John Medina Quotes

What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like—it literally rewires 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.

Here's why this matters: Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50 percent longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50 percent more errors.

We must do a better job of encouraging lifelong curiosity.

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

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

The more senses recruited at the moment of learning, the more likely you are to recall it later.

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.

To improve short-term memory significantly, reduce the stress in your life. And choose your parents wisely.

Empathy works so well because it does not require a solution. It requires only understanding.

Public speaking professionals say that you win or lose the battle to hold your audience in the first 30 seconds of a given presentation.

Don't start with the details. Start with the key ideas, and in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions.

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

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.

Babies learn through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas. They use very sophisticated hypothesis testing strategies to find out about their world.

Human learning is a very aggressive style in its native state. I am not sure why, though it is a very useful trait in an unstable, unpredictable living environment.

I have great confidence in human curiosity - even though I don't know what curiosity is from a biological point of view. One of its characteristics has got to be the willingness to explore.

You can practice for 30 years and still not be a Mozart. The most lethal combination would be a Mozart who practiced for thousands of hours.

If you are curious, you won't be satisfied with the "tyranny of custom." People stuck in that rut might say "why?" and the first thing an exploratory person would say is "why not?"

A factory worker at an assembly line, who can learn their job in 5 minutes, can get bored fairly easily, and disengage completely.

Not even identical twins can have the exact same experiences, and their brains are not wired the same way.

The distance between a gene and a behavior is of greatest interest to me. The relative contributions of nature and nurture, of nucleotide and nuclear family, are perpetually fascinating to me.

The brain doesn't care about change. As the world's most sophisticated survival organ, the brain cares about loss.

What's obvious to you is obvious to you.

To put it bluntly, research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously.

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

Every brain is wired differently from every other brain, and learns in ways unique to that wiring.

We are human because we can fantasize.

The brain doesn't pay attention to boring things.

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.

The brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an outdoor setting, in unstable meteorological conditions, and to do so in near constant motion.

The more personal an example, the more richly it becomes encoded and the more readily it is remembered.

The more handles one creates at the moment of learning, the more likely the information is to be assessed at a later date. The handles we can add revolve around content, timing, and environment.

WE DO NOT SEE with our eyes. We see with our brains.

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.

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.

If you are trying to get information across to someone, your ability to create a compelling introduction may be the most important single factor in the later success of your mission.