Quotes from John Medina

Why is it important to forget? Forgetting plays a vital role in our ability to function for a deceptively simple reason. Forgetting allows us to prioritise. Anything irrelevant to our survival will take up wasteful cognitive space if we assign it the same priority as events critical to our survival.

Other labs have extended his work, finding that women recall more emotional autobiographical events, more rapidly and with greater intensity, than men do. Women consistently report more vivid memories for emotionally important events such as a recent argument, a first date, or a vacation.

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,

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

Experiments show that infants just entering the third trimester will move or alter their heart rate, or both, in response to a strong light beamed at the womb.

System consolidation, the process of transforming a short-term memory into a long-term one, can take years to complete. During that time, the memory is not stable.

is to teach her impulse control in her early

prolific inventor,

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. I know firsthand:

What you pay attention to is often profoundly influenced by memory. In everyday life, you use your previous experiences to predict where you should pay attention.

The brain can be divided roughly into two hemispheres of unequal function, and patients can get strokes in either. The hemispheres contain separate "spotlights" for visual attention. The left hemisphere's spotlight is small, capable of paying attention only to items on the right side of the visual field.

The effect is so powerful that what you eat during the last stages of pregnancy can influence the food preferences of your baby.

Assigning work projects based on an employee's strengths may be critical to your group's productivity. You may discover you had a Michael Jordan on your team but couldn't see it because you were only asking him to play baseball.

people don't pay attention to boring things

Do one thing at a time

The only time I ever felt qualified to be a parent was before I had kids.

Try creating an interruption-free zone during the day—turn off your e-mail, phone, IM program, or BlackBerry—and see whether you get more done.

Here's something you can try at home if you are eight months pregnant or if you have a baby younger than 5 months old. If the infant has already arrived, place him on his back. Then gently lift up both of his legs, or both of his arms, and let them drop back to the bed of their own weight. His arms will usually fling out from the sides of his body, thumbs flexed, palms up, with a startled look on his face. This is called the Moro reflex.

if you get a certain breed of dog or buy a certain model of car, you suddenly start noticing the same dog or car everywhere you go.

The fact is, the amount of TV a child should watch before the age of 2 is zero.

What you praise defines what your child perceives success to be.

For example, from nouns to verbs to aspects of grammar, we each store language in different areas, recruiting different regions for different components.

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.

Americans 2 years of age and older now spend an average of four hours and 49 minutes per day in front of the TV—20 percent more than 10 years ago. And we are getting this exposure at younger and younger ages, made all the more complex because of the wide variety of digital screen time now available. In 2003, 73 percent of kids under 6 watched television every day. And children younger than 2 got two hours and five minutes of "screen time" with TVs and computers per day.