Quotes from Annie Murphy Paul

Individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.

We often respond to today's world with yesterday's adaptations. (quoting Dan Fesster)

The world has its way with us long before we're born.

What we shouldn't do is keep our thoughts inside our heads, inert, unchanged by encounters with the world beyond the skull.

For many centuries people have believed that there is continuity between the individual in utero and the individual in the world; now there is solid evidence that this ancient belief is correct, albeit in a far more complex and nuanced way than our ancestors ever imagined. But science can't tell us everything we need to know about this new perspective; there's always a gap where the hard evidence of the laboratory meets the soft flesh of our bodies.

When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the world," psychologist Barbara Tversky has observed.

Once we recognize this possibility, we can deliberately shape the material worlds in which we learn and work to facilitate mental extension—to enhance "the cognitive congeniality of a space," in the words of David Kirsh, a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

Half of the participants were then asked to engage in what the researchers call "affect labeling," filling in responses to the prompt "I feel _________," while the other half were asked to complete a neutral shape-matching task. The affect-labeling group showed steep declines in heart rate and skin conductance compared to the control group, whose levels of physiological arousal remained high.

such as the one encapsulated in the seventh principle: whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by generating cognitive loops.

Accordingly, the ninth principle: whenever possible, we should manage our thinking by embedding extensions in our everyday environments.

The difference such minimal instruction made in participants' ability to recall information, they noted, was "striking": students who incorporated movement into their learning strategy remembered 76 percent of the material, while those who engaged in "deliberate memorization" recalled only 37 percent.

Commercial brain-training regimens like Cogmed, Lumosity, and BrainHQ have attracted many who desire to improve their memory and increase their focus; Lumosity alone claims 100 million registered users in 195 countries.

There are values embedded in the technology we use, and as we scroll and tap we often unthinkingly adopt these priorities as our own.

At the highest speed I can sustain on the hills, about 14 minutes for a mile, I do not even try to think of anything else.

Achieving transient hypofrontality generally requires exercising at one's "ventilatory threshold"—the point at which breathing becomes labored, corresponding to about 80 percent of the exerciser's maximum heart rate—for forty minutes or more.

Professional Actors' Learning Strategies,

The good news: research shows that offering simple instructions to parents leads them to gesture more often; in turn, their children also gesture more.

The first set of principles lays out some habits of mind we would do well to adopt, starting with this one: whenever possible, we should offload information, externalize it, move it out of our heads and into the world.

In a related vein, the third principle: whenever possible, we should seek to productively alter our own state when engaging in mental labor.

Biophilic design is an emerging discipline, but a handful of studies have begun to suggest that working and learning in buildings inspired by nature can grant some of the same benefits for cognition as actually being outdoors.

Philosopher Andy Clark, observing the progressive delegation of our mental operations to our devices, has noted that "the mind is just less and less in the head" these days. More than that, the mind must be less and less in the head, and more and more emblazoned on the world, if we are to extend our minds with the minds of others.

When we're engaged in physical activity, our visual sense is sharpened, especially with regard to stimuli appearing in the periphery of our gaze. This shift, which is also found in non-human animals, makes evolutionary sense: the visual system becomes more sensitive when we are actively exploring our environment. When our bodies are at rest—that is, sitting still in a chair—this heightened acuity is dialed down.

Parents and teachers often believe they have to get kids to stop moving around before they can focus and get down to work, Schweitzer notes; a more constructive approach would be to allow kids to move around so that they can focus.

Even though the run of The Dining Room had ended five months earlier, and many of the actors had learned new roles since then, they still remembered the lines from Gurney's play that had been accompanied onstage by movement or gestures (as when Arthur holds out the spoon to Sally). Lines they had delivered while standing or sitting still, the Noices discovered, were much more likely to be forgotten.