There is a neuron in your brain that will respond only to pictures of Jennifer Aniston - provided you have had prior visual exposure to the actress. That neuron does not respond to pictures of Bill Clinton or Halle Berry. Only Jennifer. I used the story to explain the almost ridiculous plasticity of the organ. There is no such thing as Jennifer Aniston in our evolutionary history - she was born in 1969, for heaven's sake - but we are flexible enough to devote an entire cell to her if we have previously encountered her in some fashion.

If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you would probably design something like a classroom.

The distance between a gene and a behavior is of greatest interest to me. The relative contributions of nature and nurture, of nucleotide and nuclear family, are perpetually fascinating to me.

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.

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.

There are nature and nurture components to virtually every behavior a human experiences. The research effort lies only in finding the relevant percentages, not on some absolute value. That's one of the reasons behavioral scientists have to be really good statisticians.

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