During today’s class, we have these goals:
- Beginning of Class Writing on the “Attention” chapter from John Medina’s Brain Rules. Spend the first ten minutes writing a summary of your reading in your notebook. Also, write about your own experiences with maintaining attention, losing someone’s attention, and dealing with distraction.
- Presentation on “Attention” and subsequent discussion.
- Peer Review Team exercise with the brainstorming writing that you began in our last class and brought print outs of your typed up results.
- End of class reminders for next week.
- Hand in your print outs as you leave class today.
- Post your beginning of class writing to OpenLab before our next class on Wednesday, 10/14. Keep up with the reading: “Memory” chapter is next.
- Begin writing Project Two introduction and bring your writing to our next class (multiple copies not necessary yet).
- Print out the pages from your department’s section of the College Catalog and bring these to our next class.
- Need places to photograph for your Project Two blog post? Check out Open House New York: http://www.ohny.org/. Use Google Maps as a research tool, too.
Resources for today’s discussion:
In the chapter attention, there are ways that the brain can gain notice to the things around us. The brain can grasp attention by 10 minutes and next time someone encounters that task, you will be more attentive to that task. Emotions is one way the brain gains attention from either people or items. We function by remembering or start noticing what our surroundings are. Attention in my own experience has been used when my cousin died this summer. In Medinaâs writing, he mentions a bird being killed by a hawk. The awareness and reaction to both situations are similar due to the idea of loss which can cause anyone to be attentive to what is going on.
In the chapter attention John Medina emphasizes on attention. According to Medina âour brain doesnât pay attention to boring thingsâ. This caught my attention because it shows that we learn more when we learning about things that we find interesting because we pay more attention to it. The most we can pay attention to boring things is only 10 minutes after that we lose our attention. Medina stated that âas my sleepy brain was immediately and violently aroused, it struckâŠ..called the police, and prayedâ. Medina could not forget this 45 sec event because it had involved emotions. Our brain are more likely to pay more attention to events that has emotions. In order to for a presenter to keep his/her audience attention he/she has to add more emotions in the presentation.
Brain Rule #6 is âWe donât pay attention to boring thingsâ. In order to pay attention, a human has to find the interested part. All depending on what they are listening or watching, their brains will pick what grabbed their most attention. When it comes to Multitasking a human brain can not do such a thing. Multitasking when it comes to paying attention is a myth.The Human brain can only focus on one thing at a time. The Brain cannot multitask as much as it wants. John Medina talks about his experience as a professor. His Students abilities to pay attention to him during class was often difficult.They had a habit of bringing out their laptops in the middle of him giving his lecture. Researchers at Stanford University noticed the same thing about the undergraduates. They noticed while all the students were in class they bought out their digital devices incessantly, not the whole class but majority of the class did. NO such thing as multitasking.The brain can only do things one step at a time. Researchers called the 21st century the age of distraction.Paying attention is mostly compared to being aware of what grabs your attention. Always stay focus.
In order to pay attention we cannot multitask, the brain can only pay attention to one thing at a time. In order to write essay your brain as to set itself to essay mood. If you get distracted from a text message or a TV show your brain has to reset itself to normal mood and set itself to TV mood then if you go back to your essay your brain is then resetting itself from watching TV to righting an essay, which is the reason why we tell our self ânow where was Iâ. If your full attention is on a traumatically event which most of the time it usually is. Your brain will remember that event in more depth then you can even realize. Your brain does this because it is a dangerous event and you have to remember it to avoid it again. Once we start paying attention after about ten minutes we start to lose attention of the thing that we were once paying attention to. Also if we donât know what the details that we are paying attention to mean we pay even more less attention to it.
Whenever you go through something in life, your brain tends to remember it forever. Something you do may trigger you to remember and it grabs hold of your attention. In Brain Rules by John Medina, the “Attention” chapter tells us that a guy home was about to get robbed whilst he and his children were inside, he remembers the guy’s form, the shape of his arm, his coat, it became impressed in his mind. Mostly your brain can pay attention to something for only about 10 minutes and you begin to lose interest. Brains need to always be entertained, it fires stimulation and carries messages trying to grab your attention, but only a few will succeed in breaking through to your awareness and the rest will be ignored in part or full. The messages that do grab your attention are connected to memory, interest, and awareness. What you pay attention to is influenced by memory and your past experiences. The brain selects meaning-laden information and this is true because certain things I will pay attention to and certain thing and not everything. The subtitle, “the brain cannot multitask”, is a great way to explain that, you may be able to do two things at a time, like walk and talk, but you can not really pay attention to both at the same time. The brains attentional “spotlight” can only focus on one thing at a time and Emotional arousal helps the brain to learn, the way you tell a story, that emotionally connects to someone helps them to learn the situation better.
Rahat Ahmed
Prof. J
English
10/11/15
Wiring
In this chapter of the book called “Wiring by Dr. John Medina mentions how learning rewires your brain. Dr. John Medina states that ” when you learn something new, the wiring in the human brain changes. The wiring of the human brain is very unique in a way because at birth our brain is only partially constructed and as time goes it develops with maturity. The human brain won’t be fully assembled until we are in our early 20s.
Each human brain has a different road map. The human brain can be predictable and similar to each other but it wonât never be the same, simply because every human brain has its own independent wiring. Not even identical twin having identical experiences possess brain that wire themselves exactly the same way.
One thing that stood out for me the most in this “Wiring” chapter is the fact that the human brain wiring is related to areas such as acuity and perhaps even language acquisition. I was kind of surprised because I always had thought that everything in the human brain would have it’s own way of operating things. Turns out every human brain experiences dependent wiring as well. Overall this chapter was really interesting because it personally taught me a lot about how the human brain wiring has its own little ways of operating.
This was posted by mistake, please ignore.
Rahat Ahmed
Prof. J
English
10/11/15
Attention
In this chapter of “Brain Rules” called “Attention”, Dr. John Medina talks about the how difficult it can be for the human brain to stay completely focused for a long period of time. As Dr. John Medina mentions, the human brain can only stay focused for about 9 to 10 minutes. After 10 minutes of complete focus on a particular topic our brain starts to lose interest, so in order for us humans to regain our focus the speaker would have to say something completely off topic that engages our brains again.
The human brain cannot multitask because the human brain can only focus on thing at a time. It might sound peculiar but in some cases the human brain can and does multitask, for example when we are walking and talking at the same time.
Honestly for me it’s very hard to stay completely focused on certain because I tend to daydream a lot. If the topic that is being discussed is something that I enjoy, only then will I stay focused throughout the whole lecture. Generally when I speak people tend to listen because I donât like to talk for too long so I keep it short and simple. I can easily get distracted because like I said I tend to daydream a lot. One thing that I do to not get distracted is try to completely ignore everything that’s going on. overall I am someone who does get distracted easily which leads me to not pay attention at times.
I agree with the Attention chapter on Brain Rules by John Medina with first quote that says,”We don’t pay attention to boring things.” because this quote is really relate able personally.” Also, “Paying Attention improves retention of reading material, increases accuracy, and boosts clarity in writing, math, science, and every other academic category that has ever been tested.” The chapter basically explains that messages that grab your attention is connected to memory, interest, and awareness. All around Memory consist of the Subgroups of Interest, Awareness and Emotions. “Attention” can also be affected by the two hemisphere of the brain.
In this chapter of “Brain Rules”, John Medina talks about attention. He explains that the brain cannot pay sharp attention to boring things, and if it does then it would be a span of 10 minutes then it would lose attention. The brain has to be intrigued again after those 10 minutes to be attentive again. Our attention is only limited, which means that we cannot pay attention to two things at once and multitask. An example of is texting and driving. We cannot pay attention to our phones and text and have our hand on the wheel and our attention to the road at the same time. Also for the brain to learn, there has to be emotional arousals, and the brain has to stay intrigued. Emotion is what gets our attention. Happiness, fear, nostalgia, laughter, and amazed are what get our attention off the bat and keeps the brain locked in for a span until it is bored.
In chapter âAttentionâ John Medina explained about how our brain get attract to things. John medina stated that our brain donât pay attention to the boring things. He also said that our brain can grasp attention only for 10 minutes and to grasp attention again the thing have to change the way its getting brain attention. For example when a person is giving speech after 10 minutes brain will stop grasping attention towards it so the person who is giving speech have to add new things to grasp audience attention. If our brain pay attention to things it boost the learning ability of brain and helps to memorize the things that you are paying attention to.
Paying attention or to alert is very important in many ways. How you may ask? We could react to certain situations or things at the moment that it happens. Like for example, there is a red light meaning that it is your turn to cross the street but unfortunately, it seems that the car ran a red light and you got hit because you weren’t paying attention. Being aware of your surroundings is the key to survival in any circumstances. However, paying attention doesn’t always apply to potentially dangerous situations. According to John Medina, “Audiences check out after 10 minutes, but you can keep grabbing them back by telling narratives or creating events rich in emotion”. In other words, if you are trying to convince the audience about something, you have to make sure that you keep them engaged for the majority of the time.
In the “Attention” chapter of John Medina’s Brain Rules, it is stated that memory has an influence in where our attention goes. From our memory, we are able to decide which elements of a situation are superfluous, and do not require us to focus on them, and which elements may require our immediate attention. Things that are unfamiliar, for example, may attract more attention than say, an ordinary tree. Your brain regards things with five questions: Can i eat it? Will it eat me? Can i mate with it? Will it mate with me? Have I seen it before?
It is also explained that the average brain is a sequential processor, meaning it handles one task at a time before switching its attention to another. This means every time you switch attention from one thing to another, your brain takes a fraction of a second to reset itself and focus on the new process it has been presented with. Trying to multitask only decreases the efficiency rate of both tasks significantly, causing many errors.
Almost everything in this chapter caught my attention. What Medina said was that the brain cannot paid attention to boring thing meaning that what we do not find interresting , amusing or like.Ans we can’t really pay attention if we are tired.Their are key factor as why we cannot pay attention to things and one of the reason I cant’t pay attention to thing is time, if it;s too long I lose focus halfway throught it.
In the ‘Attention’ chapter Medina goes over different reasons why he believes attention is a curial part for the human being. In the beginning of the chapter Medina goes on to say how a presenter only has ten minutes before the audience loses interest, he refers to the book Teaching tips that âtypically, attention increases from the beginning of the lecture to ten minutes into the lecture and decreases after that pointâ and it’s due to being influenced by both culture and gene. He also brings up the idea how attention works with memory, interest, and awareness, how past experience with something particular may cause you to focus more the next time you encounter it. Finally he talks about multi-tasking and how it is possible however the ability for the brain to pay attention to various things at a time ; is simply not capable of doing so.
In John Medina’s “Attention” chapter he speaks and emphasizes attention and how the brain plays into it. John Medina states that the people don’t pay attention to boring things. I completely believe with this statement because people easily lose focus of something that isn’t worth paying attention to. So when a professor is giving a lecture and does not have any type of illustration or integration into the lecture the students lose focus and pay attention to something else. The brain can only focus on one thing at a time, so if you think you can multitask you can’t. It is virtually impossible. It is easier for us to see patterns and abstract meanings than actually recording detail. Also when someone brings emotions into whatever the audience is watching it grabs the audiences attention and grasps it for a longer period of time. Many people lose sight of what they are paying attention to but you can easily grasp it by throwing in some emotion or something eye popping
John Medina, a well known, well received and famous molecular biologist known for his excellent study of the brain. Medina has studied the brain in vast and extensive detail. In John Medina’s famous and well known and well received book titled, “Brain Rules”, he covers the next most important thing that our brains needs and that would be the chapter titled “Attention”. Medina as usual is known to state thing he feels as though is nothing more then facts. Medina discusses that our brains tend to ignore other individual processes unless something has attracted out attention. This of course makes sense and it quite evident in our every day lives. Many people are seen to be paying too much attentive attention to their cell phones on the street either texting or looking up info, for whatever reason and can end up missing something interesting or appealing because their attention has them focused on one object at the time.
We all have those days where we just cant focus and pay attention. From long lectures to important business meetings. But why is it so hard for people to pay attention when it comes down to certain important things? Speaking for myself, my attention can be drawn and lost in the matter of seconds. I find my attention on certain things that i find most interesting to be stronger than others i don’t. What catches my attentions? Well,things that i find fascinating to my ears and eye catching. Studies shoe that paying attention improves retention of reading material, increases accuracy, and boosts clarity in writing math, science and every academic category that has ever been tested. So how does attention and the way the human body works connect? And, Why do we pay attention to certain things rather than others? What you pay attention to is often influenced by memory. You use your previous experience to predict where you should pay attention. if you have an interest in a subject or a person, or something is important to you, you tend to pay more attention to things related to that subject or person. Emotion can influence attention. Emotionally charged events are better remembered for longer and with more accuracy than neutral events. Certain events have an emotional charge only for specific people. The brain pays more attention to the gist than to the peripheral details of an emotionally charged experience. Ever questions yourself and wonder why you remembered something and someone else didn’t? well, those are some but not all explanations and reason. Finding out what draws and keeps your attention is all up to you.
In the âAttentionâ chapter Medina goes over different reasons why he believes attention is a curial part for the human being. In the beginning of the chapter Medina goes on to say how a presenter only has ten minutes before the audience loses interest, he refers to the book Teaching tips that âtypically, attention increases from the beginning of the lecture to ten minutes into the lecture and decreases after that pointâ and itâs due to being influenced by both culture and gene sometimes its very hard to concentrate when you have a lot of things on your mind and its very easy to concentrate when your relaxed .