Quotes from John Medina

The distance between a gene and a behavior is of greatest interest to me. The relative contributions of nature and nurture, of nucleotide and nuclear family, are perpetually fascinating to me.

I have great confidence in human curiosity - even though I don't know what curiosity is from a biological point of view. One of its characteristics has got to be the willingness to explore.

The more senses recruited at the moment of learning, the more likely you are to recall it later.

What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like—it literally rewires it.

If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to tear down both and start over.

Children have never been good at listening to their parents, but they have never failed to imitate them.

The problem in today's economy is that people are typically starting a family at the very time they are also supposed to be doing their best work. They are trying to be productive at some of the most stressful times of their lives. What if companies took this unhappy collision of life events seriously? They could offer Gottman's intervention as a benefit for every newly married, or newly pregnant, employee.

We must do a better job of encouraging lifelong curiosity.

What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like—it literally rewires it.

One of the greatest predictors of successful aging, they found, is the presence or absence of a sedentary lifestyle. Put

You may think that grown-ups create children. The reality is that children create grown-ups. They become their own person, and so do you. Children give so much more than they take.

Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50 percent longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50 percent more errors.

Having a first child is like swallowing an intoxicating drink made of equal parts joy and terror, chased with a bucketful of transitions nobody ever tells you about.

The most common communication mistakes? Relating too much information, with not enough time devoted to connecting the dots.

There are four nutrients you will want in your behavioral formula, adjusting them as your baby gets older: breast-feeding, talking to your baby, guided play, and praising effort rather than accomplishment. Brain research tells us there are also several toxins: pushing your child to perform tasks his brain is not developmentally ready to take on; stressing your child to the point of a psychological state termed "learned helplessness"; and, for the under-2 set, television.

How People Learn. If you want people to be able to pay attention, don't start with details. Start with the key ideas and, in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions. Meaning before details.

preschoolers demand some form of attention 180 times per hour, behavioral psychologists say),

The brain appears to be designed to (1) solve problems (2) related to surviving (3) in an unstable outdoor environment, and (4) to do so in nearly constant motion. I call this the brain's performance envelope.

People view their own behaviors as originating from amendable, situational constraints,but they view other people's behavior as originating from inherent, immutable personality traits.

Over the long term, however, too much adrenaline produces scarring on the insides of your blood vessels. These scars become magnets for molecules to accumulate, creating lumps called plaques. These can grow large enough to block the blood vessels. If it happens in the blood vessels of your heart, you get a heart attack; in your brain, you get a stroke.

Repeat to remember.

The more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids' linguistic abilities become

After years of investigating aging populations, researchers' answer to the question of how much is not much. If all you do is walk several times a week, your brain will benefit. Even

To put it bluntly, research shows that we can't multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously.