Quotes from John Medina

These inferences are the signature characteristic of something called Theory of Mind. We activate it all the time. We try to see our entire world in terms of motivations, ascribing motivations to our pets and even to inanimate objects. The skill is useful for selecting a mate, for navigating the day-to-day issues surrounding living together, for parenting. Theory of Mind is something humans have like no other creature. It is as close to mind reading as we are likely to get.

For example, if healthy 30-year-olds are sleep deprived for six days (averaging, in this study, about four hours of sleep per night), parts of their body chemistry soon revert to that of a 60-year-old.

We now know that infants do not gain a more sophisticated vocabulary until their fine-motor finger control improves.

We have a great number of ways of being intelligent, many of which don't show up on IQ tests.

At birth, your baby can distinguish between the sounds of every language that has ever been invented. Professor Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, discovered this phenomenon. She calls kids at this age "citizens of the world." Chomsky puts it this way: We are not born with the capacity to speak a specific language. We are born with the capacity to speak any language.

Whether at work, home or school, everybody carries their brain around them, and if the organ suffers from a disorder, we carry the disorder around with us too.

You don't have a work brain and a home brain. You have a single brain, one you carry with you wherever you go. Whatever affects you in one place is fully capable of affecting you at the other.

If managers knew how deeply their behaviors could affect brain function - whether they are piling up too much work on someone or yelling at them for "motivational purposes", they would quit doing it.

You've got seconds to grab your audience's attention and only minutes to keep it.

If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you would probably design something like a classroom.

Brain scientists and education scientists don't get together very often, and we end up living in our own little silos.

The brain remembers the emotional component of an experience better than any other aspect.

Change often involves loss, so change can be a risky experience.