It’s why your mother always asked (or told) you to wear your bike helmet! Your brain is pretty important to your everyday life … and well … existence! I am currently reading two books on that very fact: Our brains are powerful and magical beyond our wildest dreams and imaginations.

I will go into detail about these books once I finish them and synthesize their information, but I didn’t want to hold in some of the key learnings for too long as they are too important to the work I do.

As a speaker, I use emotional stories to assist in making my points. Why? Because emotionally charged events persist much longer in our memories and are recalled with greater accuracy than neutral memories.

• In a study to determine if “sleeping on it” can actually help, students were given a series of math problems and prepped with a method to solve them. The students were not told there was also an easier “shortcut” way to solve the problems, potentially discoverable while doing the exercise itself. The question was: Can you get the students to put this other method on their radar screens? What the research showed was that by allowing the students 12 hours after the initial training and asking the students to do the exercise again produced a 20 percent discovery rate. But if in those 12 hours, you allowed the students eight hours of sleep, that rate triples to 60 percent. It just goes to show you how important and valuable sleep is.
• It is estimated that stress causes companies to lose between $200 and $300 billion a year. A year!
• Our body often leads the mind. In a test involving a two decks of cards – one pile was more positive the other more negative – within ten random draws, the participant’s electric responses knew which pile of cards was better; more positive. It would take another 30 draws for the mind to catch up to the body. So, while our brains are ridiculously smart, we also have to learn how to listen to our bodies.
• Finally, George Eliot wrote it best in relation to why I am putting so much of my life behind bettering the lives of others, “to throw the whole force of one’s soul towards the achievement of some possible better.”

You can always change your life and your brain has a huge role in that.

If you could learn one thing about your brain, what would it be?