I had the pleasure of reading John Medina’s brilliant book “Brain Rules” over the holidays. Medina helps us better understand what goes on in our brains and offers ideas on how to make better use of this vitally important organ. “Brain Rules” is organized according to 12 well-researched brain principles:

1. Exercise boosts brain power. Exercise gets blood to your brain, bringing it glucose for energy and oxygen to soak up the toxic electrons that are left over. It also stimulates the protein that keeps neurons connecting.

2. The human brain evolved, too. We don’t have one brain in our heads; we have three. We started with a “lizard brain” to keep us breathing, then added a brain like a cat’s and then topped those with the thin layer of Jell-O known as the cortex – the thirds and powerful “human” brain.

3. Every brain is wired differently. The various regions of the brain develop at different rates in different people. No two people’s brains store the same information in the same way in the same place.

4. We don’t pay attention to boring things. The brain’s attentional “spotlight” can focus on only one thing at a time: no multitasking.Emotional arousal helps the brain learn.

5. Short-term memory: repeat to remember. Most of the events that predict whether something learned also will be remembered occur in the first few seconds of learning. The more elaborately we encode a memory during its initial moments, the stronger it will be.

6. Long-term memory: Remember to repeat. The way to make long-term memory more reliable is to incorporate new information gradually and repeat it in timed intervals.

7. Sleep well, think well. Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning and even motor dexterity.

8. Stressed brains don’t learn the same way. Chronic stress dangerously deregulates a system built only to deal with short-term responses.

9. Stimulate more of the senses. Our senses evolved to work together – vision influencing hearing, for example – which means that we learn best if we stimulate several senses at once.

10. Vision trumps all other senses. We learn and remember best through pictures, not through written or spoken words.

11. Male and female brains are different. Men’s and women’s brains are different structurally and biochemically.

12. We are powerful and natural explorers. We learn not by passive reaction to the environment but by active testing through observation, hypothesis, experiment and conclusion.

Within an organizational context the winners will be those that  incorporate these principles into best management, leadership and training practices.