One of the greatest predictors of academic success that exist is the emotional stability of the home. So if parents are interested in education reform, they should also be interested in how they conduct themselves in front of their children. If they are homeschooling their kids, they are even more exposed, so the idea is even more important.

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.

Brain scientists and education scientists don't get together very often, and we end up living in our own little silos.

The more senses recruited at the moment of learning, the more likely you are to recall it later.

A factory worker at an assembly line, who can learn their job in 5 minutes, can get bored fairly easily, and disengage completely.

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!

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.