Americans have been good at improvising for a long time, but in the last few decades, we have gotten very sloppy about the rote memorization of facts. That's a discipline issue. You need the rote skill in order to have something to improvise off of, otherwise you are simply playing air guitar.

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.

We are human because we can fantasize.

The brain remembers the emotional component of an experience better than any other aspect.

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.

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?"

Babies learn through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas. They use very sophisticated hypothesis testing strategies to find out about their world.