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

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.

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.

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.

Years of research show us that the less control a person feels over an aversive stimuli coming at them, the more likely they are to disengage. Complete loss of control over a sustained period of time can actually lead to depression. It then follows that giving the person a level of control over the situation reduce the stress - and perhaps restore the disengagement.

Women tend to recall the details of an emotionally competent stimulus, using more of their left hemisphere to do the processing. Men tend to recall the gist aspects of an emotionally competent stimulus, using more of their right hemisphere to do the processing.