Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye.

The mammalian brain evolved exquisite place memory because that was essential for survival. This is why squirrels have such a good memory for where they buried their nuts.

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.

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.

We really are living in an age of information overload. Google estimates that there are 300 exabytes (300 followed by 18 zeros) of human-made information in the world today. Only four years ago there were just 30 exabytes. We've created more information in the past few years than in all of human history before us.

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.

When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red.