You can practice for 30 years and still not be a Mozart. The most lethal combination would be a Mozart who practiced for thousands of hours.

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 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.

Here's why this matters: Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50 percent longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50 percent more errors.

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

Historically, very few discoveries were made out of thin air. Most of the greatest insights depended upon the intellectual ecology in which the scientists lived. A certain critical mass of "new findings" occurred, and bright people all over the world found out about it, and several read the tea leaves the same way.

The brain doesn't care about change. As the world's most sophisticated survival organ, the brain cares about loss.