Brain Rules Quotes

“If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to tear down both and start over.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“The problem in today’s economy is that people are typically starting a family at the very time they are also supposed to be doing their best work. They are trying to be productive at some of the most stressful times of their lives. What if companies took this unhappy collision of life events seriously? They could offer Gottman’s intervention as a benefit for every newly married, or newly pregnant, employee.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like—it literally rewires it.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“One of the greatest predictors of successful aging, they found, is the presence or absence of a sedentary lifestyle. Put”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“We must do a better job of encouraging lifelong curiosity.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“Jill was born into an inner-city home. Her father began having sex with Jill and her sister during their preschool years. Her mother was institutionalized twice because of what used to be termed “nervous breakdowns.” When Jill was 7 years old, her agitated dad called a family meeting in the living room. In front of the whole clan, he put a handgun to his head, said, “You drove me to this,” and then blew his brains out. The mother’s mental condition continued to deteriorate, and she revolved in and out of mental hospitals for years. When Mom was home, she would beat Jill. Beginning in her early teens, Jill was forced to work outside the home to help make ends meet. As Jill got older, we would have expected to see deep psychiatric scars, severe emotional damage, drugs, maybe even a pregnancy or two. Instead, Jill developed into a charming and quite popular young woman at school. She became a talented singer, an honor student, and president of her high-school class. By every measure, she was emotionally well-adjusted and seemingly unscathed by the awful circumstances of her childhood. Her story, published in a leading psychiatric journal, illustrates the unevenness of the human response to stress. Psychiatrists long have observed that some people are more tolerant of stress than others.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“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.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“How People Learn. If you want people to be able to pay attention, don’t start with details. Start with the key ideas and, in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions. Meaning before details.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“Repeat to remember.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“The most common communication mistakes? Relating too much information, with not enough time devoted to connecting the dots.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“Emotionally charged events are better remembered—for longer, and with more accuracy—than neutral events.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“The brain appears to be designed to (1) solve problems (2) related to surviving (3) in an unstable outdoor environment, and (4) to do so in nearly constant motion. I call this the brain’s performance envelope.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“To put it bluntly, research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“Over the long term, however, too much adrenaline produces scarring on the insides of your blood vessels. These scars become magnets for molecules to accumulate, creating lumps called plaques. These can grow large enough to block the blood vessels. If it happens in the blood vessels of your heart, you get a heart attack; in your brain, you get a stroke.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“Stress hormones can do some truly nasty things to your brain if boatloads of the stuff are given free access to your central nervous system.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“The more you exercise, the more tissues you can feed and the more toxic waste you can remove.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“After years of investigating aging populations, researchers’ answer to the question of how much is not much. If all you do is walk several times a week, your brain will benefit. Even”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“Three researchers at Stanford University noticed the same thing about the undergraduates they were teaching, and they decided to study it. First, they noticed that while all the students seemed to use digital devices incessantly, not all students did. True to stereotype, some kids were zombified, hyperdigital users. But some kids used their devices in a low-key fashion: not all the time, and not with two dozen windows open simultaneously. The researchers called the first category of students Heavy Media Multitaskers. Their less frantic colleagues were called Light Media Multitaskers. If you asked heavy users to concentrate on a problem while simultaneously giving them lots of distractions, the researchers wondered, how good was their ability to maintain focus? The hypothesis: Compared to light users, the heavy users would be faster and more accurate at switching from one task to another, because they were already so used to switching between browser windows and projects and media inputs. The hypothesis was wrong. In every attentional test the researchers threw at these students, the heavy users did consistently worse than the light users. Sometimes dramatically worse. They weren’t as good at filtering out irrelevant information. They couldn’t organize their memories as well. And they did worse on every task-switching experiment. Psychologist Eyal Ophir, an author of the study, said of the heavy users: “They couldn’t help thinking about the task they weren’t doing. The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can’t keep things separate in their minds.” This is just the latest illustration of the fact that the brain cannot multitask. Even if you are a Stanford student in the heart of Silicon Valley.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“Though we have been stuffing them into classrooms and cubicles for decades, our brains actually were built to survive in jungles and grasslands. We have not outgrown this.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“Is there something to the notion "Let me sleep on it."? Mountains of data says there is. For example, Mendeleyev - the creator of the Periodic Table of Elements - says that he came up with this idea in his sleep. Contemplating the nature of the universe while playing Solitaire one evening, he nodded off. When he awoke, he knew how all the atoms in the universe were organised, and he promptly created his famous table. Interestingly, he organised the atoms in repeating groups of seven, just the way you play Solitaire.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“Are you a lark, an owl or a hummingbird?

Lark, also called early chronotype, is someone who does usually wake up very early. They are most active during morning around 6:00 am. Approximately 10% of people are larks.

Owl, also called late chronotype, is someome who does usually wake up very late. They are most active in the evening around 6:00 pm. They usually drink a lot of coffee and accumulate a massive sleep debt as they go through life. Approximately 10% of people are owls.

The rest, around 80% of people, are hummingbirds. Some hummingbirds are more larkish, some more owlish and some are in between.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“The mammalian brain's functions include what researchers call the "four F's": fighting, feeding, feeling and ... reproductive behavior.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“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. We have created high-stress office environments, even though a stressed brain is significantly less productive than a non-stressed brain. Our schools are designed so that most real learning has to occur at home. Taken together, what do the studies in this book show? Mostly this: If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to tear down both and start over.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“WE DO NOT SEE with our eyes. We see with our brains.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“When the brain is fully working, it uses more energy per unit of tissue weight than a fully exercising quadricep.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“One of the greatest predictors of performance in school turns out to be the emotional stability of the home.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“There are two ways to beat the cruelty of a harsh environment: You can become stronger or you can become smarter.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“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.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“If you want people to be able to pay attention, don’t start with details. Start with the key ideas and, in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions. Meaning before details.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School