Run Your Brain

Neuroscientist David Eagleman argues that the unconscious mind is king

Your conscious mind is a newspaper.

Your unconscious mind is the city that that newspaper covers, with its countless comings and goings, traffic, transactions, arguments, conversations, intimate moments and the rest. The newspaper every day delivers to you only a tiny fraction of what happened in the city that day, only what you need to know to get you through your day.

Your conscious mind is the newly hired CEO of an enormous blue-chip company that has been changing and evolving for decades before he got there. His job only is to make long-term plans for the company and provide an overriding vision of the company's identity. Your unconscious mind is the thousands of employees, most of whom you don't know, who make the company go for your benefit.

Your conscious mind is a young vainglorious queen who inherits the throne and has convinced herself that the power of her mighty nation is a product of her own virtue, willfully ignoring the millions of serfs and merchants that labor in obscurity every day to keep the country running.

In his new book "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain," celebrated neuroscientist David Eagleman makes all these analogies and more in an effort to bring to mass consciousness the primary importance of unconsciousness in the realm of brain science.

Eagleman, who will appear Sunday at Bookshop Santa Cruz, is hoping to bring new research about brain science to a mass audience too distracted in their own brains to pay too much attention to the peer-reviewed journals in the field.

"I'm a real believer in the endeavor of popular science," said Eagleman, who directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor's College of Medicine. "I run a large neuroscience research lab, and spend all my day doing neuroscience research. But at night, I think it's very important to tell people what's going on, because this is fundamentally the way we're going to know ourselves."

Eagleman said that the human brain is, by far, the most complicated and mysterious thing science has ever come across. "There are probably 30,000 neuroscientists on the planet right now, and we're all working really hard, but it turns out that this is the biggest problem we've ever come up against."

"Incognito" touches on some of the more intriguing cul-de-sacs of human behavior. There is a tendency for people whose name begins with J to marry others whose name begins with J. Similarly, there is a statistically meaningful trend of people named Dennis or Denise becoming dentists. Eagleman uses brain science to put some rationality behind these odd trends. He makes the case that sexual attractiveness is often a function of dilated pupils, that strippers at their most fertile in their reproductive cycle made about twice as much in tips as those who were not, and that neuroscience has figured out ways to determine whether or not an individual is really racist.

Prevent Summer Brain Drain – Train your Brain! | HowToLearn.com

The brain is a muscle: the more you exercise it, the bigger and more agile it gets and unfortunately, the opposite is also true if you don't act to prevent summer brain drain.

Just as your muscles will atrophy from disuse, so to will you lose some of that brain power that you’ve worked so hard at building. Think of it this way: you must train really over a long period of time to run a 5k race.

You set a goal and you stick to a regimen of regular training to build up your endurance, stamina and strength. If you break your training regiment and take a few weeks or a few months off, you’ll find that when you hit the track you aren’t able to run nearly as fast or as long as you were during your more active training periods. The same thing will happen to students over the summer if you don't

You can start a neighborhood summer time book club. Go to the local zoo to learn about new animals. Check out the local library for cool summer programs. Set up a lemonade stand and learn about finances (then make a trip to the bank to take the learning to the next level).

Challenge your child with active learning activities through problem solving. This summer, in order to , when you decide the fence needs to be painted, don’t just give your child a chore to paint the fence. Create a challenge for him or her to prevent summer brain drain.

Give him a budget for the task that is slightly more than what you know it will cost to finish the job – say, $100.

Tell him that his task is to paint the fence. He must calculate the area to be painted (e.g. 100 square feet of fence), estimate the appropriate amount of paint (e.g. approximately 5 gallons), buy all the supplies (e.g. $12 per gallon plus brushes, rollers and pans) and then complete the task. Ideas like this will easily .

Any change left over from the $100 is his to keep!  This problem-based exercise will teach your child how to devise a plan and execute it efficiently. You should be actively involved in lending a hand, but don’t be afraid to let your child make mistakes.

When he does, be sure to take time to review where he may have miscalculated. It’s in the process of giving feedback where we learn the most!

Or try this one: the next time the family is planning on renting a movie or going to the theater, give the kids 2 or 3 choices to pick from. Have them make a case for which film the family should see based on the reviews from critics or other movie-goers - another simple way to prevent summer brain drain.

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