Quotes from John Medina

The more attention the brain pays to a given stimulus, the more elaborately the information will be encoded—and retained.

Write this across your heart before your child comes into the world: Parenting is 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.

You can maximize your child's brain power in plenty of wonderful ways. After breast-feeding, focus on open-ended play, lots of verbal interaction, and praising effort—fertilizers statistically guaranteed to boost your child's intellect from almost any starting point.

attention Brain Rule #6 We don't pay attention to boring things.

Emotionally arousing events tend to be better remembered than neutral events. While

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.

we must do a better job of encouraging lifelong curiosity, in our workplaces, our homes, and especially in our schools.

larks report being most alert around noon and feel most productive at work a few hours before they eat lunch. They don't need an alarm clock, because they invariably get up before the alarm rings—often before 6:00 a.m. Larks cheerfully report their favorite mealtime as breakfast and generally consume much less coffee than non-larks. Getting increasingly drowsy in the early evening, most larks go to bed (or want to go to bed) around 9:00 p.m.

the laboratory, the gold standard appears to be aerobic exercise, 30 minutes at a clip, two or three times a week. Add a strengthening regimen and you get even more cognitive benefit.

In one of the strangest types of synesthesia—there are at least three dozen—people see a word and immediately experience a taste on their tongue.

The messages that do grab your attention are connected to memory, interest, and awareness.

Yes, your children are constantly observing you. They are profoundly influenced by what they record. And that can quickly turn from funny to serious, especially when mommy and daddy start fighting.

In the laboratory, the gold standard appears to be aerobic exercise, 30 minutes at a clip, two or three times a week. Add a strengthening regimen and you get even more cognitive benefit.

The brain cannot multitask

Truth: The greatest pediatric brain-boosting technology in the world is probably a plain cardboard box, a fresh box of crayons, and two hours. The worst is probably your new flat-screen TV. (See "Hurray for play!" on page 129.)

The trick for business professionals, and for educators, is to present bodies of information so compelling that the audience does this (encoding) on their own, spontaneously engaging in deep and elaborate encoding.

Without a flexible, immediately available, highly regulated stress response, we would die. Remember, the brain is the world's most sophisticated survival organ. All

For example, brain-damaged individuals who lack the ability to sleep in the slow-wave phase nonetheless have normal, even improved, memory.

Google takes to heart the power of exploration. For 20 percent of their time, employees may go where their mind asks them to go. The proof is in the bottom line: Fully 50 percent of new products, including Gmail and Google News, came from "20 percent time.

Why would anyone willingly take on this line of work? The interview for the job, that single act of sex, is certainly fun. But then you get hired to raise a child.

Essentially, exercise improves a whole host of abilities prized in the classroom and at work.

Control isn't the only factor in productivity. Employees on an assembly line, doing the same tired thing day after day, certainly can feel in control of their work processes. But the brain-numbing tedium can become a source of stress.

Money increases happiness only when it lifts people out of poverty to about $50,000 a year in income. Past that, wealth and happiness part ways. This suggests something practical and relieving: Help your children get into a profession that can at least make around $50,000 a year. They don't have to be millionaires to be thrilled with the life you prepare them for. After their basic needs are met, they just need some close friends and relatives. And sometimes even siblings,

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.