John Medina Quotes
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I think the most incredible fact about the brain is that it is the only piece of biological real estate that can actually study itself. I can think about that for decades - I have, actually - and still be in drop dead amazement.
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The more senses recruited at the moment of learning, the more likely you are to recall it later.
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Women tend to recall the details of an emotionally competent stimulus, using more of their left hemisphere to do the processing. Men tend to recall the gist aspects of an emotionally competent stimulus, using more of their right hemisphere to do the processing.
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Babies learn through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas. They use very sophisticated hypothesis testing strategies to find out about their world.
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Our ability to adapt came from our East African birthplace, a meteorologically unstable place. If you couldn't adapt, you'd be dead. But once you've found a solution, there is no need to continue the adaptive behavioral parrying, which is bioenergetically very expensive to maintain. We are built to find answers, then hang on to them as long as we can.
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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.
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Years of research show us that the less control a person feels over an aversive stimuli coming at them, the more likely they are to disengage. Complete loss of control over a sustained period of time can actually lead to depression. It then follows that giving the person a level of control over the situation reduce the stress - and perhaps restore the disengagement.
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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.
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You've got seconds to grab your audience's attention and only minutes to keep it.
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We are human because we can fantasize.
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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.
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Not even identical twins can have the exact same experiences, and their brains are not wired the same way.
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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.
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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.
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A third or more of the brain is devoted to visual processing, not true of any other sense. We have color vision and it is truly binocular. This sophistication is not true of other senses, such as smell, where many genes are actually mutated and no longer work.
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The brain processes meaning before detail. Providing the gist, the core concept, first was like giving a thirsty person a tall glass of water. And the brain likes hierarchy. Starting with general concepts naturally leads to explaining information in a hierarchical fashion. You have to do the general idea first. And then you will see that 40 percent improvement in understanding.
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Even though we don't know squat about how the brain works, the little we do know suggests that if you wanted to design a learning environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was naturally good at doing, you would design the education system we currently have, not only in America, but all over the world!
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What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like—it literally rewires it.
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Most brain scientists have not taught 4th grade, and don't know very much about the classroom, even though they might study learning in some detail. Most education professionals, who often know a tremendous amount about the classroom, don't know much about the brain. That is one of the reasons why I am so skeptical about applying brain findings to the classroom.
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Every brain is wired differently from every other brain, and learns in ways unique to that wiring.
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Based on research into the Picture Superiority Effect, when we read text alone, we are likely to remember only 10 percent of the information 3 days later. If that information is presented to us as text combined with a relevant image, we are likely to remember 65 percent of the information 3 days later.
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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?"
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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.
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The brain doesn't care about change. As the world's most sophisticated survival organ, the brain cares about loss.
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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.
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The brain doesn't pay attention to boring things.
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To put it bluntly, research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously.
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Public speaking professionals say that you win or lose the battle to hold your audience in the first 30 seconds of a given presentation.
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There is a neuron in your brain that will respond only to pictures of Jennifer Aniston - provided you have had prior visual exposure to the actress. That neuron does not respond to pictures of Bill Clinton or Halle Berry. Only Jennifer. I used the story to explain the almost ridiculous plasticity of the organ. There is no such thing as Jennifer Aniston in our evolutionary history - she was born in 1969, for heaven's sake - but we are flexible enough to devote an entire cell to her if we have previously encountered her in some fashion.
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The brain cannot multitask. Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time…To put it bluntly, research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing information-rich inputs simultaneously…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.
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