Brain Rules summary

From an evolutionary standpoint, sleeping is dangerous, as it makes us vulnerable to predators. If we’ve evolved to take such a serious risk on a daily basis, it stands to reason that sleep is important.

But what exactly does sleeping do? Simply put, sleeping regenerates our mind and body.

You probably have heard of the “fight or flight” response. We experience this in reaction to a stressful situation, and ideally this response helps us stay away from danger.

Thus stress motivates us to protect ourselves; it can even save our lives. Yet chronic stress is harmful.

As you're reading these blinks, millions of sensory neurons are firing simultaneously in your brain. Each is trying to grab your attention, but only a few break through to your consciousness. You won't actually notice the rest.

Can you feel where your feet are right now? You probably didn’t until you read that sentence. Thinking about your feet before that wasn’t a detail that was important for your brain.

Michael Jordan, one of the top basketball players in history, quit basketball in 1994 and took up baseball. Surprisingly, he failed miserably.

You might think that someone as athletic as Jordan could dominate in any sport, but baseball proved too challenging. So he went back to what his brain and muscles were used to, that is basketball.

Solomon Shereshevskii was a Russian journalist born in 1886, who was once given a formula of 30 letters and numbers and could still recall the formula some 15 years later.

Shereshevskii's mighty memory came at a price. He could memorize random information, but he couldn't organize that information into meaningful patterns. He could understand all the words in a book individually, but he couldn't figure out what they meant when put together.

Can you listen to music while you study? If you can, it’s probably because your brain has evolved to be able to do so!

Again, think about the lives of our ancestors. Our Homo sapiens forefathers didn’t spend their days quietly painting in caves without distraction. Instead, their brains had to handle multiple stimuli at once, whether visual, aural, olfactory or tactile.

Vision is a powerful sense, one that can trick our other senses into interpreting stimuli differently. A group of researchers learned this by pulling the wool over some wine experts’ eyes!

The researchers wanted to see whether wine tasters could tell the difference between red wines and white wines that had been dyed red. It turns out they couldn’t; when the tasters drank the dyed whites, they thought they were red wines. Vision trumped smell!