If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to tear down both and start over.

Whether at work, home or school, everybody carries their brain around them, and if the organ suffers from a disorder, we carry the disorder around with us too.

We are human because we can fantasize.

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.

To improve short-term memory significantly, reduce the stress in your life. And choose your parents wisely.

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.

A third or more of the brain is devoted to visual processing, not true of any other sense. We have color vision and it is truly binocular. This sophistication is not true of other senses, such as smell, where many genes are actually mutated and no longer work.