Brain Rules and Tools For Raising Happy and Healthy Children

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Hi everyone, welcome to the show, I am Dr. Nicole, and on today’s episode, we’re going to talk about what science tells us about how our brains function best. I don’t know about you, but I’ve often wished that I could have a set of rules or guidelines to follow that would help me and my kids and my patients function at our best and several years ago, someone actually wrote a book on this topic and it has been very influential in my work with patients and families and even how I think about things for myself. So today, we’re going to talk with Dr. John Medina about his book ‘Brain Rules’, and the brain rules that are really important for parents, kids, and educators to understand.

Let me tell you a bit about him. Dr. John Medina is a developmental molecular biologist and has a lifelong fascination with how the mind reacts to and organizes information. He’s the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School”, a provocative book that takes on the way our schools and work environments are designed. Medina’s book on brain development is a must-read for parents and early-childhood educators: “Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five”, and his latest book in the series is “Brain Rules for Aging Well: 10 Principles for Staying Vital, Happy, and Sharp.” I love that because he’s got the whole age span covered, from our little ones all the way through our grandmas and grandpas, it’s great. 

Dr. Medina is an affiliate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He lives in Seattle, Washington, with his wife and two boys. I have been looking very forward to this conversation, welcome to the show!

Dr. John Medina:

Thank you for inviting me to talk to you!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So I read this book many years ago, now, and it was one of those books where I have like half the pages dogeared and things underlined and I found myself cheering throughout and going “Yes! Yes! This is great! This is what I see!” and I think because my background is as a teacher still working in education settings, but then also as a clinical psychologist and therapist working with kids and families in private practice and just being a parent and all of that, so much of this resonates and the things that you sort of call out that we do that are not necessarily helpful, I just found myself just so engrossed with it. So I can’t wait to delve into this with you and with our listeners today, but I want to start by asking: You’re a developmental molecular biologist. You have a research background. I need to know how it is that you became interested in the brain, the mind, and these brain rules.

Dr. John Medina: 

Sure. Well, I’ve always been really interested in the distance between the gene and the behavior, and as a biochemist and molecular biologist, my research interest extended to the genetics of psychiatric disorders, as a way of really trying to get a hold of that distance between a gene and a behavior. So I’m very interested in how the brain develops in the womb, and then what happens when things screw up and years later, you get a psychiatric disorder or psychopathology of some kind. That comes from a general interest of just being interested in how the brain processes external information. I was a graphics artist and an animator before I was a scientist and that same interest of figuring out how a motion picture might actually influence and emotion or at least influence a perception of motion when somebody is looking at it. Well, it all was the same thing to me, so I was always good at math and science, so I figured I can go down the route of becoming an animator or go down the route of becoming a scientist, and I chose the scientist. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Nice. I love it when people have unique mixtures of things, and if nothing else, it helps me feel better that my schooling and career journey has been more winding, as opposed to straight lines. I’m glad to know others have the same thing. 

Dr. John Medina: 

Well, you’ve gone a similar path, you started out in education and ended up in clinical psychology, so it sounds like you had the same interest in understanding how people behave and what were the things that could be done to aid and abet when those behaviors become self-defeating. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Absolutely, and I think so much of what we take as well, this is how things are done, particularly when we look at things in the traditional school environment or even work environments, we just sort of say, “Oh well, this is how it is.” And yet, especially when we have kids who have some developmental or mental health or brain-based challenges, that really spotlights how a lot of what is status quo in school environments, especially, isn’t necessarily supportive of how brains function, and I saw that as a teacher, and I certainly see that now working with families as a psychologist. 

Dr. John Medina: 

True. What I’ve always been interested in — are you familiar with Diana Baumrind…

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yes, yes!

Dr. John Medina: 

Then probably John Gottman’s work also?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Of course, yeah. 

Dr. John Medina: 

What I’ve been fascinated with is that Dianna did a lot of her developmental work — for your listeners who don’t know, Diana Baumrind was a powerful psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and she was very interested in parenting for a long period of time. John Gottman, who is an emeritus now at the University of Washington, also psychologist — believe it or not, his Ph.D. is in applied mathematics, Nicole. That really helped to produce a quantitative understanding, asking a single question. And what’s fascinating is, though Diana did her work in the 60’s and John did the work I’m about to describe in the late 90’s, they came to the exact same conclusion about parenting. And that has blown me away forever, and is a great example to me that even as a scientist who is used to dealing with biochemicals, behavior, if done statistically correctly, can actually be examined with the same rigor that I would go after a gene inside somebody’s brain. So Diana Baumrind and John, the first point of agreement between the two was — Am I allowed to go down this rabbit hole there, is that okay, Nicole?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Please do! It’s great!

Dr. John Medina:

As you’re familiar, the question that both Diana and John came to as conclusion was that successful parenting — and successful parenting is defined lots of ways, although they eventually defined it actually fairly rigorously, rose or fell on a single battlefield, and that is what the parent did when the child’s emotions ran hot. What the parents did when the emotions were in lots of different places doesn’t cosegregate and doesn’t predict future outcomes, but man, you pay close attention the instant a child’s emotions are running in an intense fashion: What the parent did can profoundly influence how the child turns out years later. That was the first point of agreement. The second point of agreement that was interesting is that both Diana and John came to the conclusion that what parents did when their child’s emotions ran hot could be segregated into one of four parenting styles. And these were behaviors that actually cosegregated together, so Diana could call them styles, and John actually called them styles too, and what blows me away, Nicole, is that they were the same behavioral clusters! It was the same things! 

If we take John’s rubric, I guess, his is more recent. He says there are four parenting styles and only one of them predicts the successful outcome of a stable child, an academically successful child, one who could mobilize his or her IQ in an education setting. He called one ‘Dismissive’ parenting style, the other one he called, ‘Disapproving’ parenting style. The third, which was the most toxic in his finding was the ‘Laissez-faire’ parenting style, and then finally, the one that did all the good. Diana called it the ‘Authoritative’ and John calls it ‘Emotion Coaching’. We can go through each of those styles to refresh your listeners if you are so inclined. But to me, the interesting thing is they found the same things. And so, as a scientist, when you can see something that’s replicated — with that type of complexity, you’ve really got something to think about there. So you can put the behavioral sciences on firm rigorous footing within the eyes of these two very gifted researchers. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

It’s a great point because so often when we talk about these kinds of things in the realm of psychology or relationships, parenting, behavior, those kinds of things, people don’t realize that there has been excellent rigorous research that describes not only some of the problems and challenges that we see, but also what works and what’s effective. We’re not just talking about, “Well, we feel like this might be helpful” or whatever. When we’re talking about good evidence-based interventions, there is strong scientific evidence to show that these are the things that are useful. 

Dr. John Medina: 

Oh yeah, I think a metaphor I will sometimes use — I will occasionally teach this in lecture, I teach primarily bioengineering graduate students, but occasionally I will help out in some of the behavioral undergraduate work. I’ll give them this example, because they’re really interested, usually people care about these data and want to ask questions: How can I be a better parent, if I ever choose to become a parent? And that’s a big deal in this generation these days. So what I tell them is this: Let’s say you have a little girl and her name is Emily, and she’s just had a goldfish die. What we’re going to do is we’re going to use that. This is going to be an intense feeling. This little girl has never had primary grief happen before in her little life, so she’s going to come to you as a parent, and this is an intense feeling, and automatically, your spidey senses should be tingling because this is an intense feeling. And this battlefield, or better to say, these interactions will profoundly predict how Emily is going to turn out years and years later. So if you are a dismissing parent, and if you have the behavioral cluster of dismissing parenting style, you’ll look at Emily and you’ll say, “Emily, you know, it’s sad your goldfish died, but death is a part of life, this is no big deal. We will go to the Petco and get you another fish tomorrow, and all will be well. You just go outside and play now because this is no big deal. And Emily looks at the parent and says — hence you can see why John and Diana would call this dismissive type stuff, because all you’ve done is she’s got this great big feeling, you’ve given her no acknowledgment that it is a big feeling. In fact, you’ve colored it. You’ve said, “This is no big deal.” So Emily looks in her little heart and says, “If this is no big deal, how come I feel so bad? And I will go get another one? Am I supposed to just kind of cover this up?” Well, that’s dismissing parenting style. Not the recommended style!

Number two is “Disapproving”. The disapproving style in John’s rubric is a little bit like dismissing style but it’s actually dismissing and you’ve got a weapon, because what you’re going to say is this: Emily will come to you and her goldfish is dead, and she says to you — and she’s crying, and you will say to her the same thing a dismissing one says, “This is no big deal, we’ll go get you another one, death is a part of life”, circle of life stuff — and then the disapproving parent also says, “You need to man up, Emily, because you are weak and you can’t have weak feelings like this. Emily, you become a man.” And so what you’ve done is you’ve thrown a rock at Emily. Now, you’re not only dismissing, you’ve not given her any tools at all to work with the grief that she’s feeling, and you’ve not even anesthetized it, you actually said it was bad, that this is not something that you should — that it’s a sign of some kind of behavioral weakness, and once again, is not the recommended thing to do. 

The third style, the “Laissez-faire” parenting style, John says is the most toxic, I have in my research notes — John and I worked together for a while on a project, we started a developmental brain research institute called the Talaris Research Institute, and John was a scientist we worked with a lot. In the research notes, we gave this as a hypothetical, the Emily and goldfish story, we said to this one woman, “You know, Emily’s got this goldfish and she’s just died, what are you going to do?” And her response, Nicole, was the classic Laissez-faire. She said, and I’m quoting, “I hate it when pets die! I would go for a run!” You know! Emily’s not even in sight here. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

The “All about me” method!

Dr. John Medina:

It is all about you and how you react to your problems, and what you have is a control disengagement of Emily. I think it’s an application of parenting, but it’s toxic because Emily, once again, has no tools, has no nothing, and now, Emily doesn’t even have you because you’ve gone for a run. Okay. So those are the three things what not to do. The biggie, which Diana calls “Authoritative” and John calls “Emotion Coaching” is fairly classic and wonderful. When you’re an emotion coaching parent, John would notice, if you were to do the Emily thing. Emily comes to you with the goldfish and you are going to be emotion coaching — you would say to Emily, “I hate it when pets die, it’s so sad, and I see you’re so sad. That makes me so sad. Come here Emily, I want to give you a hug!”, and you squeeze Emily as hard as you can and you cry with her. It’s not everything you need to do, but man it’s the gateway because what you’re doing is that you’re validating these feelings. You’re so validating that you can internalize them and begin to experience them yourself, which empathy has always been a wonderful bridge between two lonely skulls, our brains in the water world of the closed confinement of our heads. You do that so there is a safety thing. 

But then, John also says emotion coaching parents don’t just use intense feelings as a trigger point for empathy, although that’s key. They also use it as a point for teaching. Always, there is a teaching component to the emotional teaching parenting style. So with Emily, it would be like this: “Emily, we have a word for this. I’m going to teach you to verbalize this, Emily. This is called ‘grief’, and I’ve got to tell you something about grief, Emily. Grief is going to be a little bit like the tide on an ocean. You’re going to get clobbered by a wave, but here is the weird thing, Emily, it’s that the wave will eventually subside and it will go away for a little while, and you’ll feel like everything is okay. And then you’ll go upstairs and you’ll see the empty goldfish bowl and Emily, those feelings are going to come washing back over you just as if you were in a tide. This is the nature of grief. It comes, it goes, it comes it goes. And every time, Emily, you get clobbered by a wave, I want you to find me, so that you and I can hug each other and we can cry together because it’s awful when things you love are no longer there.” That’s what you do. And statistically, the best grades, the most psychiatric stability, low incidents of affective disorders — those would be the anxiety and depressive disorders exist in kids that were exposed to that kind of emotional sophistication. And what’s fun about this, as you were saying, Nicole, is that this isn’t an opinion, this is what you do. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Absolutely. And I’m thinking of so many examples of kids. You used the example of grief with Emily, and I’m thinking of the many parents who are listening who deal with things on a pretty regular basis with their kids, where their kids exhibit some pretty intense emotions, whether that may be anger or frustration or whatever, and how this is the same approach that we want to take, of acknowledging what the child is feeling, not dismissing it, not avoiding it, not telling them not to feel it, not making it about us, but acknowledging, “Wow, you’re really feeling frustrated right now”, and empathizing with them and helping to soothe them and also giving them some language and some skills around that to be able to move through it, and that’s such a powerful and effective way of handling any kind of intense emotional thing that kids are going through. 

Dr. John Medina: 

Sure. And John has the initial, I’d call this a codicil to some of these data. He tells parents that you should teach your kids to verbalize their feelings almost as soon as they can talk, because the idea of being able to put a microphone inside a child’s head and broadcast the information in there so the parent can actually hear it is one of the most valuable things you can do. It’s especially valuable when that child becomes a teenager and they don’t want to talk at all. We practice this, I have a 23-year-old and 21-year-old now, but we would practice these exercises, I guess. If I saw a beautiful sunset, I learned not to just acknowledge that. I would just say in my kids’ presence, “You know, that’s a beautiful sunset, that makes me happy.” Just these little passive things that you can say, so that when you are angry, “That just really makes me angry.” And after a while, the kids started doing it too. If something made them happy, if it’s something they were sad about, they would say it. If they were frustrated, they learned to say that too. And the gift of being able to allow the child to describe what he or she is feeling, so that the parent at least has an idea of what’s going on in the kids’ brain, I think, is about half the battle. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I completely agree, and I think it also is so important for kids to know that it’s okay to have a range of feelings. 

Dr. John Medina:

Yeah. And that they can change. You can feel one way about something, and tomorrow wake up and remember the same thing and feel it completely differently. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Right, and that their parents can handle them experiencing and feeling a wide range of emotions. That also is really important. 

Dr. John Medina:

Yeah. It’s that “Laissez-faire” parenting. It’s not about you, darn it!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

That’s right. I love this, this is so helpful and so valuable. Talking about this whole research, we talked about Diana’s research, John’s research. I want to talk about your research as it pertains to you sort of synthesizing these 12 brain rules. Talk to us about that research. How did you settle on these 12, several of which we will get into here, but how did you come to these 12 things as being really important rules for the brain?

Dr. John Medina:

Sure. Well, I’ve been mostly a private research consultant for most of my life. Primarily for pharmaceutical and biotech companies, if they have a question about mental health, I am literally a troubleshooter. They will hire me, I will parachute in and work with their project for a while. On the basis of those experiences, I would fly around to various places, various laboratories, and I would invariably pick up — in those days, there were magazines on airplanes, and I looked at one, Nicole, this is the origins story of brain rules, by the way, to answer your question. I looked at one that said: “Modern brain science can predict whether you are going to vote on the Republican ticket or the Democratic ticket for one of the elections.” And I thought to myself, well, I’m a modern brain scientist. I’ve never heard of this! What! 

And then when I went on to read, the mythology is just built by the paragraph. You know, “left brain/right brain personalities!”, “You only use 10% of your brain!” You call those the usual suspects. Thank God there weren’t a lot of people on the airplane because I literally threw the magazine down on there… I went, “This is nuts! How does this happen!” And I was telling my wife, when I got home, Nicole, and she said — and she often has played this role in my life. She said, “Well, John, you know you could sit on that high ivory tower of yours and just throw stones at everybody about how rigorous things need to be, or you could say something that’s in a positive direction, and tell people what we do know about how the brain works. What we do know that’s solid. What do we know that you could actually say that might be relevant to an educator? What do we know about the brain sciences that might be relevant to a business person? And from that, that’s the answer to the question. I synthesized there are 12 things that I think are really solid that have at least translational research directions, if not outright suggestions about what to do. Diana’s and John’s are a great example of something you could do next Monday, but there are 12 of those things that you could do. They range from exercise to multisensory processing, to memory — things that would be valuable for educators to know. 

So I eventually wrote those down and that gave birth to the Brain Rules book, and then eventually the other two of the series, too. Brain rules for baby, same idea, and then brain rules for aging well. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Well, I think it’s so valuable because, as you noted, so much of what’s out there really is more mythical than factual or is such an overextension of the research or an overgeneralization, and I think education is one realm where some of that stuff has been taken and may be taken out of context or implemented in ways that aren’t really accurate, as far as what we know, so I love that you’ve taken that and said, “Here is what we do know, and here are some foundations that we can use to help our brains, our kids’ brains.”

Dr. John Medina:

Yeah, and some of them are a little stunning. Back when I first wrote it, a lot of people were just in the beginning stages of understanding that aerobic exercise could change a complex suite of behaviors called executive function, that you could actually, if you got out — for those of your listeners who don’t know what executive function is, it’s kind of — well, I don’t know what you call it, Nicole, I call it the ability to get things done. There are two —

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Higher-level thinking processes, right? Attention, prioritizing, all of those higher-level things. 

Dr. John Medina:

The metaphor I will use often is the Golden Gate bridge with two piers. One pier is cognitive control, and that is the planning and the ability to focus, defocus and refocus things, and the other is emotional regulation. The hallmark behavior there is impulse control. And the two of those working together, they have reciprocating electrical loops in the brain near the forehead and the prefrontal cortex, and then in the middle of the brain, the amygdala — it’s sometimes called ‘The lizard brain’. The ability of that prefrontal to control aspects of the amygdaloid complex of the basal ganglia and other regions of the brain is extremely important. 

Well, we know that exercise, aerobic exercise, but not strengthening exercise — there are great reasons to do strengthening, but it doesn’t segregate here, aerobic exercise can improve executive function in every age group that has ever been tested. So you’re looking at three-year-olds, you’re looking at elementary school kids, you’re looking at junior high, high school, then you’re looking at college. Heck, you’re looking at 40 year-olds, then you’re looking at the old guys. In fact, the finding was very powerful, it was first done in geriatric populations. But what immediate thing that leaps out to me is this: a lot of school districts, when they’re cutting their budgets, will cut their budgets and you immediately kill the P.E program. When an executive function, as many of your listeners may now, executive function is one of the greatest predictors of academic performance that exists. It actually slumps kids’ IQ. And the only thing greater than that as a predictor is the emotional stability of the home, and I’m convinced that the emotional stability of the home directly affects a kids’ executive function. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Absolutely. 

Dr. John Medina:

So you can’t stop — what you have to do, if you are an education strategist, is that you have to say: “Okay, given that that’s a fact, that that is evidence-based, what are the kids of things that will improve executive function? Since aerobic exercise is an easy win and you can really do it, the last thing any district should cut out would be P.E when they’re trying to improve a kids’ grades. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Absolutely. How about recess? What we see more and more with the focus on more in-seat time for higher test scores, it’s like shooting ourselves in the foot, right? Because many districts now have cut kids down to maybe one 15-minute recess a day. So from all these different angles, we’re removing these opportunities for exercise and for movement and putting kids in a sedentary type of situation more and more, and then we work why we are not having kids who are doing better academically. 

Dr. John Medina:

Well, it’s the physical equivalent of breaking somebody’s legs because you think it will make them run faster. What! You know, in our evolutionary history, we were walking 20 kilometers a day, easily, maybe even a little more than that, let’s go 11, 12 miles, maybe 13 miles a day, and we’re scrambling up and down the sides of the Ngorongoro crater for millions of years. This gorgeous brain of ours, this problem-solving, universally interesting organ, the planets most interesting was forged under conditions of near-constant motion. It is the opposite to put some kid in a school, in a classroom desk and have them sit there for 6 hours and not bang up against their evolutionary history. They were made to move, they were made to do all kinds of things, and not doing that turned out to be the first brain rule. I said, “Okay, we can’t predict if you’re going to vote republican or democrat, but we can sure predict that if you don’t get off your butt, bad things will happen.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Absolutely, and then where we see that really creating a problem for a lot of kids, and this will resonate with a lot of the parents listening is then they get told, “Well, you’re moving around too much, you’re too impulsive, you don’t have a good executive function, you have ADHD, you need medication” — all of these things where we could at least start by looking at: “Are we giving these kids and their brains and their bodies enough opportunity for the movement and for the physical activity that they need for the development of those executive functions. 

Dr. John Medina:

It is not normal to stay seated for more than a half an hour, and in Serengeti, you would be somebody’s lunch. So! I’ll sometimes see pictures, Nicole, of these well-behaved kids in classrooms, and they’re like 6 years old, and I’m thinking, I’m looking at a mutation! This isn’t right! This isn’t how it’s supposed to be at all! 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Absolutely. So exercise, critical thing, not just for kids, but for parents for adults of all ages, we need to be making sure that we have enough movement.

Dr. John Medina:

Sure. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Sleep. Tell me what the research says about sleep, because I preach this all the time with families, so I would love for you to talk about it.

Dr. John Medina:

Sleep is as almost ridiculously important as exercise is, but it’s for a really strange reason. It wasn’t until about, I don’t know, 18 or 19 years ago, that we actually had an idea — the beginnings of a research idea of why it is that human beings need to sleep. That might seem an odd thing to say, but sleep is not particularly energy restorative, even though it feels that way. If you do the bioenergetic curves, you see that there are only a couple of spots during the night where you are actually in a tilt in the direction of saving energy. In fact, the brain is more rhythmically active at night than it is during the day. So the big question was asked, it was, “Well, then, why do you need to sleep?” Because sleep for 8 hours, in our evolutionary history is an insanely stupid thing to do when you’ve got nocturnal predators. So there must have been some strong reason. We now know there are two very powerful reasons, and it has nothing to do with energy savings. It has to do instead with something else. 

When you’ve learned something during the course of the day, and your brain is storing up temporary memory traces of that learning, at night, at certain points during the sleep, particularly in something we call ‘Slow Wave Sleep’, which for most people is maybe 30-40 minutes into the sleep cycle, in REM 4. Your brain wakes up and looks at everything you learned during the course of the day and then starts repeating it over and over again. Thousands of times at night. And it hit us that the reason why we needed to sleep had nothing to do with energy restoration. IF you were repeating something thousands of times at night, good luck with saving energy. You are sleeping so you can cut off all the other interfering sensory information that happens to you if you are conscious, and instead have you focus in on this repetition. And indeed, if you interrupt that repetition at night, people don’t learn very well. But we now understand that the reason why you need to sleep is not so that you can rest. It’s so that you can learn.  

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Such a powerful thing, yeah. 

Dr. John Medina:

There’s a second reason why we need to sleep now too, and it’s maybe related to the same thing. When you go to sleep after having had an energy-rich brain experience all day long, you have built up, like any metabolic process, like any manufacturing process, your brain builds up lots of toxic molecules, and they just sit there in your brain. They’re often called reactive oxygen species, extra electrons, free radicals, take your pick, but it’s toxic. You shouldn’t have them. If you build them up over the course of the night or the day or a week or the lifetime, you can do real brain damage. And your brain knows this. So while you’re asleep, some fascinating — I’ll call them a street cleaner, you can call it sewage flushing if you like, whatever metaphor, your brain starts creating little confections currents inside the little areas of the skull, and washes that stuff away. Dumps them into an area of the brain we call the ventricles, which eventually goes through the cerebrospinal fluid and out you go! You also need to sleep because you have to turn on the street cleaners at night to get rid of all the garbage that accumulated during the day. If you don’t get rid of that garbage, i.e you don’t sleep as well as you need to, it will just accumulate. So you don’t only need to sleep so you can learn, you need to sleep so that you can have a functioning brain the next day. And if you forgo — for as little as, man, you could just pull one all-nighter, one 24-hour period of staying in consciousness, it can take you 3-5 days for the brain to fully recover, to get back to its cognitive baseline that you could exhibit prior to the all-nighter. 

So I usually tell students and I tell parents this too, quit with the all-nighters, okay? You’re not learning very well, and you’re just going to gum up your brain. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Absolutely. But I think this is why we see in the research on everything from childhood neurodevelopmental disorders to adult psychiatric disorders, the connection between sleep and sleep problems and these kinds of symptoms, right? Because when the brain isn’t getting the good quality sleep for enough time at night, that has a lot of downstream effects, and a lot of symptoms then, functionally in the person that can develop. 

Dr. John Medina:

Well, you can slip into a depression. With sustained sleep loss, with sustained anxiousness, rumination that keep you up for a period of time, you can easily slip into a depression or an anxiety disorder or both. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

And we see in kids, the research is clear with many kids diagnosed with ADHD, for example, that there is a connection to sleep quantity, and more importantly sleep quality. And it’s why it’s not that unusual for me to see in the clinic, when we address sleep problems and we get kids sleeping well for enough time at night, suddenly, a lot of the learning and behavior challenges that they’re having during the day improve dramatically. 

Dr. John Medina:

Just disappears. There is an interesting caveat to these data that we should probably talk also about because it has a direct implication, I think, for school design and it has to do with sleep. There is the concept, I’m sure you’re familiar with it, called chronotype. There is a strong genetic component to it and I’ll explain that briefly. If you look across the entire population of the United States, about 1 in 5, about 20% of the people will respond this way when you ask them this question: The question you’re going to ask is “If you could disengage from society and go to sleep and then wake up whenever you wanted, what would that be, what would you do?” About 20% of the population would say, “Man, if I could disengage from society, I would go to sleep about 9:30 at night and I would wake up about 6:30 every morning”. And then if you give them a cognitive test, you ask them how productive they are in that morning, they say, “I am the most productive in the morning! I am a morning person.” And If you give them a series of cognitive panels, that’s exactly what you find. Man, they really are morning people. We call them “early chronotypes”, or if you ever want to google this or bing this, we call them “larks”. And they are the sworn enemy of another 20% of the population. 

Another 20% of the population, about 1 in 5, if they have their choice you ask them that question about disengaging from life and doing what you wanted, would not go to bed until 3 o’ clock in the morning and they would not get up before 11 or 12 the next morning. And if you ask them, “What are the best times when you feel the most productive” and you do that cognitive panel stuff, you will find something extraordinary. Their best times are at night. Man, it’s between 9pm and 12PM and maybe a little further than that, depending upon the chronotype, they really are night people, and we call them late chronotypes or owls. I am convinced, Nicole, that we are losing about 20% of the kids because we don’t understand this very well, and we force a late chronotype to go into an early setting, and these kids accumulate a massive sleep debt their entire life. When they get out of high school, if they make it into college, even, because they’ve been dragging the sleep debt with them like Jacob Marley from Charles Dickens. They get into college and all of a sudden can take night classes and their grades begin to soar and they begin to thrive. We call them ‘late bloomers’ but they weren’t late bloomers, they were just finally chronotype-congruent, I guess you can call it. 

The reason why I bring this up, even though we don’t know about if you’re going to vote republican or democrat, there’s a whole lot of stuff we do know that isn’t getting implemented at all. A big reason for writing books like these, and my colleagues are doing so as well is to get some of that information out because there are some things you can do immediately. There are things you can do next Monday about the sleep schedule, for example, that would be of great benefit to a huge swathe of people. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Absolutely. And what we’re seeing now is interest in more of the research that’s coming out particularly around teenagers and how during that phase of development, they do become more — they shift to staying up later and getting up later and right at the time that they’re going through that very normal developmental process, we start shifting our school schedules to make high schoolers show up to school at 7AM, and that alone has significant implications, not just for academics and learning, but also for emotional health, behavioral health and even safety from the standpoint of the studies that show that kids driving when they have that sleep deficit get in more wrecks, right?

 

Dr. John Medina:

Hell, in North Carolina they were doing this, they also did one in Minneapolis that’s like that. The recommendation that comes from a joint research effort from Harvard and Oxford together. So we’re going a little across the pond from this is: If you have a teenager, thou shalt start school at 10AM. You don’t do that, but it’s simply because the school systems aren’t designed around brain science does not mean that you are going to somehow abrogate that biological reality. Teenagers need to start later. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Absolutely. So, so true.

Dr. John Medina:

One of the reasons why that seems so critical: I’ve spent a lifetime looking at the genetics of psychiatric disorders, and one of the real things we focus a lot on is puberty and adolescence because the average age of onset of any mental health disorder that exists, whether you are looking at the mood disorders or the thought disorders, the average age in the United States is 14.1 years of age. So we’re thinking that there’s a lot of this, this is what they’ve said worked out at the university of California, San Diego, and others like him who say that they think that most mental health disorders are primarily disorders of adolescent developmental programs gone wrong, which simply means that these kids are ridiculously vulnerable. If there is any time in their lives when they should not have to get up before 10 o’clock in the morning, it’s as teenagers, and it’s for their mental health. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Yeah, absolutely. Such an important point, and for parents who are listening and saying well, what can we do about that? I advocate all the time, talk to your school district, even if it doesn’t change something immediately, make them aware that you are aware of the research and that you want them thinking about this. And parents, we’ve got control over what we do with our own kids too and I can say for my own daughter, we’ve made the decision to do some different schooling options with her because she was so sleep deprived, it was a huge problem and we forget that we can take matters into our own hands too and make decisions for their health and their wellbeing, even if the school system doesn’t. 

Dr. John Medina:

Oh, absolutely. I sometimes call it — you should have a school system that is a 5-fingered glove, and the reason why I say that, why do we have 5 fingers on our glove? Because we have 5 frickin’ fingers on our hands. We have a brain that works in a very particular way, with very predictable, measurable things that it does. We should have a school system that is a 5-fingered glove to fit the brain. In fact, I’ve gone so far as to think a number of colleges are utilizing Brain Rules as a textbook, I’m so grateful for that. The reason why is that I think colleges of education should actually be turned into cognitive neuroscience degrees, because it’s all about learning. And the people that should know the most about learning are the people who have decided in their careers to spend every day in the learning swimming pool. So they should know about how the brain works, and first up, I would argue would be exercise, second would be sleep. Easy. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Absolutely. And we need to build our educational systems so that we support the people who do understand these things and want to implement the policies and the protocols that actually are helpful. One more here, we’ve done exercise and we’ve done sleep. I’d love to have you touch on sensory integration, stimulating more of the senses because I think this is a really valuable one for parents to understand and for educators to understand.

Dr. John Medina:

Sure. I’ll briefly describe the idea. The finding is, the more multi-sensory input you can give a kid at the moment of learning, the more robust that learning becomes. So the more senses you’re stimulating simultaneously, the better the memory is going to be, the retrieval and in the two directions, it means you actually remember more content and you have a better fidelity with that content. So there are lots of reasons to want to have as strong a multi-sensory environment as you can. The reason why I say that is this: When we really look at education, it’s usually just two. It’s hearing and seeing, and in the Serengeti, that is the exact opposite of our experience. When we’re climbing down out the Ngorongoro crater and we’re feeling the wind on our backs and we’re smelling the smells of the trees and we’re tasting the fruit — the brain was built to multiple senses stimulated at the same time in a ways that can create an integrated survival whole so that — this actually has been shown experimentally in the laboratory. What will happen is you will give a fund of knowledge in just one sense, say auditory. Then add the same thing, but now add vision, and then add haptic response, which would be with fingers, or add olfactory response like with smell. And the more you add, the more robust the learning becomes. So the more you can make a learning experience multi-sensory, the more rigorous that learning becomes. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

So important for all of us to understand, I mean not only for ourselves, but also for our kids that we need to be providing those multiple inputs, which helps explain why just sitting a kid down with a workbook or giving them a lecture or an auditory lesson on something isn’t going to necessarily sink in or promote good quality learning for a pretty significant percentage of students. 

Dr. John Medina:

Oh yeah, and there is also a version of this that I would add, it sort of comes out of the memory chapter, but it’s the same idea of multi-sensory, but now by metaphor. When we’re teaching somebody, we often just use declarative information. Declarative information are things you can declare, usually as if, or a whole proposition. “The Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066” is a memorizable fact. That’s declarative learning. But there are probably 20 or 30 separate memory gadgets in the brain that all work in a semi-independent fashion, and one of the most interesting to me is a type of memory that’s called episodic memory, which isn’t concerned with 1066 and the Battle of Hastings. It’s Gilligan’s Island, you know? And there’s going to be a cast of characters and they’re going to interact and they are going to come to some conclusion and have a narrative form. That’s a separate area of the brain.

In fact, there is an interesting woman in Southern California who has a ridiculously low declarative memory, C-, D student, collects TV guides all day. But she is a case study because her episodic memory, Nicole, is nearly eidetic. It’s nearly photographic, and James McGaugh, who did this work at the University of California in Irvine studied her for years to show that if her brain could be convinced that the information coming into it was episodic in nature, she would memorize it like a sun of a gun. And if it had been presented to her as a story rather than a list of facts, she would have gotten a Ph.D. 

There’s a multi-sensory component — by metaphor, for just the styles of things. If you have to stay locked tight with the auditory visual addictions that we have in the classroom. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Yeah, and connecting it to things that speaks to the importance of making it contextual, making it connected to things, making it as experiential. You know, we talk about hands-on learning, but really it is multi-sensory learning. The more that kids or people can be engaged in and doing things with the information, the more meaningful it is and the better the learning and the memory then too. 

Dr. John Medina:

Sure. Well you can actually introduce motor skill to that too because some kids have a motor memory that’s just off the charts, and if you get them to, I don’t know, maybe not sit still for 6 hours in a straight ramrod line!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

When they’re five!

Dr. John Medina:

Get a movement maybe? Get them actually feeling something and articulating? Maybe that would be a little better. Yeah, multi-sensory is a big deal, we should do it. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

This is so beneficial because a lot of the educators who listen to this show and who, you know, follow my work — this is very supporting for them because they are doing these kinds of things, and to hear that okay, yes, I am on the right track, the things that I’m seeing and experiencing and just anecdotally feel like work, there is good science behind them. And I think that really spurs educators and professionals who are using these things to keep going with that, even though it may be outside the mainstream of what their colleagues are doing. 

Dr. John Medina:

Sure. Well, the great joy for me in science has always been that you can have opinions on lots of things, and a lot of really good educators have really insightful opinions and I can learn a lot from them. What science does when you put it into an experimental framework and make it statistically relevant is that you make it portable. And now it can apply, not just to this person’s opinion, but to this whole population who has a probability of doing X if they do Y. What science does is it just makes it portable. This is the great joy, maybe to conclude our conversation, we’re circling back to Diana and John, Diana Baumrind and John Gottman, was that by investigating it fully and understanding what this is, it does make it portable so that you can literally say to parents — “Yes, you should pay a lot of attention to your kids’ emotions and empathize with them so that you could teach them,” and that’s not an opinion, it’s what science says you should do. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Yeah. And the exercise piece and the sleep piece and the multi-sensory piece and all the other important pieces that you talk about in there, they are very tangible things that people can take and literally tomorrow start doing some things with, and that’s what’s so exciting about it. This has been just a wonderful conversation. You and I could talk for hours about this! I feel like I need to have you back on the show at some point to touch on some of the others, but hopefully people are going to read the book. I do want to make sure that you share with people where they can find out more about the work you’re doing, about the books, what is the best place for them to go to get the books?

Dr. John Medina:

Sure. brainrules.net would be the best. It will give you virtually everything you need to know, all the books, of course, are on Amazon, and in the normal bookstores back in the days when they were open.  

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

And I do want to spotlight on your website, you do have some great PDF summaries, just some great things that people can download just to supplement, as good reminders of not only this conversation, but also of the book but I just really want to encourage all of you listening to get these books. They are wonderful, they are a fantastic breed. John you have a way of — obviously speaking like we’ve been today, but also writing about these things in a way that is really engaging and not at all what people might think of when they think of a molecular biology researcher writing some things, so I just want to let all of you know that this is — these are really readable and enjoyable books, so I highly recommend them, and I can’t thank you enough for spending the time with us today, really appreciate it.  

Dr. John Medina:

Well, you’re very kind, Nicole, thank you very much for the invitation. I appreciate it.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

And thank you to all of you for listening, we will catch you back here next week for our next episode of The Better Behavior Show.