the genders. It is true that every time neuroscientist Flo Haseltine does an fMRI, she sees different parts of the brain light up depending upon whether she is viewing a man or a woman. Exactly how that relates to your behavior is a completely separate question.
first hints
What we do know about the biological roots of behavioral differences began with brain pathologies. Mental retardation is more common in males than in females in the general population. Many of these pathologies are caused by mutations in any one of 24 genes within the X chromosome. As you know, males have no backup X. If their X gets damaged, they have to live with the consequences. If a female’s X is damaged, she can often ignore the consequences. This represents to date one of the strongest pieces of evidence showing the involvement of X chromosomes in brain function and thus brain behavior.
Mental health professionals have known for years about sex-based differences in the type and severity of psychiatric disorders. Males are more severely afflicted by schizophrenia than females, for example. By more than 2 to 1, women are more likely to get depressed than men, a figure that shows up just after puberty and remains stable for the next 50
years
. Males exhibit more antisocial behavior. Females have more anxiety. Most alcoholics and drug addicts are male. Most anorexics are female. Says Thomas Insel, from the National Institute of Mental Health, “It’s pretty difficult to find any single factor that’s more predictive for some of these disorders than gender.”
But what about normal behavior? The three research islands have very few bridges between them. There are bridge-construction projects, however, and we are going to talk about two of the best.
dealing with traumatic situations
It’s a horrible slideshow. In it, a little boy is run over by a car while walking with his parents. If you ever see that show, you will never forget it. But what if you
could
forget it? The brain’s amygdala aids in the creation of emotions and our ability to remember them. Suppose there was a magic elixir that could momentarily suppress it? Such an elixir does exist, and it was used to show that men and women process emotions differently.