Brain Rules: Oliver Sacks meets GETTING THINGS DONE

John Medina's Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School pulls off a terrific trick: combining popular science with touching personal memoir and a bunch of practical conclusions for improving work, education and personal life.

Brain Rules takes the brain's mysteries apart into twelve pieces: Exercise, survival, wiring, attention, short-term memory, long-term memory, sleep, stress, multisensory perception, vision, gender, and exploration. He discusses the best, most current science describing what drives each one, delving into psychology, neurology, evolutionary biology, and practical disciplines like behavioural economics, organizational science, and pedagogy.

Woven into the science are a series of vivid anaecdotes from Medina's life and from case histories gathered across the scientific literature, and emerging naturally from that are a series of eminently practical recommendations for reforming the workplace and the education system, and for improving the way that we interact with ourselves and others.

Medina's approach to the subject combines the best aspects of Oliver Sacks and Getting Things Done, making the book into something that's part manifesto and part education. The BrainRules.net site features a ton of audio and video about the book's subject (Medina's descriptions of the value of multisensory learning are very compelling) and other supplementary material, and the book comes bundled with a DVD containing much of this material as well. Brain Rules on Amazon, BrainRules.net

Discussion

Take a look at this

#1 posted by georgelazenby , September 17, 2008 6:37 AM

Sacks

#2 posted by Mark Pearson , September 17, 2008 10:09 AM

Thanks, Cory for giving readers a heads up about the book. Garr Reynolds has put together a cool slideshow on it at http://www.slideshare.net/garr/brain-rules-for-presenters

#3 posted by Anonymous , September 17, 2008 6:05 PM

Thank you Cory!
(being able to request books from my library while I'm at home is almost dangerous /evilgrin)

#4 posted by jphilby , September 17, 2008 10:55 PM

Or, you wish, Huang Po wrote the book on NOT getting things done.

If you choose not to suck cess.