Quotes from Annie Murphy Paul

Tracking the intellectual advancement of several hundred graduate students in the sciences over the course of four years, its authors found that the development of crucial skills such as generating hypotheses, designing experiments, and analyzing data was closely related to the students' engagement with their peers in the lab, and not to the guidance they received from their faculty mentors.

We did not evolve to solve tricky logic puzzles on our own, they point out, and so we shouldn't be surprised by the fact that we're no good at it, any more than by the fact that we're no good at breathing underwater. What we did evolve to do is persuade other people of our views, and to guard against being misled by others. Reasoning is a social activity, in other words, and should be practiced as such.

Elements of the world outside may effectively act as mental "extensions," allowing us to think in ways our brains could not manage on their own.

Reading literature makes us better people.

Concluded Helga and Tony Noice in one of their academic articles, "One might paraphrase Descartes and say, 'I move, therefore I remember.'

Think of the task not in linear terms—tracing a direct line from point A to point B—but rather as a cycle: think, draw, look, rethink, redraw. Likewise, don't envision the mind telling the pencil what to do; instead, allow a conversation to develop between eye and hand,

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf,

Good fences make good neighbors," wrote poet Robert Frost; likewise, good walls make good collaborators.

One recent study, conducted in a British government agency that switched from enclosed offices to an open-plan workspace, found that the heightened imperative to engage in self-presentation in such settings fell most heavily on women, for whom appearance is considered especially important.) When people are relieved of the cognitive load imposed by their environment, they immediately become more creative, neuroscientist Moshe Bar has found.

sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement.