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.

We are human because we can fantasize.

Even though we don't know squat about how the brain works, the little we do know suggests that if you wanted to design a learning environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was naturally good at doing, you would design the education system we currently have, not only in America, but all over the world!

There are nature and nurture components to virtually every behavior a human experiences. The research effort lies only in finding the relevant percentages, not on some absolute value. That's one of the reasons behavioral scientists have to be really good statisticians.

Any education system that only memorizes things creates robots and will never produce Nobel laureates. Any education system that only emphasizes improvisation will get a bunch of people who may think they are creative, but they are functionally illiterate.

The ability to double our biomass - not by waiting several million years and growing to be the size of an elephant - but waiting a few hundred thousand years for neurons to sprout into our brains - ones capable of having us create emotional relationships with other members of our species. We thereby double our biomass not by getting bigger, but by creating an ally.

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.