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.

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.

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.

Based on research into the Picture Superiority Effect, when we read text alone, we are likely to remember only 10 percent of the information 3 days later. If that information is presented to us as text combined with a relevant image, we are likely to remember 65 percent of the information 3 days later.

If you are curious, you won't be satisfied with the "tyranny of custom." People stuck in that rut might say "why?" and the first thing an exploratory person would say is "why not?"

There are estimates that we daily walked for 10 - 20 kilometers for hundreds of thousands of years. The world's best problem solving machinery grew up under conditions of consistent, strenuous physical activity. It makes sense that when we don't recreate the environments in which the organ was forged, we get a loss of function. And that when we do restore those environments, we get that function back. The effects of aerobic exercise on executive function skills is a powerful empirical example of this idea.

Don't start with the details. Start with the key ideas, and in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions.