Quotes from John Medina

We are human because we can fantasize.

Get into the habit of rewarding the intellectual exertion your child puts into a given task rather than his or her native intellectual resources.

Emotions get our attention.

John Bransford, a gifted education researcher, has spent many years studying what separates novice teachers from expert teachers. One of many things he noticed is the way the experts organize information. "[Experts'] knowledge is not simply a list of facts and formulas that are relevant to their domain; instead, their knowledge is organized around core concepts or 'big ideas' that guide their thinking about their domains," he cowrote in How People Learn.

The four biggest reasons you'll fight Why will you fight? I mentioned four consistent sources of marital conflict in the transition to parenthood. Left to their own devices, all can profoundly influence the course of your marriage, and that makes them capable of affecting your child's developing brain. I'll call them the Four Grapes of Wrath. They are: • sleep loss • social isolation • unequal workload • depression

Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth.

If you don't have a lot of energy, and you are called upon to give to your youngest several times a minute (preschoolers demand some form of attention 180 times per hour, behavioral psychologists say), you quickly exhaust your reservoir of good will toward your spouse.

Dual Representational Theory. Stated formally, it describes our ability to attribute characteristics and meanings to things that don't actually possess them.

The brain pays more attention to the gist than to the peripheral details of an emotionally charged experience...present information in a logically organized, hierarchical structure.

She said calmly, "So I hear you are now an atheist. Is that true?" I nodded yes, and she smiled. She placed the package in my hands. "The man's name is Friedrich Nietzsche, and the book is called Twilight of the Idols," she said. "If you are going to be an atheist, be the best one out there. Bon appetit!

With words, with language, we could extract a great deal of knowledge about our living situation without always having to experience its harsh lessons directly.

The brain cannot multitask...The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time...This attentional ability is, to put it bluntly, not capable of multitasking.

People view their own behaviors as originating from situations beyond their control, but they view other people's behaviors as originating from inherent personality traits.

an amazing 27-minute animated short called Donald in Mathmagic Land.

You want to get your kid into Harvard? You really want to know what the data say? I'll tell you what the data say! Go home and love your wife!

Parents who consistently apply attention—especially in these early years—statistically raise the happiest kids.

That's why a person who is interrupted takes 50 percent longer to accomplish a task and makes up to 50 percent more errors.

Stress hormones seem to have a particular liking for cells in the hippocampus, which is a problem because the hippocampus is deeply involved in many aspects of human learning.

TV also poisons attention spans and the ability to focus, a classic hallmark of executive function. For each additional hour of TV watched by a child under the age of 3, the likelihood of an attentional problem by age 7 increased by about 10 percent. So a preschooler who watches three hours of TV per day is 30 percent more likely to have attentional problems than a child who watches no TV.

If you look at 4-year-olds, they are constantly asking questions. But by the time they are 6½ years old, they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions.

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

In fact, one of the biggest predictors of marital bliss appears to be the agreement to have kids in the first place.

Your meta-emotion philosophy turns out to be very important to your children's future. It predicts how you will react to their emotional lives, which in turn predicts how (or if) they learn to regulate their own emotions. Because these skills are directly related to a child's social competency, how you feel about feelings can profoundly influence your child's future happiness. You have to be comfortable with your emotions in order to make your kids comfortable with theirs.

One of the hardest behaviors to quench in anyone is a habit that is only occasionally rewarded. Want to keep a gambler at a slot machine longer? Make sure the payout schedule is random. Studies show that people who experience random rewards in response to a behavior cling to that behavior much more solidly than those who don't. This