1. The brain is a complex adaptive system.
2. The brain is a social brain.
3. The search for meaning is innate.
4. The search for meaning occurs through patterning.
5. Emotions are critical to patterning.
6. Every brain simultaneously perceives and creates parts and wholes.
7. Learning involves both focused attention and peripheral attention.
8. Learning always involves conscious and unconscious processes.
9. We have at least two ways of organizing memory. 10. Learning is developmental.
11. Complex learning is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by threat.
12. Every brain is uniquely organized.

Conditions required for optimal learning
1. An optimal state of mind that we call relaxed alertness, consisting of low threat and high challenge.
2. The orchestrated immersion of the learner in multiple, complex, authentic experience.
3. The regular, active processing of experience as the basis for making meaning.
(Caine and Caine 1997)