I just finished an awesome book - and I mean “awesome” in the traditional sense. The book is Brain Rules by John Medina.
I found the book through the now familiar web of links on the Internet. Garr Reynold’s (from the inspiring Presentation Zen) mentioned it in his blog and pointed to an Authors@Google video on YouTube. I watched the video about four times and purchased the book on Amazon.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough. I’m going to give a copy to my daughter and son-in-law who are expecting their first child in a few months.
For people, like myself, who think of themselves as fact-driven and relatively objective, John’s Brain Rules lay out the known workings of the brain based on peer-reviewed, reproduced science. As John himself says, he’s a great guy but a cranky scientist: evidence is all important, and there’s an entire website devoted to the detailed research references for everything in the book (along with excerpts of the DVD that comes with the book).
From a business perspective I was interested in the book because giving effective presentations is something key to my future income stream and knowing how the brain acquires information and maintains attention is critical information for presenters. For this alone it was worth the price of the book. But, if you do nothing else and take an hour to watch the Google video, you’ll see that there is much, much more to Brain Rules.
(While reading the chapter on attention I suddenly realized that a seemingly nonsequitur joke in his presentation was rather odd — and then I went back to the video looked at the timing and it all made perfect sense!)
Read the book or at least watch the Google Video. Visit his web site. Go, now! Shoo!
