John Medina > 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

“Children have never been good at listening to their parents, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

“Ethan’s parents constantly told him how brainy he was. “You’re so smart! You can do anything, Ethan. We are so proud of you, they would say every time he sailed through a math test. Or a spelling test. Or any test. With the best of intentions, they consistently tethered Ethan’s accomplishment to some innate characteristic of his intellectual prowess. Researchers call this “appealing to fixed mindsets.” The parents had no idea that this form of praise was toxic.

　　Little Ethan quickly learned that any academic achievement that required no effort was the behavior that defined his gift. When he hit junior high school, he ran into subjects that did require effort. He could no longer sail through, and, for the first time, he started making mistakes. But he did not see these errors as opportunities for improvement. After all, he was smart because he could mysteriously grasp things quickly. And if he could no longer grasp things quickly, what did that imply? That he was no longer smart. Since he didn’t know the ingredients making him successful, he didn’t know what to do when he failed. You don’t have to hit that brick wall very often before you get discouraged, then depressed. Quite simply, Ethan quit trying. His grades collapsed.


What happens when you say, ‘You’re so smart’

　　Research shows that Ethan’s unfortunate story is typical of kids regularly praised for some fixed characteristic. If you praise your child this way, three things are statistically likely to happen:

　　First, your child will begin to perceive mistakes as failures. Because you told her that success was due to some static ability over which she had no control, she will start to think of failure (such as a bad grade) as a static thing, too—now perceived as a lack of ability. Successes are thought of as gifts rather than the governable product of effort.

　　Second, perhaps as a reaction to the first, she will become more concerned with looking smart than with actually learning something. (Though Ethan was intelligent, he was more preoccupied with breezing through and appearing smart to the people who mattered to him. He developed little regard for learning.)

　　Third, she will be less willing to confront the reasons behind any deficiencies, less willing to make an effort. Such kids have a difficult time admitting errors. There is simply too much at stake for failure.

　　 

　　What to say instead: ‘You really worked hard’

　　What should Ethan’s parents have done? Research shows a simple solution. Rather than praising him for being smart, they should have praised him for working hard. On the successful completion of a test, they should not have said,“I’m so proud of you. You’re so smart. They should have said, “I’m so proud of you. You must have really studied hard”. This appeals to controllable effort rather than to unchangeable talent. It’s called “growth mindset” praise.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

“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

“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

“You may think that grown-ups create children. The reality is that children create grown-ups. They become their own person, and so do you. Children give so much more than they take.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

“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

“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.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

“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

“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

“There are four nutrients you will want in your behavioral formula, adjusting them as your baby gets older: breast-feeding, talking to your baby, guided play, and praising effort rather than accomplishment. Brain research tells us there are also several toxins: pushing your child to perform tasks his brain is not developmentally ready to take on; stressing your child to the point of a psychological state termed “learned helplessness”; and, for the under-2 set, television.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

“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

“Many families actively discourage the expression of tough emotions like fear and anger. Happiness and tranquility, meanwhile, make it to the top of the list of “approved” emotions. There is no such thing as a bad emotion. There is no such thing as a good emotion. An emotion is either there—or it is not. These parents seem to know that emotions don’t make people weak and they don’t make people strong. They only make people human. The result is a savvy let-the-children-be-who-they-are attitude.

-They do not judge emotions.
-They acknowledge the reflexive nature of emotions.
-They know that behavior is a choice, even though an emotion is not.
-They see a crisis as a teachable moment.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

“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

“People view their own behaviors as originating from amendable, situational constraints,but they view other people's behavior as originating from inherent, immutable personality traits.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

“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

“(preschoolers demand some form of attention 180 times per hour, behavioral psychologists say),”
― John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

“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

“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

“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

“The more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids’ linguistic abilities become”
― John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

“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

“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

“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

“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