The constant nagging in your mind of undone things pulls you out of the present--tethers you to a mind-set of the future so that you're never fully in the moment and enjoying what's now.

Although it is easier to find information these days, it is easier than ever before to find misinformation, pseudo-facts, unsupported and fringe opinions, and the like. Children should be taught at an early age what constitutes evidence, how to detect biases or distortions in newspaper accounts, and that there exist hierarchies of information sources. In the medical field, for example, a controlled experiment published in a peer-reviewed journal is a better source than a blog by the Ginseng Growers Association, promoting the health benefits of their own product.

The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.

The amount of scientific information we've discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language.

A song playing comprises a very specific and vivid set of memory cues. Because the multiple-trace memory models assume that context is encoded along with memory traces, the music that you have listened to at various times of your life is cross-coded with the events of those times. That is, the music is linked to events of the time, and those events are linked to the music.

No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.

Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years... No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.