Quotes from John Medina

Brain Rule #6 We don't pay attention to boring things. • The brain's attentional "spotlight" can focus on only one thing at a time: no multitasking. • We are better at seeing patterns and abstracting the meaning of an event than we are at recording detail. • Emotional arousal helps the brain learn. • Audiences check out after 10 minutes, but you can keep grabbing them back by telling narratives or creating events rich in emotion.

The researchers consistently found that all kinds of mental abilities began to come back online—after as little as four months of aerobic exercise. A different study looked at school-age children. Children jogged for 30 minutes two or three times a week. After 12 weeks, their cognitive performance had improved significantly compared with prejogging levels. When the exercise program was withdrawn, the scores plummeted back to their preexperiment levels.

Every time I lectured to a group of parents-to-be about baby brain development,

People usually forget 90 percent of what they learn in a class within 30 days. And the majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours after class.

I was born with the horse and buggy. I die with the space shuttle. What kind of thing is that?" His eyes twinkled. "I live the good life!

Because we don't fully understand how our brains work, we do dumb things. We try to talk on our cell phones and drive at the same time, even though it is literally impossible for our brains to multitask when it comes to paying attention.

There's no such thing as a firewall between personal issues and work productivity.

What does this have to do with exercise? McAdam's central notion wasn't to improve goods and services, but to improve access to goods and services. You can do the same for your brain by increasing the roads in your body, namely your blood vessels, through exercise. Exercise does not provide the oxygen and the food. It provides your body greater access to the oxygen and the food.

les ruego que traten de conocer a sus hijos. Eso significa dedicarles mucho tiempo. La única forma de descubrir qué funciona y qué no funciona es conocer su comportamiento y saber cómo cambia con el tiempo.

happy a child ultimately becomes. This chapter is all about why some kids, like Baby 19, are so unhappy—and other kids are not. (Indeed, most kids are just the opposite. Baby 19 is so named because babies 1 through 18 in Kagan's study were comparatively pretty jolly.) We will discuss the biological basis of happy children,

We were not sitting in a classroom for eight hours at a stretch. We were not sitting in a cubicle for eight hours at a stretch. If we sat around the Serengeti for eight hours—

Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.

A lifetime of exercise results in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary. Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in tests that measure long-term memory, reasoning, attention, and problem-solving skill.

This led to the masterpiece of evolution, the region that distinguishes humans from all other creatures. It is a specialized area of the frontal lobe, just behind the forehead, called the prefrontal cortex.

Aerobic exercise just twice a week halves your risk of general dementia. It cuts your risk of alzheimer's by 60 percent.

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." Veteran

One study hints that it could, though more work needs to be done. Kids with normal hearing took an American Sign Language class for nine months, in the first grade, then were administered a series of cognitive tests. Their attentional focus, spatial abilities, memory, and visual discrimination scores improved dramatically—by as much as 50 percent—compared with controls who had no formal instruction.

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.

he once played 45 games of chess simultaneously. He won 39 of these games, drew four, and lost two. While that is amazing in its own right, the truly phenomenal part is that he played all 45 games in all 11 hours blindfolded. You did not read that wrong. Najdorf never physically saw any of the chessboards or pieces; he played each game in his mind.

When Tyler found out about chocolate-chip cookies, his sole goal in life became to stuff as many as he could into his mouth.

Executive function is a better predictor of academic success than IQ.

reasoning is a uniquely human talent. It may have arisen from our need to understand one another's intentions and motivations. This allowed us to coordinate within a group, which is how we took over the Earth.

Twenty percent of the workforce is already at suboptimal productivity in the current nine-to-five model.

Most of its functions involve what some researchers call the "four Fs": fighting, feeding, fleeing, and … reproductive behavior.