The Brain Book by Phil Dobson
July 2025 (343 Words, 2 Minutes)
The Brain Book by Phil Dobson Date: 31 July 2025
Purpose: I want to learn more about reprogramming brain, attaining extreme efficiency on learning and becoming more productive on work, as well as I want to be more creative by understanding my brain and neuroscience concepts.
Key Ideas
- Improving brain fitness is the most important thing to upgrade your entire system (physical and mental). You can develop better brain fitness by applying SENSE (Stress, Exercise, Nutrition, Sleep, Experience) model:
- Stress: You can manage stress by breathing exercise, regulating physiology, focusing on your purpose, doing what you enjoy, and reseting brain regularly.
- Exercise: doing at least 20 mins exercise in the morning, focusing on blood flow on breaks and doing intense exercise at least 3 times a week, can increase the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which plays a significant role in the process of the formation of new brain cells (i.e. neuroplasticity).
- Nutrition: eating fresh vegetables, nuts, fruits, oil (olive, coconut etc.), healthy fats, vitamins rich food, drinking enough water and cosuming less sugar, is an obvious thing in brain fitness.
- Sleep: taking enough sleep (at least 5-6 90 mins sleep cycles roughly 7-8 hours) is crucial.
- Experience: learning a new language or a musical instrument, embracing novelty, and keeping an active social life can improve overall brain fitness.
- Creativity is a skill that improves with practice. To be more creative, follow these steps:-
- Be more willing to fail.
- Creativity is the ability to form relationships between unrelated concepts. The broader your palatte of knowledge and experience, the more unrelated concepts you have to work with. So, read broadly and learn about new disciplines.
- Give yourself time to dwell (incubate) on important problems.
- Question deeply without thinking about the answers at first.
- Put your idea down on papers or any place, and take action.
- Memory is a process. It works in three steps: encode (create), store (save), retrieve (find).
- To improve encoding, pay closer attention.
- To improvde storing, repeat, associate with past memory/experience, and visualize with multi-sensors.
- To remember what you read. Use Scan - Question - Read - Question - Scan (SQRQS) method.
Memorable Quotes
“It’s not how long you sit at a desk that determines the value you generate. It’s the energy you bring to those hours that is important. Therefore, focus on managing energy and effectivenss rather than time and busyness.”
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t - you’re right. It’s confirmation bias means that if you have negative or positive beliefs about yourself, you’ll be good at finding their proof.”
Practising gratitude, challenging limiting beliefs and using mental rehearsals (visualization) are great methods to reprogram your brain.
Action Steps
- I will meditate and exercise regularly.
- I will learn new things everyday across multiple disciplines.
- I will improve my memory by repetition, association and visualization.
Reflection: Before reading, I believed creativity and memory were mostly inborn. Now I see them as trainable. That belief alone shifts how I see my future.