That’s what the brain came up with in response to what I like to sometimes call our uterus - which is essentially the east African plates, the Serengeti, and the sides of the Ngorongoro Crater. I couch it this way: 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. Even so, we know something about what I call its “evolutionary performance envelope.” These are the conditions under which the brain best processes information, lives within that information, can forward a body of knowledge, and lives within our civilization even. I’ve been working at it for 40 years, and sometimes I think I know less now than I did before. We don’t know much about how the brain actually processes information. You need both hemispheres to make a frickin’ personality! Because there are so many of those : You only use 10% of your brain, or there’s a right-brain personality and a left-brain personality. That’s why I have to mention that hardly anybody else was in my section. I got so steamed that I literally threw the magazine across the aisle. I picked up this magazine, and it says “Modern Brain Science.” My Spidey-Sense goes, “Oh, what tasty thing are we going to read here?” It claims, “Modern brain science can now use brain scans to tell you if you’re going to vote Democratic or Republican,” and I’m thinking, “Brain science can’t do that.” I mean, we can’t even tell you how you can pick up a glass of water and drink it – and by the way, we still don’t know how. There was hardly anybody else there - back in those days, you could actually have an empty plane. I had given a talk in Atlanta, and I was on my way back to Seattle. Medina: The origin story of my Brain Rules series came on a plane flight, Kevin. Kevin: In your book, you propose ten brain rules to help people improve workplaces and find that elusive “work-life balance.” But to start, I’d like to know what led you to explore the intersection between neuroscience and people’s lives. I spoke with Medina* to discuss how we might refashion work to better serve our brains, rather than trying to force our brains to fit work. None of which our brains have evolved to do - all of which takes its toll on our well-being and ability to engage. We force our brains to spend hours inside boxed cubicles, try to build relationships over Zoom, and pretend that spreadsheets are more important than whatever is going on at home. Yet, the modern workplace is jam-packed with tools, practices, and procedures that have not been designed for the part of humans that our work is most dependent upon: our brains. John Medina, developmental molecular biologist and affiliate professor of the department of bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine, opens his book Brain Rules for Work with this question to hint at a vital rule of design: Tools need to be tailored for people using them if they are to be advantageous.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |