Illumine Me

Your brain craves novelty. It's always searching, scanning, waiting for something unusual. It was built that way, and it helps you stay alive.

So what does your brain do with all the routine, ordinary, normal things you encounter? Everything it can to stop them from interfering with the brain's real job--recording things that matter. It doesn't bother saving the boring things; they never make it past the "this is obviously not important" filter. [Boring? ouch!]

How does your brain know what's important? Suppose you're out for day hike and a tiger jumps in front of you; what happens inside your head and body?

Neurons fire. Emotions crank up. Chemicals surge.

That's how your brain knows...

This must be important! Don't forget it!

But imagine you're at home, or in a library. It's a safe, warm, tiger-free zone. You're studying. Getting ready for an exam. Or trying to learn some tough technical topic your boss things will take a week, ten days at the most.

Just one problem. Your brain's trying to do you a big favor. It's trying to make sure that this obviously non-important [again, ouch!] content doesn't clutter up scarce resources. Resources that are better spent storing the really big things. Like tigers. Like the danger of fire. Like how you should never again snowboard in shorts.

And there's no simple way to tell your brain, "Hey brain, thank you very much, but no matter how dull this book is, and how little I'm registering on the emotional Richter scale right now, I really do want you to keep this stuff around" (xxiii).

There's the slow, tedious way, or the faster, more effective way. The slow way is about sheer repetition. You obviously know that you are able to learn and remember even the dullest of topics if you keep pounding the same thing into your brain. [Of course, I do. That's how I've been teaching.] With enough repetition, your brain says, "This doesn't feel important to him, but he keeps looking at the same thing over and over and over, so I suppose it must be."

The faster way is to do anything that increases brain activity, especially different types of brain activity. . . More neurons firing = more chances for your brain to get that this is something worth paying attention to, and possibly recording.

So what does it take to learn something? First, you have to get it, then make sure you don't forget it. It's not about pushing facts into your head. Based on the latest research in cognitive science, neurobiology, and educational psychology, learning takes a lot more than text on a page. We know what turns your brain on.

Some of the Head Rush learning principles:

Make it visual. Images are far more memorable than words alone, and make learning much more effective (up to 89% improvement in recall and transfer studies). It also makes things more understandable.

Use a conversational and personalized style. In recent studies, students performed up to 40% better on post-learning tests if the content spoke directly to the reader, using a first-person, conversational style rather than taking a formal tone. Tell stories instead of lecturing. Use casual language. Don't take yourself too seriously. Which would you pay more attention to: a stimulating dinner party companion, or a lecture?

Get the learner to think more deeply. In other words, unless you actively flex your neurons, nothing much happens in your head. A reader has to be motivated, engaged, curious, and inspired to solve problems, draw conclusions, and generate new knowledge. And for that, you need challenges, exercises, thought-provoking questions, and activities that involve both sides of the brain, and multiple senses.

Get--and keep--the reader's attention. We've all had the "I really want to learn this but I can't stay awake past page one" experience. Your brain pays attention to things that are out of the ordinary, interesting, strange, eye-catching, unexpected. Learning a new, tough, technical topic doesn't have to be boring. Your brain will learn much more quickly if it's not.

Touch their emotions. We now know that your ability to remember something is largely dependent on its emotional content. You remember what you care about. You remember when you feel something. No, we're not talking heart-wrenching stories about a boy and his dog. We're talking about emotions like surprise, curiousity, fun, "what the...?", and the feeling of "I Rule!" that comes when you solve a puzzle, learn something everybody thinks is hard, or realize you know something that "more-technical-than-thou" Bob from engineering doesn't.