If managers knew how deeply their behaviors could affect brain function - whether they are piling up too much work on someone or yelling at them for "motivational purposes", they would quit doing it.

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.

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

You've got seconds to grab your audience's attention and only minutes to keep it.

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

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.