John Medina quotes

What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like-it literally rewires it. (John Medina)
Don't start with the details. Start with the key ideas, and in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions. View quote
John Medina
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. View quote
John Medina
The brain remembers the emotional component of an experience better than any other aspect. View quote
John Medina
You've got seconds to grab your audience's attention and only minutes to keep it. View quote
John Medina
The more senses recruited at the moment of learning, the more likely you are to recall it later. View quote
John Medina
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. View quote
John Medina
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. View quote
John Medina
We must do a better job of encouraging lifelong curiosity. View quote
John Medina
Empathy works so well because it does not require a solution. It requires only understanding. View quote
John Medina
Public speaking professionals say that you win or lose the battle to hold your audience in the first 30 seconds of a given presentation. (John Medina)
Change often involves loss, so change can be a risky experience. View quote
John Medina
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. View quote
John Medina
Historically, very few discoveries were made out of thin air. Most of the greatest insights depended upon the intellectual ecology in which the scientists lived. A certain critical mass of "new findings" occurred, and bright people all over the world found out about it, and several read the tea leaves the same way. View quote
John Medina
Any education system that only memorizes things creates robots and will never produce Nobel laureates. Any education system that only emphasizes improvisation will get a bunch of people who may think they are creative, but they are functionally illiterate. View quote
John Medina
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. View quote
John Medina
The brain doesn't pay attention to boring things. View quote
John Medina
There are nature and nurture components to virtually every behavior a human experiences. The research effort lies only in finding the relevant percentages, not on some absolute value. That's one of the reasons behavioral scientists have to be really good statisticians. View quote
John Medina
Though we have been stuffing them into classrooms and cubicles for decades, our brains actually were built to survive in jungles and grasslands. A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary. View quote
John Medina
We are human because we can fantasize. View quote
John Medina
Every brain is wired differently from every other brain, and learns in ways unique to that wiring. (John Medina)
To put it bluntly, research shows that we can't multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously. View quote
John Medina
What's obvious to you is obvious to you. View quote
John Medina
The brain doesn't care about change. As the world's most sophisticated survival organ, the brain cares about loss. View quote
John Medina
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. View quote
John Medina