david
wtorek, 30 grudnia 2014
1. Brain Rules 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School Paperback ebook [1-20]
go ahead and multiply the number 8,388,628 x 2 in your head.
Can you do it in a few seconds? There is a young man who can double
that number 24 times in the space of a few seconds. He gets it right
every time. There is a boy who can tell you the precise time of day
at any moment, even in his sleep. There is a girl who can correctly
determine the exact dimensions of an object 20 feet away. There is
a child who at age 6 drew such lifelike and powerful pictures, she
got her own show at a gallery on Madison Avenue. Yet none of these
children could be taught to tie their shoes. Indeed, none of them
have an IQ greater than 50.
The brain is an amazing thing.
Your brain may not be nearly so odd, but it is no less
extraordinary. Easily the most sophisticated information-transfer
system on Earth, your brain is fully capable of taking the little black
squiggles on this piece of bleached wood and deriving meaning from
them. To accomplish this miracle, your brain sends jolts of electricity
crackling through hundreds of miles of wires composed of brain cells
introduction
BRAIN RULES
2
so small that thousands of them could fit into the period at the end
of this sentence. You accomplish all of this in less time than it takes
you to blink. Indeed, you have just done it. What’s equally incredible,
given our intimate association with it, is this: Most of us have no idea
how our brain works.
This has strange consequences. We try to talk on our cell phones
and drive at the same time, even though it is literally impossible for
our brains to multitask when it comes to paying attention. We have
created high-stress office environments, even though a stressed brain
is significantly less productive. Our schools are designed so that most
real learning has to occur at home. This would be funny if it weren’t
so harmful. Blame it on the fact that brain scientists rarely have a
conversation with teachers and business professionals, education
majors and accountants, superintendents and CEOs. Unless you have
the Journal of Neuroscience sitting on your coffee table, you’re out of
the loop.
This book is meant to get you into the loop.
12 brain rules
My goal is to introduce you to 12 things we know about how
the brain works. I call these Brain Rules. For each rule, I present
the science and then offer ideas for investigating how the rule
might apply to our daily lives, especially at work and school. The
brain is complex, and I am taking only slivers of information from
each subject—not comprehensive but, I hope, accessible. The Brain
Rules film, available at www.brainrules.net/dvd, is an integral part of
the project. You might use the DVD as an introduction, and then
jump between a chapter in the book and the illustrations online. A
sampling of the ideas you’ll encounter:
• For starters, we are not used to sitting at a desk for eight hours
a day. From an evolutionary perspective, our brains developed
while working out, walking as many as 12 miles a day. The brain
still craves that experience, especially in sedentary populations like
INTRODUCTION
3
our own. That’s why exercise boosts brain power (Brain Rule #1) in
such populations. Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in longterm
memory, reasoning, attention, and problem-solving tasks. I am
convinced that integrating exercise into our eight hours at work or
school would only be normal.
• As you no doubt have noticed if you’ve ever sat through a typical
PowerPoint presentation, people don’t pay attention to boring things
(Brain Rule #4). You’ve got seconds to grab someone’s attention and
only 10 minutes to keep it. At 9 minutes and 59 seconds, something
must be done to regain attention and restart the clock—something
emotional and relevant. Also, the brain needs a break. That’s why I
use stories in this book to make many of my points.
• Ever feel tired about 3 o’clock in the afternoon? That’s because
your brain really wants to take a nap. You might be more productive
if you did: In one study, a 26-minute nap improved NASA pilots’
performance by 34 percent. And whether you get enough rest at
night affects your mental agility the next day. Sleep well, think well
(Brain Rule #7).
• We’ll meet a man who can read two pages at the same time, one
with each eye, and remember everything in the pages forever. Most
of us do more forgetting than remembering, of course, and that’s why
we must repeat to remember (Brain Rule #5). When you understand
the brain’s rules for memory, you’ll see why I want to destroy the
notion of homework.
• We’ll find out why the terrible twos only look like active
rebellion but actually are a child’s powerful urge to explore. Babies
may not have a lot of knowledge about the world, but they know a
whole lot about how to get it. We are powerful and natural explorers
(Brain Rule #12), and this never leaves us, despite the artificial
environments we’ve built for ourselves.
no prescriptions
The ideas ending the chapters of this book are not a prescription.
BRAIN RULES
4
They are a call for real-world research. The reason springs from
what I do for a living. My research expertise is the molecular basis of
psychiatric disorders, but my real interest is in trying to understand
the fascinating distance between a gene and a behavior. I have been
a private consultant for most of my professional life, a hired gun for
research projects in need of a developmental molecular biologist with
such specialization. I have had the privilege of watching countless
research efforts involving chromosomes and mental function.
On such journeys, I occasionally would run across articles and
books that made startling claims based on “recent advances” in
brain science about how to change the way we teach people and do
business. And I would panic, wondering if the authors were reading
some literature totally off my radar screen. I speak several dialects
of brain science, and I knew nothing from those worlds capable of
dictating best practices for education and business. In truth, if we
ever fully understood how the human brain knew how to pick up a
glass of water, it would represent a major achievement.
There was no need to panic. You can responsibly train a skeptical
eye on any claim that brain research can without equivocation tell us
how to become better teachers, parents, business leaders, or students.
This book is a call for research simply because we don’t know enough
to be prescriptive. It is an attempt to vaccinate against mythologies
such as the “Mozart Effect,” left brain/right brain personalities, and
getting your babies into Harvard by making them listen to language
tapes while they are still in the womb.
back to the jungle
What we know about the brain comes from biologists who
study brain tissues, experimental psychologists who study behavior,
cognitive neuroscientists who study how the first relates to the
second, and evolutionary biologists. Though we know precious little
about how the brain works, our evolutionary history tells us this: The
brain appears to be designed to solve problems related to surviving
INTRODUCTION
5
in an unstable outdoor environment, and to do so in nearly constant
motion. I call this the brain’s performance envelope.
Each subject in this book—exercise, survival, wiring, attention,
memory, sleep, stress, sense, vision, gender, and exploration—
relates to this performance envelope. Motion translates to exercise.
Environmental instability led to the extremely flexible way our
brains are wired, allowing us to solve problems through exploration.
Learning from our mistakes so we could survive in the great outdoors
meant paying attention to certain things at the expense of others,
and it meant creating memories in a particular way. Though we have
been stuffing them into classrooms and cubicles for decades, our
brains actually were built to survive in jungles and grasslands. We
have not outgrown this.
I am a nice guy, but I am a grumpy scientist. For a study
to appear in this book, it has to pass what some at The Boeing
Company (for which I have done some consulting) call MGF: the
Medina Grump Factor. That means the supporting research for
each of my points must first be published in a peer-reviewed journal
and then successfully replicated. Many of the studies have been
replicated dozens of times. (To stay as reader-friendly as possible,
extensive references are not in this book but can be found at
www.brainrules.net.)
What do these studies show, viewed as a whole? Mostly this: If
you wanted to create an education environment that was directly
opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would
design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business
environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good
at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle. And if
you wanted to change things, you might have to tear down both and
start over.
In many ways, starting over is what this book is all about.
exercise
Rule #1
Exercise boosts brain power.
if the cameras weren’t rolling and the media abuzz
with live reports, it is possible nobody would have
believed the following story:
A man had been handcuffed, shackled and thrown
into California’s Long Beach Harbor, where he was quickly fastened
to a floating cable. The cable had been attached at the other end to
70 boats, bobbing up and down in the harbor, each carrying a single
person. Battling strong winds and currents, the man then swam,
towing all 70 boats (and passengers) behind him, traveling 1.5 miles
to Queen’s Way Bridge. The man, Jack La Lanne, was celebrating his
birthday.
He had just turned 70 years old.
Jack La Lanne, born in 1914, has been called the godfather of
the American fitness movement. He starred in one of the longestrunning
exercise programs produced for commercial television. A
prolific inventor, La Lanne designed the first leg-extension machines,
the first cable-fastened pulleys, and the first weight selectors, all now
BRAIN RULES
10
standard issue in the modern gym. He is even credited with inventing
an exercise that supposedly bears his name, the Jumping Jack. La
Lanne is now in his mid-90s, and even these feats are probably not
the most interesting aspect of this famed bodybuilder’s story.
If you ever have the chance to hear him in an interview, your
biggest impression will be not the strength of his muscles but the
strength of his mind. La Lanne is mentally alert, almost beyond
reason. His sense of humor is both lightening fast and improvisatory.
“I tell people I can’t afford to die. It will wreck my image!” he once
exclaimed to Larry King. He regularly rails at the camera: “Why am I
so strong? Do you know how many calories are in butter and cheese
and ice cream? Would you get your dog up in the morning for a cup of
coffee and a doughnut?” He claims he hasn’t had dessert since 1929.
He is hyper-energized, opinionated, possessed with the intellectual
vigor of an athlete in his 20s.
So it’s hard not to ask: “Is there a relationship between exercise
and mental alertness?” The answer, it turns out, is yes.
survival of the fittest
Though a great deal of our evolutionary history remains shrouded
in controversy, the one fact that every paleoanthropologist on the
planet accepts can be summarized in two words:
We moved.
A lot. When our bountiful rainforests began to shrink, collapsing
the local food supply, we were forced to wander around an
increasingly dry landscape looking for more trees we could scamper
up to dine. As the climate got more arid, these wet botanical vending
machines disappeared altogether. Instead of moving up and down
complex arboreal environments in three dimensions, which required
a lot of dexterity, we began walking back and forth across arid
savannahs in two dimensions, which required a lot of stamina.
“About 10 to 20 kilometers a day with men,” says famed
anthropologist Richard Wrangham, “and about half that for women.”
1. EXERCISE
11
That’s the amount of ground scientists estimate we covered on a daily
basis back then—up to 12 miles a day. That means our fancy brains
developed not while we were lounging around but while we were
working out.
The first real marathon runner of our species was a vicious
predator known as Homo erectus. As soon as the Homo erectus family
evolved, about 2 million years ago, he started moving out of town.
Our direct ancestors, Homo sapiens, rapidly did the same thing,
starting in Africa 100,000 years ago and reaching Argentina by
12,000 years ago. Some researchers suggest that we were extending
our ranges by an unheard-of 25 miles per year.
This is an impressive feat, considering the nature of the world our
ancestors inhabited. They were crossing rivers and deserts, jungles
and mountain ranges, all without the aid of maps and mostly without
tools. They eventually made ocean-going boats without the benefit
of wheels or metallurgy, and then traveling up and down the Pacific
with only the crudest navigational skills. Our ancestors constantly
were encountering new food sources, new predators, new physical
dangers. Along the road they routinely suffered injuries, experienced
strange illnesses, and delivered and nurtured children, all without
the benefit of textbooks or modern medicine.
Given our relative wimpiness in the animal kingdom (we don’t
even have enough body hair to survive a mildly chilly night), what
these data tell us is that we grew up in top physical shape, or we
didn’t grow up at all. And they also tell us the human brain became
the most powerful in the world under conditions where motion was
a constant presence.
If our unique cognitive skills were forged in the furnace of
physical activity, is it possible that physical activity still influences
our cognitive skills? Are the cognitive abilities of someone in good
physical condition different from those of someone in poor physical
condition? And what if someone in poor physical condition were
whipped into shape? Those are scientifically testable questions. The
BRAIN RULES
12
answers are directly related to why Jack La Lanne can still crack jokes
about eating dessert. In his nineties.
will you age like jim or like frank?
We discovered the beneficial effects of exercise on the brain
by looking at aging populations. This was brought home to me by
an anonymous man named Jim and a famous man named Frank. I
met them both while I was watching television. A documentary on
American nursing homes showed people in wheelchairs, many in
their mid- to late 80s, lining the halls of a dimly lit facility, just sitting
around, seemingly waiting to die. One was named Jim. His eyes
seemed vacant, lonely, friendless. He could cry at the drop of a hat
but otherwise spent the last years of his life mostly staring off into
space. I switched channels. I stumbled upon a very young-looking
Mike Wallace. The journalist was busy interviewing architect Frank
Lloyd Wright, at the time in his late 80s. I was about to hear a most
riveting interview.
“When I walk into St. Patrick’s Cathedral … here in New York
City, I am enveloped in a feeling of reverence,” said Wallace, tapping
his cigarette. The old man eyed Wallace. “Sure it isn’t an inferiority
complex?”
“Just because the building is big and I’m small, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I think not.”
“I hope not.”
“You feel nothing when you go into St. Patrick’s?”
“Regret,” Wright said without a moment’s pause, “because it isn’t
the thing that really represents the spirit of independence and the
sovereignty of the individual which I feel should be represented in
our edifices devoted to culture.”
I was dumbfounded by the dexterity of Wright’s response. In four
sentences, one could detect the clarity of his mind, his unshakable
vision, his willingness to think out of the box. The rest of his
1. EXERCISE
13
interview was just as compelling, as was the rest of Wright’s life. He
completed the designs for the Guggenheim Museum, his last work,
in 1957, when he was 90 years old.
But I also was dumbfounded by something else. As I
contemplated Wright’s answers, I remembered Jim from the nursing
home. He was the same age as Wright. In fact, most of the residents
were. I suddenly was beholding two types of aging. Jim and Frank
lived in roughly the same period of time. But one mind had almost
completely withered, while the other remained as incandescent as
a light bulb. What was the difference in the aging process between
men like Jim and the famous architect? This question has bugged the
research community for a long time. Investigators have known for
years that some people age with energy and pizazz, living productive
lives well into their 80s and 90s. Others appear to become battered
and broken by the process, and often they don’t survive their
70s. Attempts to explain these differences led to many important
discoveries, which I have grouped as answers to six questions.
1) Is there one factor that predicts how well you will age?
It was never an easy question for researchers to answer. They
found many variables, from nature to nurture, that contributed
to someone’s ability to age gracefully. That’s why the scientific
community met with both applause and suspicion a group of
researchers who uncovered a powerful environmental influence. In
a result that probably produced a smile on Jack La Lanne’s face, one
of the greatest predictors of successful aging was the presence or
absence of a sedentary lifestyle. Put simply, if you are a couch potato,
you are more likely to age like Jim, if you make it to your 80s at all.
If you have an active lifestyle, you are more likely to age like Frank
Lloyd Wright and much more likely to make it to your 90s.
The chief reason for the difference seemed to be that exercise
improved cardiovascular fitness, which in turn reduced the risk for
diseases such as heart attacks and stroke. But researchers wondered
BRAIN RULES
14
why the people who were aging “successfully” also seemed to be
more mentally alert. This led to the obvious second question:
2) Were they?
Just about every mental test possible was tried. No matter how
it was measured, the answer was consistently yes: A lifetime of
exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive
performance, compared with those who are sedentary. Exercisers
outperform couch potatoes in tests that measure long-term
memory, reasoning, attention, problem-solving, even so-called fluidintelligence
tasks. These tasks test the ability to reason quickly and
think abstractly, improvising off previously learned material in order
to solve a new problem. Essentially, exercise improves a whole host
of abilities prized in the classroom and at work.
Not every weapon in the cognitive arsenal is improved by
exercise. Short-term memory skills, for example, and certain types of
reaction times appear to be unrelated to physical activity. And, while
nearly everybody shows some improvement, the degree of benefit
varies quite a bit among individuals. Most important, these data,
strong as they were, showed only an association, not a cause. To show
the direct link, a more intrusive set of experiments had to be done.
Researchers had to ask:
3) Can you turn Jim into Frank?
The experiments were reminiscent of a makeover show.
Researchers found a group of couch potatoes, measured their brain
power, exercised them for a period of time, and re-examined their
brain power. They consistently found that when couch potatoes are
enrolled in an aerobic exercise program, all kinds of mental abilities
begin to come back online. Positive results were observed after as
little as four months of activity. It was the same story with schoolage
children. In one recent study, children jogged for 30 minutes two
or three times a week. After 12 weeks, their cognitive performance
1. EXERCISE
15
had improved significantly compared with pre-jogging levels. When
the exercise program was withdrawn, the scores plummeted back to
their pre-experiment levels. Scientists had found a direct link. Within
limits, it does appear that exercise can turn Jim into Frank, or at least
turn Jim into a sharper version of himself.
As the effects of exercise on cognition became increasingly
obvious, scientists began fine-tuning their questions. One of the
biggest—certainly one dearest to the couch-potato cohort—was:
What type of exercise must you do, and how much of it must be done
to get the benefit? I have both good news and bad news.
4) What’s the bad news?
Astonishingly, after years of investigation in aging populations,
the answer to the question of how much is not much. If all you do
is walk several times a week, your brain will benefit. Even couch
potatoes who fidget show increased benefit over those who do not
fidget. The body seems to be clamoring to get back to its hyperactive
Serengeti roots. Any nod toward this history, be it ever so small, is
met with a cognitive war whoop. In the laboratory, the gold standard
appears to be aerobic exercise, 30 minutes at a clip, two or three
times a week. Add a strengthening regimen and you get even more
cognitive benefit.
Of course, individual results vary, and no one should embark on a
rigorous program without consulting a physician. Too much exercise
and exhaustion can hurt cognition. The data merely point to the
fact that one should embark. Exercise, as millions of years traipsing
around the backwoods tell us, is good for the brain. Just how good
took everyone by surprise, as they answered the next question.
5) Can exercise treat brain disorders?
Given the robust effect of exercise on typical cognitive
performance, researchers wanted to know if it could be used to
treat atypical performance. What about diseases such as age-related
BRAIN RULES
16
dementia and its more thoroughly investigated cousin, Alzheimer’s
disease? What about affective disorders such as depression?
Researchers looked at both prevention and intervention. With
experiments reproduced all over the world, enrolling thousands of
people, often studied for decades, the results are clear. Your lifetime
risk for general dementia is literally cut in half if you participate in
leisure-time physical activity. Aerobic exercise seems to be the key.
With Alzheimer’s, the effect is even greater: Such exercise lowers
your odds of getting the disease by more than 60 percent.
How much exercise? Once again, a little goes a long way. The
researchers showed you have to participate in some form of exercise
just twice a week to get the benefit. Bump it up to a 20-minute walk
each day, and you can cut your risk of having a stroke—one of the
leading causes of mental disability in the elderly—by 57 percent.
The man most responsible for stimulating this line of inquiry
did not start his career wanting to be a scientist. He wanted to be an
athletics coach. His name is Dr. Steven Blair, and he looks uncannily
like Jason Alexander, the actor who portrayed George Costanza on
the old TV sitcom Seinfeld. Blair’s coach in high school, Gene Bissell,
once forfeited a football game after discovering that an official had
missed a call. Even though the league office balked, Bissell insisted
that his team be declared the loser, and the young Steven never
forgot the incident. Blair writes that this devotion to truth inspired
his undying admiration for rigorous, no-nonsense, statistical analysis
of the epidemiological work in which he eventually embarked. His
seminal paper on fitness and mortality stands as a landmark example
of how to do work with integrity in this field. The rigor of his findings
inspired other investigators. What about using exercise not only as
prevention, they asked, but as intervention, to treat mental disorders
such as depression and anxiety?
That turned out to be a good line of questioning. A growing body
of work now suggests that physical activity can powerfully affect the
course of both diseases. We think it’s because exercise regulates the
1. EXERCISE
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release of the three neurotransmitters most commonly associated
with the maintenance of mental health: serotonin, dopamine, and
norepinephrine. Although exercise cannot substitute for psychiatric
treatment, the role of exercise on mood is so pronounced that
many psychiatrists have begun adding a regimen of physical activity
to the normal course of therapy. But in one experiment with
depressed individuals, rigorous exercise was actually substituted for
antidepressant medication. Even when compared against medicated
controls, the treatment outcomes were astonishingly successful. For
both depression and anxiety, exercise is beneficial immediately and
over the long term. It is equally effective for men and women, and
the longer the program is deployed, the greater the effect becomes. It
is especially helpful for severe cases and for older people.
Most of the data we have been discussing concern elderly
populations. Which leads to the question:
6) Are the cognitive blessings of exercise only for the elderly?
As you ratchet down the age chart, the effects of exercise on
cognition become less clear. The biggest reason for this is that so
few studies have been done. Only recently has the grumpy scientific
eye begun to cast its gaze on younger populations. One of the best
efforts enrolled more than 10,000 British civil servants between the
ages of 35 and 55, examining exercise habits and grading them as
low, medium, or high. Those with low levels of physical activity were
more likely to have poor cognitive performance. Fluid intelligence,
the type that requires improvisatory problem-solving skills, was
particularly hurt by a sedentary lifestyle. Studies done in other
countries have confirmed the finding.
If only a small number of studies have been done in middle-age
populations, the number of studies saying anything about exercise
and children is downright microscopic. Though much more work
needs to be done, the data point in a familiar direction, though
perhaps for different reasons.
BRAIN RULES
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To talk about some of these differences, I would like to introduce
you to Dr. Antronette Yancey. At 6 foot 2, Yancey is a towering,
beautiful presence, a former professional model, now a physicianscientist
with a deep love for children and a broad smile to buttress
the attitude. She is a killer basketball player, a published poet, and
one of the few professional scientists who also makes performance
art. With this constellation of talents, she is a natural to study the
effects of physical activity on developing minds. And she has
found what everybody else has found: Exercise improves children.
Physically fit children identify visual stimuli much faster than
sedentary ones. They appear to concentrate better. Brain-activation
studies show that children and adolescents who are fit allocate more
cognitive resources to a task and do so for longer periods of time.
“Kids pay better attention to their subjects when they’ve been
active,” Yancey says. “Kids are less likely to be disruptive in terms of
their classroom behavior when they’re active. Kids feel better about
themselves, have higher self-esteem, less depression, less anxiety. All
of those things can impair academic performance and attentiveness.”
Of course, there are many ingredients to the recipe of academic
performance. Finding out which components are the most
important—especially if you want improvement—is difficult enough.
Finding out whether exercise is one of those choice ingredients is
even tougher. But these preliminary findings show that we have
every reason to be optimistic about the long-term outcomes.
an exercise in road-building
Why exercise works so well in the brain, at a molecular level,
can be explained by competitive food eaters—or, less charitably,
professional pigs. There is an international association representing
people who time themselves on how much they can eat at a given
event. The association is called the International Federation of
Competitive Eating, and its crest proudly displays the slogan (I am
not making this up) In Voro Veritas—literally, “In Gorging, Truth.”
1. EXERCISE
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Like any sporting organization, competitive food eaters have their
heroes. The reigning gluttony god is Takeru “Tsunami” Kobayashi.
He is the recipient of many eating awards, including the vegetarian
dumpling competition (83 dumplings downed in 8 minutes),
the roasted pork bun competition (100 in 12 minutes), and the
hamburger competition (97 in 8 minutes). Kobayashi also is a world
champion hot-dog eater. One of his few losses was to a 1,089-pound
Kodiak bear. In a 2003 Fox televised special called Man vs. Beast, the
mighty Kobayashi consumed only 31 bunless dogs compared with
the ursine’s 50, all in about 2½ minutes. Kobayashi lost his hot-dog
crown in 2007 to Joey Chestnut, who ate 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes
(the Tsunami could manage only 63).
But my point isn’t about speed. It’s about what happens to all of
those hot dogs after they slide down the Tsunami’s throat. As with
any of us, his body uses its teeth and acid and wormy intestines to
tear the food apart and, if need be, reconfigure it.
This is done for more or less a single reason: to turn foodstuffs
into glucose, a type of sugar that is one of the body’s favorite energy
resources. Glucose and other metabolic products are absorbed into
the bloodstream via the small intestines. The nutrients travel to all
parts of the body, where they are deposited into cells, which make
up the body’s various tissues. The cells seize the sweet stuff like
sharks in a feeding frenzy. Cellular chemicals greedily tear apart
the molecular structure of glucose to extract its sugary energy. This
energy extraction is so violent that atoms are literally ripped asunder
in the process.
As in any manufacturing process, such fierce activity generates
a fair amount of toxic waste. In the case of food, this waste consists
of a nasty pile of excess electrons shredded from the atoms in the
glucose molecules. Left alone, these electrons slam into other
molecules within the cell, transforming them into some of the most
toxic substances known to humankind. They are called free radicals.
If not quickly corralled, they will wreck havoc on the innards of a cell
BRAIN RULES
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and, cumulatively, on the rest of the body. These electrons are fully
capable, for example, of causing mutations in your very DNA.
The reason you don’t die of electron overdose is that the
atmosphere is full of breathable oxygen. The main function of oxygen
is to act like an efficient electron-absorbing sponge. At the same time
the blood is delivering foodstuffs to your tissues, it is also carrying
these oxygen sponges. Any excess electrons are absorbed by the
oxygen and, after a bit of molecular alchemy, are transformed into
equally hazardous—but now fully transportable—carbon dioxide. The
blood is carried back to your lungs, where the carbon dioxide leaves
the blood and you breathe it out. So, whether you are a competitive
eater or a typical one, the oxygen-rich air you inhale keeps the food
you eat from killing you.
Getting food into tissues and getting toxic electrons out obviously
are matters of access. That’s why blood has to be everywhere inside
you. Serving as both wait staff and haz-mat team, any tissue without
enough blood supply is going to starve to death—your brain included.
That’s important because the brain’s appetite for energy is enormous.
The brain represents only about 2 percent of most people’s body
weight, yet it accounts for about 20 percent of the body’s total energy
usage—about 10 times more than would be expected. When the
brain is fully working, it uses more energy per unit of tissue weight
than a fully exercising quadricep. In fact, the human brain cannot
simultaneously activate more than 2 percent of its neurons at any
one time. More than this, and the glucose supply becomes so quickly
exhausted that you will faint.
If it sounds to you like the brain needs a lot of glucose—and
generates a lot of toxic waste—you are right on the money. This
means the brain also needs lots of oxygen-soaked blood. How
much food and waste can the brain generate in just a few minutes?
Consider the following statistics. The three requirements for human
life are food, drink, and fresh air. But their effects on survival have
very different timelines. You can live for 30 days or so without food,
poniedziałek, 24 marca 2014
The Vampire Diaries - Season 5/ Episode 4 - Mystic Falls Messenger (recap/synopis)
1. We opened with amnesic Stefan reading his journals. "Let me guess, fun brother," he said, referring to himself. "Safe brother," he said, motioning to Damon. Damon crashed the car and proved he is definitely the most fun brother.
2. Caroline, who's been boning up on all things biology to help Stefan, impress Dr. Maxfield, and spend time with her tutor Jesse, told Elena she planned to take him with her to study in the graveyard during the festivities.
Ważny czas i trwanie zdarzenia a nie rezultaty!
I'm tired [now] because I've been running. - Coś się dopiero co skończyło i widać tego efekt, ma wpływ na teraźniejszość.
How long have you been learning English? [You are still learning now]. - Coś się zaczęło kiedyś, ale nadal trwa.
używamy przy tym since oraz for
I have been studying for 3 hours.
Tara hasn't been visiting us since March.
3. Stefan was getting thirsty looking at the waitress. Not that he's a shrink ("I'm no shrink, right?" "Right."), but maybe he only turned Ripper when he drank human blood from the vein because of all the trauma and guilt associated with his early days as a vamp. Since he can't remember any of that, maybe he could drink and not kill now. Damon told him not to find out.
4. The next scene was the funniest of the episode. We got to see Jeremy doing shirtless push-ups on a rug at Salvatore Mansion. Bonnie likes to watch, too. "You working out is my main source of entertainment," she told him. He's just working off some extra adrenaline. "And every girl on the other side thanks you for it." Sigh. Swoon. Rewind.
5. Matt phoned Jeremy to come to his place. Matt was determined to find out the cause of his blackouts, so he'd set cameras up all over the house. Like Damon and Elena, who'd tried contacting Bonnie for help with Stefan, he's pissed that Bonnie's not returning his calls to help figure out what Nadia has done.
6. Stefan cornered the waitress he'd been eying earlier and compelled her not to scream or move. The thought of killing her scares him, but the hunger inside of him is just so much more powerful. Damon swooped in to stop him right before Stefan's fangs made contact.
7. Damon and Elena took Stefan to the family crypt, to keep him away from humans until they could fix his memory. Was that really a good idea considering the graveyard was going to be filled with people that day? Stefan asked if there was anyone in there he hadn't killed. Damon got a text from Jeremy saying he needed to speak to him alone. That gave Stefan and Elena a chance to catch up.
8. We'd already learned that Damon hadn't told Stefan much about Elena yet. Stefan said he hoped Elena's backstory wasn't as tragic as his. Ha! She rattled off all those she'd lost. "How do I not remember you?" Stefan said. "You're smart, you're pretty, you're funny. Obviously you're the strongest woman in the world if you managed to figure out a way to get through all of that." She said she surrounds herself with amazing people who help her through it, like him. "Bonded by death," he said. "Please don't tell me that we met in a cemetery." Technically, no. To the school they went.
9. Elena reenacted them running into each other as she walked out of the men's room. Wait, maybe he was coming from the other direction. Perhaps they should try it again. Colliding bodies with Stefan would be a great way to spend an afternoon, I'm sure, but it wasn't helping him remember anything. And since the football team had entered the hallway, and one player was bleeding, it was time for Elena to try something else.
10.She took Stefan outside and showed him how to jump to the roof of the building. So no one who'd just been watching the football team practice or play a game was around to see that? Stefan figured out they'd dated. "I may have amnesia, but I'm not an idiot. I'm a 164-year-old vampire who went back to high school, so I'm guessing that had something to do with you," he said. He guessed his Ripper tendencies were the turnoff. No. He was the most compassionate person she knew, she said. He was always in control. So he bored her? No. It was her, she said. Becoming a vamp had changed her. He wanted to know how she became a vampire. She said she'd show him. Then she fell backwards off the roof, because again, she was sure no one would see? I'll forgive that because that was much cooler than the motorcycle scene when Elena was learning the physical joys of being a vamp.
10.She took Stefan outside and showed him how to jump to the roof of the building. So no one who'd just been watching the football team practice or play a game was around to see that? Stefan figured out they'd dated. "I may have amnesia, but I'm not an idiot. I'm a 164-year-old vampire who went back to high school, so I'm guessing that had something to do with you," he said. He guessed his Ripper tendencies were the turnoff. No. He was the most compassionate person she knew, she said. He was always in control. So he bored her? No. It was her, she said. Becoming a vamp had changed her. He wanted to know how she became a vampire. She said she'd show him. Then she fell backwards off the roof, because again, she was sure no one would see? I'll forgive that because that was much cooler than the motorcycle scene when Elena was learning the physical joys of being a vamp.
11.Jesse had accepted Caroline's invitation to study in the graveyard. She told him she wasn't talking to her boyfriend and explained she just wanted to hang out with him that day because he was smart and nice
and available. He made a classic look over there and when you turn back around, I'll kiss you move. Good kisser. He can stick around. He apologized. He'd just been wanting to do that since the day he met her. Back to studying.
12. Jeremy did his best to break Bonnie's death to Damon gently. "Don't you say it, Jeremy. Don't you dare," Damon pleaded. Damon didn't want to hear Jeremy say she was dead, because if he did, everything in Elena's life sucks again. Too bad. "Bonnie's dead." Damon was pissed. Like, snarling pissed. When he walked toward Jeremy, you thought he was going to grab him and lock him up so he couldn't share the news with anyone else. Instead, he embraced him. AHHHHHH, Damon.
13 Elena took Stefan on a walk down memory lane that ended with them gazing upon Wickery Bridge. She explained about her two accidents there, and what a great boyfriend he was as we heard. Stefan said this was working -- his urge to feed had settled. He could see why he was different around her and not a monster. He scared himself when he saw his vamp face in the mirror. She told him she'd never been afraid of him, and showed him how she'd touched that face when she saw him for who he is and told him not to hide. She went to move her left hand away. "Don't," he said, taking it and placing it back on his face.They leaned in and were about to kiss when she remembered she's with Damon. And she blurted that out. "You're with my brother? And neither of you thought that was something I should know?" he asked. She said they weren't hiding it from him. "And just like that, the hunger returns," Stefan said. And he was gone.
sobota, 22 marca 2014
10 of the Most Important Life Lessons I Learned from My 20s
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On my 20th birthday, I got drunk and peed on(siusiać na) some old ladies' front lawn(trawnik). A cop(glina) saw me and stopped me. Fortunately(na szczęście), I talked my way out(dyskutować) of going to jail that night. I already had an arrest record, but he didn't bother (nie silili się, nie przejmowali) to check. My 20s started out(rozpoczynać się) with a bang.(huk)
This post originally appeared on Mark Manson's blog.
At the time (w tamtym czasie), I was aimless(pozbawiony celu). I had just dropped out(wycofać się;porzucić;rzucić szkołę) of music school and cut my long, tangly(spątany) hair. I wanted to move out of Texas but didn't know how or where. I would sometimes lecture(wygłaszać wykład) people about the spiritual(duchowy) aspect of consciousness(świadomość) and had a number of half-baked ideas(nieprzemyślany pomysł) about the theory of relativity and whether the universe actually existed or not.
I was smart and audacious(bezczelny) and arrogant and really annoying.
Three days from now, I will be turning 30 years old. I will be in Las Vegas and probably completely out of my mind when it happens. But I'm happy to report(donieść) that I'm far more responsible and far less pretentious(protensjonalny) these days. I've changed a lot in these 10 years. I don't get arrested anymore and I don't pee on people's lawns anymore. I've built businesses, been around the world multiple(wielokrotnie) times, and managed to create a career for myself as a writer — something I never could have predicted(przewidywać).
In our instant gratification(natychmiastowe zaspokojenie) culture, it's easy to forget that most personal change does not occur(wydarzyć się;wystąpić jako) as a single static event(zdarzenie) in time (w swoim czasie), but rather as(raczej jako) a long, gradual(stopniowny) evolution where we're hardly aware of it as it's happening. We rarely(rzadko) wake up one day and suddenly notice wild, life-altering(zmieniający życie) changes in ourselves. No, our identities (tożsamość) slowly shift, like sea sand getting pushed around by the ocean, slowly accumulating into(gromadzić się) new contours and forms over the passage of time.(upływ czasu)
It's only when we stop years or decades later and look back that we can notice all of the dramatic changes that have taken place (mieć miejsce, zdarzyć się). My 20s certainly(z pewnością) were dramatic. Here are some of the things I learned:
1. Fail Early and Often; Time Is Your Best Asset(atut)
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When you are young, your greatest asset is not your talent, not your ideas, not your experience, but your time. Time grants(przyznawać) you the opportunity to take big risks and make big mistakes. Dropping everything(porzucić wszystko) and traveling the world for six years or starting some company to build this crazy app you and your friends came up with(wytrzasnąć, znaleźć coś) when you got high one night, or randomly(przypadkowo) packing up all (four) of your belongings(dobytek) and moving to another city on a whim(zachcianka) to work and live with your cousin, you can only get away(wyrwać się) with these things when you're young, when you have nothing to lose. The difference between an unemployed(bezrobotny) 22-year-old with debt (dług)and no serious work experience and an unemployed 25-year-old with debt and no work experience is basically(w zasadzie) negligible(nieistotny) in the long run.(na dłuższą metę)
Chances are you aren't strapped by all of the financial responsibilities that come with later adulthood: mortgage payments, car payments, daycare for your kids, life insurance and so on. This is the time in your life where you have the least amount to lose by taking some long-shot risks, so you should take them. Because its the disastrous failures of these years — that crazy love affair with the Taiwanese dancer that made your mother lose her hair, or the entrepreneurial joint venture some guy in Starbucks talked you into that turned out to be an elaborate pyramid scheme — it's these failures that will set you up for your life successes down the line. They are the best lessons of your life. Get learning.
2. You Can't Force Friendships
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There are two types of friends in life: the kind that when you go away for a long time and come back, it feels like nothing's changed, and the kind that when you go away for a long time and come back, it feels like everything's changed.
I've spent the majority of the last five years living in a number of different countries. Unfortunately, that means that I've left a lot of friends behind in various places. What I've discovered over this time is that you can't force a friendship with someone. Either it's there or it's not, and whatever "it" is, is so ephemeral and magical that neither one of you could even name it if you tried to. You both just know.
What I've also found is that you can rarely predict which friends will stick with you and which ones won't. I left Boston in the Fall of 2009 and came back eight months later to spend the Summer of 2010 there. Many of the people I was closest to when I left could hardly even be bothered to call me back when I returned. Yet, some of my more casual acquaintances slowly became the closest friends in my life. It's not that those other people were bad people or bad friends. It's nobody fault. It's just life.
3. You're Not Supposed To Accomplish All of Your Goals
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Spending the first two decades of our life in school conditions us to have an intense results-oriented focus about everything. You set out to do X, Y or Z and either you accomplish them or you don't. If you do, you're great. If you don't, you fail.
But in my 20s I've learned that life doesn't actually work that way all the time. Sure, it's nice to always have goals and have something to work towards, but I've found that actually attaining all of those goals is beside the point.
When I was 24, I sat down and wrote down a list of goals I wanted to accomplish by my 30th birthday. The goals were ambitious and I took this list very seriously, at least for the first few years. Today, I've accomplished about 1/3 of those goals. I've made significant progress on another 1/3. And I've basically done nothing about the last 1/3.
But I'm actually really happy about them. As I've grown, I've discovered that some of the life goals I set for myself were not things I actually wanted, and setting those goals taught me what was not important to me in my life. With some other goals, while I didn't attain them, the act of working towards them for the past six years has taught me so much that I'm still pleased with the outcome anyway.
I'm firmly convinced that the whole point of goals is 80% to get us off our asses and 20% to hit some arbitrary benchmark. The value in any endeavor almost always comes from the process of failing and trying, not in achieving.
4. No One Actually Knows What the Hell They're Doing
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There's a lot of pressure on kids in high school and college to know exactly what they're doing with their lives. It starts with choosing and getting into a university. Then it becomes choosing a career and landing that first job. Then it becomes having a clear path to climb up that career ladder, getting as close to the top as possible. Then it's getting married and having kids. If at any point you don't know what you're doing or you get distracted or fail a few times, you're made to feel as if you're screwing up your entire life and you're destined for a life of panhandling and drinking vodka on park benches at 8AM.
But the truth is, almost nobody has any idea what they're doing in their 20s, and I'm fairly certain that continues further into adulthood. Everyone is just working off of their current best guess.
Out of the dozens of people I've kept in touch with from high school and college (and by "keep in touch" I really mean "stalked on Facebook"), I can't think of more than a couple that have not changed jobs, careers, industry, families, sexual orientation or who their favorite power ranger is at least once in their 20s. For example, good friend of mine was dead-set when he was 23 of climbing the corporate hierarchy in his industry. He had a big head-start and was already kicking ass and making good money. Last year, at age 28, he just went and bailed. Another friend of mine went from the Navy to selling surf equipment, to getting a masters in education. Another friend of mine just picked up and took her career to Hong Kong. Another friend stopped working as an environmental scientist and is now a DJ.
I rarely had any clue what I was doing. I get emails all the time from people wanting to know how I built my business, when I decided to become a writer, what my initial business plan was. The truth is I never knew any of those things. They just happened. I paid attention to opportunities and acted on them. Most of those opportunities failed drastically. But I was young and could afford those failures. Eventually, I was fortunate enough to work my way to do something I liked and do it well.
5. Most People in the World Basically Want the Same Things
In hindsight, I've had a pretty rollicking 20s. I started a business in a bizarre industry that took me to some interesting places and allowed me to meet interesting people. I've been all over the world, having spent time in over 50 countries. I've learned a few languages, and rubbed elbows with some of the rich and famous and the poor and downtrodden, in both the first and third worlds.
And what I've discovered is that from a broad perspective, people are basically the same. Everyone spends most of their time worrying about food, money, their job and their family — even people who are rich and well fed. Everyone wants to look cool and feel important — even people who are already cool and important. Everyone is proud of where they come from. Everyone has insecurities and anxieties that plague them, regardless of how successful they are. Everybody is afraid of failure and looking stupid. Everyone loves their friends and family yet also gets the most irritated by them.
Humans are, by and large, the same. It's just the details that get shuffled around. This homeland for that homeland. This corrupt government for that corrupt government. This religion for that religion. This social practice for that social practice. Most of the differences that we hold to be so significant are accidental byproducts of geography and history. They're superficial — merely different cultural flavors of the same overarching, candy-coated humanity.
I've learned to judge people not by who they are, but by what they do. Some of the kindest and most gracious people I've met were people who did not have to be kind or gracious to me. Some of the most obnoxious asshats have been people who had no business being obnoxious asshats to me. The world makes all kinds. And you don't know who you're dealing with until you spend enough time with a person to see what they do, not what they look like, or where they're from or what gender they are or whatever.
6. The World Doesn't Care About You
The thought that is so frightening at first glance — "No one cares about me!?" —becomes so liberating when one actually processes its true meaning. As David Foster Wallace put it, "You'll stop worrying what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do."
You, me, and everything we do, will one day be forgotten. It will be as if we never existed, even though we did. Nobody will care. Just like right now, almost nobody cares what you actually say or do with your life.
And this is actually really good news: it means you can get away with a lot of stupid shit and people will forget and forgive you for it. It means that there's absolutely no reason to not be the person that you want to be. The pain of un-inhibiting yourself will be fleeting and the reward will last a lifetime.
7. Pop Culture Is Full of Extremes, Practice Moderation
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My life immediately got about 542% better when I realized that the information you consume online is predominantly made up of the 5% of each extreme view and that 90% of life actually occurs in the silent middle-ground where most of the population actually lives. If one reads the internet enough, one is liable to start thinking that World War III is imminent, that corporations rule the world through some conspiracy, that all men are rapists (or at the very least, complicit in rape), that all women are lying, hypergamous whores, that white people are victims of reverse racism, that there's a war on Christmas, that all poor people are lazy and destroying the government, and on and on.
It's important to sometimes retreat to that quiet 90% and remind oneself: life is simple, people are good, and the chasms that appear to separate us are often just cracks.
8. The Sum of the Little Things Matter Much More Than the Big Things
I remember reading an interview of Dustin Moskovitz, the co-founder of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg's college roommate. The interviewer asked Dustin what it felt like to be part of Facebook's "overnight success." His answer was something like this, "If by 'overnight success' you mean staying up and coding all night, every night for six years straight, then it felt really tiring and stressful."
We have a propensity to assume things just happen as they are. As outside observers, we tend to only see the result of things and not the arduous process (and all of the failures) that went into producing the result. I think when we're young, we have this idea that we have to do just this one big thing that is going to completely change the world, top to bottom. We dream so big because we don't yet realize — we're too young to realize — that those "one big things" are actually comprised of hundreds and thousands of daily small things that must be silently and unceremoniously maintained over long periods of time with little fanfare. Welcome to life.
9. The World Is Not a Scary Place Out to Get You
This gets said all the time, but it's basically true. I've been to a fair amount of dangerous shit holes both inside and outside the US. And when given the opportunity, the majority of people are kind and helpful. If there's one piece of practical advice I would give every 20-year-old, regardless of circumstance, it is this: find a way to travel, and when in doubt, talk to people, ask them about themselves, get to know them. There's little to no downside and huge, major upsides, especially when you're still young and impressionable.
10. Your Parents Are People Too1
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And finally, perhaps the most disillusioning realization of your 20s: seeing mom and dad not as the all-knowing protectors like you did as a child, and not as the obnoxious and totally uncool authoritarians like you did as a teenager, but as peers, as just two flawed, vulnerable, struggling people doing their best despite often not knowing what the hell they're doing (see number 5).
Chances are your parents screwed some things up during your childhood. Pretty much all of them do (as my mom always likes to say, "Kids aren't born with instruction manuals.") And chances are, you will start to notice all of these screw-ups while you are in your 20s. Growing up and maturing to the extent that one can recognize this is always a painful process. It can kick up a lot of bitterness and regret.
But perhaps the first duty of adulthood — true adulthood, not just taxed adulthood — is the acknowledgment, acceptance, and (perhaps) forgiveness of one's parent's flaws. They're people too. They're doing their best, even though they don't always know what the best is.
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