Tricks from Neuroscience that you should be using for your benefit
Marketers, business people, salesman and scammers are using advanced neurology and psychology tricks on you for decades now.
Isn’t just fair that YOU start hacking your own brain for your own benefits for once?
Some months ago, I had the insight that I was able to reach these conclusions you will read because of my mixed background in engineering, neuroscience and business, a very specific path. I hope that, with few minutes here you can learn extremely valuable things for your life that otherwise you would have to study a decade. I’ll attain the text only in things that are trainable and you’ll be able to apply to your life, regardless of your level of education or IQ.
Disclaimer: This is the first post I ever write anywhere. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list, nor to be perfectly scientifically accurate. The idea is to share many knowledge I apply in a daily basis that are core to me, but I found out that most people don’t use it or don’t even know it!
Disclaimer 2: Some people will argue that some of the tips are from Psychology not Neuroscience. But, isn’t psychology just a model for understanding high-level cognitive processes occurring in the same physical brain?
If your brain is your working tool, these tips are for you! As product manager/developer/data scientist, I like to see my brain as athletes see their bodies. I don’t spare efforts to try to learn things that will help me extract the full potential of it. In this pursue, I learned a lot of things I’d like to share with you in this post.
Enjoy!
1) The brain learns best by association
Well… everything starts with learning something new. So, the most important brain hack to develop first is to enhance your retention.
Have you ever asked yourself consciously about how to learn better? If yes, I ask you what is the purpose of learning?
In my opinion, learning only has meaning if you can apply the knowledge to your reality one way or another.
The most important trace I see that sets apart very smart people from average people is the capacity of making connections between very distant contexts and apply it to the practice in the right time. Source: Me, this post.
If you don’t become an expert in making these connections and applying them, chances are that every time you study or read something you are only overloading your brain with useless gigabytes of information.
There is a lot of published science on this topic, but I’ll focus on what I think is the core of meaningful learning.
My statement: Every time we learn something new, our brain tries to connect this new piece of information with something that is already there. Think of all of your knowledge as a spider web. When you try to add something new, if the thing does not touch the ‘web’ it will simply pass through without long-term retention.
Recognizing it: It is much easier for you to learn and remember something inside your area of expertise. Frequently, when you learn something from a completely new topic you forget it very easily.
How to train: Every time you learn something, try to connect with something you already know or lived. I was once one of these people that say ‘I have a bad memory’. But, once I learned this simple trick, I became able to never forget important things.
- How to — 1: When you meet someone new, picture in your mind a ‘postcard’ featuring the person, their name in the title, and personal info you gathered. Think a little about the person’s expertise and experiences and in which situations you would ask for their guidance.
- How to — 2: When you read something, stop to connect the situation with your reality. For instance, when I was reading about the crash of 1929, I tried to envision how would the events develop today and how would it impact me. This way I was able to understand and remember easily what actually happened.
- How to — 3: Every time you learn something new that is ‘technical’, stop one minute to think: where and when you would use this, what would be the outcomes, and where not to use it. Try to imagine in your mind you using it in your current projects and environment. By doing so, the odds are that when the time comes you’ll bring this piece of knowledge out, do something extraordinary, and leave your audience thinking that you are a genius.
That last example leads us to the next neuroscience trick you should be using:
2) Reading and Thinking are complementary
I think everyone knows the benefits of reading, but do everyone knows the benefits of thinking? Is ‘reading a lot’ sufficient to become an ‘intelligent’ successful person?
I once heard that: when you read you are thinking with other person’s head. That is very important, especially if this other head is smarter than your own on that topic. But, I found out through experience that thinking with your own head is as important as reading, or you don’t become able to leverage the information you received to your favor.
A person that understood this much before me is Bill Gates. He is a reference in using reading as a tool for creating meaningful impact in the world. What does he do that’s different from everyone else, besides reading a lot? From what I know, at least one thing:
- He writes on pages. Once upon a time, a friend of mine told me that Bill Gates interacts a lot with his books. He makes notes, summarizes and write his own ideas.
What he does is not just vandalizing his books. What he does is: 1) extract the information from the book, 2) organize it in his mind, 3) discuss and practice it with himself, and then, finally, 4) teach himself.
Everything that happens in his mind looks a lot with the most updated ‘learning pyramid’ that scientist have built. The biggest difference is, that you can advance all the levels of learning inside your mind in very few minutes, instead of having to spend hours putting a seminary together.
Will you now spend hours reading your old notes in your books? Not necessary at all. The knowledge was housed in your brain during the writing process. Remember the first neuroscience trick, learning with association? The mechanical act of grabbing a pen and writing, by itself, is a reinforcement to the learning because your brain processed the ideas together with the neural-motor activation.
You don’t like messing with your book? No problem! Now that you know how your brain works, you can use any tool for making notes (even imaginary diagrams in your mind).
Well, now I’m tired of writing and you are probably tired of reading. The post became much bigger than I expected… I’ll now present to you only one more trick, and leave the rest for a sequel.
If you got so far in the text, it’s probably time to follow me and avoid missing the next posts! I’m very glad that you are enjoying it!
From now on, I ask you to read the rest of this post with both of the first and second tips in mind, so that you achive a greater understanding and won’t forget it anymore.
Now, let’s go to some more tricks.
3) Maintain the ‘physical health’ of your brain is much harder than you think!
Everyone knows many things that are supposed to be good for the brains health. There are a lot of well-disseminated recommendations that you already know (good nutrition, practicing 300 minutes of exercise per week, sleeping well, etc.…).
But, there are a few things that are not obvious and most people don’t know. I’ll focus on these.
- You need strenuous exercise at least 2 days a week. Going out for jogging everyday or going to the gym several days a week is not enough. The brain has tiny capillary arteries that go deep into the structures that won’t deliver enough nutrients and oxygen in regular exercises. Only strenuous exercises such as soccer or tennis playing will put your body in the high-arterial-pressure and high-heart-frequency state necessary for the blood to reach and clean-up these cells.
- Don’t sleep with your neck rotated. The brain has a thing known as the cerebrospinal fluid, which is the liquid that ‘washes’ away some undesirable substances your brain produces. Most of the ‘flushing’ happens during sleeping time through the spine in the neck. If you have the habit to sleep with your neck rotated you will not only have column problems, but you will be preventing this liquid to flow properly and do its job as well.
- Avoid the alarm clock snooze. When your clock triggers in the morning, your body delivers to your brain a lot of hormones that will help it start the engines for the day. If you snooze it and goes for more 5 minutes of sleep, your body will try to fill your blood with other types of hormones that help you sleep. If you do this with frequency, the ability of your brain to use these hormones well will decrease and you find yourself messing with a very important mechanism of your body. This has very serious consequences that range from the development of anxiety and depression to Alzheimer's disease.
- Learn what sleeping hygiene is NOW! I’m still surprised with the amount of people that don’t know or don’t care with their sleeping hygiene. In few words: Sleeping hygiene is a set of good practices that help you have a great sleeping quality. I’ll leave to you to learn these techniques. I was one of these people. I had the knowledge but didn’t do anything about it. What finally made me take the sleeping hygiene very seriously was an article I read that showed the graph of how our brains build melatonin for sleeping. It is a very slow process that should start at 4 PM with the orange light of the sun. If we want to have a good night of sleep starting at 10 PM, the brain must be preparing at the end of the afternoon. WOW! So, sleeping well is hard! It is something that we need to actively work for.
Our brains’ attention span lasts only 20 minutes
And that’s why I’ll finish this post here. I have much more tricks I’d like to share, but you won’t pay as much attention as you payed so far.
I’ll list the other topics I had in mind, and let you decide in the comments which do you think are worthwhile of more 20 minutes of you attention next time:
A) Be aware of your countless brain biases
B) Use dopamine shots at your favor
C) People only remember the beginning and end of presentations
D) The brain urges easy answers only
Which trick did you like most? Did you apply any of these and got some results? Please share with me in the comments as well!
See ya! :)
