Quotes from John Medina

The more you exercise, the more tissues you can feed and the more toxic waste you can remove.

As always, there are exceptions. Adults with training can still learn to distinguish speech sounds in other languages. But in general, the brain appears to have a limited window of opportunity in an astonishingly early time frame. The cognitive door begins swinging shut at 6 months old, and then, unless something pushes against it, the door closes. By 12 months, your baby's brain has made decisions that affect her the rest of her life.

Kids come into the world before their brains are fully developed. The result? Parenthood.

There are two ways to beat the cruelty of a harsh environment: You can become stronger or you can become smarter.

As C.S. Lewis observed in The Silver Chair, one book in the Chronicles of Narnia series: "Crying is all right in its own way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.

Stress hormones can do some truly nasty things to your brain if boatloads of the stuff are given free access to your central nervous system.

WE DO NOT SEE with our eyes. We see with our brains.

The mammalian brain's functions include what researchers call the "four F's": fighting, feeding, feeling and ... reproductive behavior.

When the brain is fully working, it uses more energy per unit of tissue weight than a fully exercising quadricep.

A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary.

mothers suffered from major nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. When the children reached school age, 21 percent scored 130 or more points on a standard IQ test, a level considered gifted. If their mothers had no morning sickness, only 7 percent of kids did that well. The researchers have a theory—still to be proven—about why. Two hormones that stimulate a woman to vomit may also act like neural fertilizer for the developing brain.

Though we have been stuffing them into classrooms and cubicles for decades, our brains actually were built to survive in jungles and grasslands. We have not outgrown this.

souls should, by definition, also teach about "the metaphysical dimensions

Money increases happiness only when it lifts people out of poverty to about $50,000 a year in income.

Music has been a part of the cultural expression of virtually every culture ever studied. It may even extend into prehistoric times. A 35,000-year-old flute made from bird bone has been discovered,

Many couples will fight in front of their children but reconcile in private. This skews a child's perceptions, even at early ages, for the child always sees the wounding but never the bandaging. Parents who practice bandaging each other after a fight, deliberately and explicitly, allow their children to model both how to fight fair and how to make up.

Verbalizing has a soothing effect on the nervous systems of children. (Adults, too.)

Worrying is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere. —Anonymous

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.

Author Elizabeth Stone once said, "Making a decision to have a child—it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

There are great reasons to fear what happens if you don't create a robust social schedule for the rest of your life or practice mindfulness meditation for the rest of your life.

Here's why this matters: 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.

One of the reasons empathy works so well is because it does not require a solution.

Write this across your heart before your child comes into the world: Parenting is a not a race. Kids are not proxies for adult success. Competition can be inspiring, but brands of it can wire your child's brain in a toxic way. Comparing your kids with your friends' kids will not get them, or you, where you want to go.