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.

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.

A factory worker at an assembly line, who can learn their job in 5 minutes, can get bored fairly easily, and disengage completely.

You don't have a work brain and a home brain. You have a single brain, one you carry with you wherever you go. Whatever affects you in one place is fully capable of affecting you at the other.

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.

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 brain doesn't pay attention to boring things.