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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.

John Medina

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John Medina
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: January 19
Molecular Biologist
Conditions
Designed
Problems
Settings
Brain
Appears
Problem
Near
Meteorological
Related
Outdoor
Setting
Unstable
Solve
Surviving
Constant
Motion

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Brain scientists and education scientists don't get together very often, and we end up living in our own little silos.
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We must do a better job of encouraging lifelong curiosity.
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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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The brain doesn't pay attention to boring things.
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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.
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The brain remembers the emotional component of an experience better than any other aspect.
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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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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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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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What's obvious to you is obvious to you.
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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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Don't start with the details. Start with the key ideas, and in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions.
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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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Americans have been good at improvising for a long time, but in the last few decades, we have gotten very sloppy about the rote memorization of facts. That's a discipline issue. You need the rote skill in order to have something to improvise off of, otherwise you are simply playing air guitar.
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Empathy works so well because it does not require a solution. It requires only understanding.
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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.
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People try to apply directly results from the cognitive neurosciences directly to classroom practice and I have to tell you I am very skeptical about the exercise. We don't know very much about how the brain works - we don't even know how you remember to write your name.
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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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