Dr. John Medina, University of Washington School of Medicine
My guest for today is Dr. John Medina, Affiliate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and the author of Brain Rules, a best-selling book spawning a franchise covering Work, Babies, Aging and more.
In this massively stimulating conversation, John and I discuss:
🛠 How the brain is actually focused solely on surviving, and learns only as long as it sustains its prime goal; and why the learning environments we create are actually the opposite of what the brain is expecting
📄 How the Zoom fatigue we’ve all experienced in online classes is related to the “big head problem,” eye contact timing, missing body columns, nonverbal information… even minor variations in air pressure (you’ll have to listen to understand that little nugget)
🔃 What the BRAC, or basic rest-activity cycle is, and why you need to incorporate it into your teaching and learning ASAP (PS. BRAC gets even better if you just go outside for a few minutes)
🖌 “Flow,” the two types of creativity and cognitive disinhibition, and how they all play together to help us solve problems
🌝 Why we absolutely need to sleep to learn and why it's actually just as important *when* we sleep as *how much* we sleep
🎓 How grief affects our ability to learn, and how critical it is that we all take this into account in a world recovering from a pandemic and other global afflictions
🕛 Finally, we talk about what a “perfect” schedule would look like for anyone learning or working from home
