Latest John Medina Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• One of the greatest predictors of academic success that exist is the emotional stability of the home. So if parents are interested in education reform, they should also be interested in how they conduct themselves in front of their children. If they are homeschooling their kids, they are even more exposed, so the idea is even more important.

  John Medina

  Children, Home, Kids

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Brain scientists and education scientists don't get together very often, and we end up living in our own little silos.

  John Medina

  Brain, Together, Littles

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Most brain scientists have not taught 4th grade, and don't know very much about the classroom, even though they might study learning in some detail. Most education professionals, who often know a tremendous amount about the classroom, don't know much about the brain. That is one of the reasons why I am so skeptical about applying brain findings to the classroom.

  John Medina

  Brain, Reason Why, Details

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• 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.

  John Medina

  Stress, Loss, Years

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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

  John Medina

  Jobs, Bored, Lines

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• If you are curious, you won't be satisfied with the "tyranny of custom." People stuck in that rut might say "why?" and the first thing an exploratory person would say is "why not?"

  John Medina

  People, Why Not, Might

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Americans have been good at improvising for a long time, but in the last few decades, we have gotten very sloppy about the rote memorization of facts. That's a discipline issue. You need the rote skill in order to have something to improvise off of, otherwise you are simply playing air guitar.

  John Medina

  Air Guitar, Order, Skills

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• I have great confidence in human curiosity - even though I don't know what curiosity is from a biological point of view. One of its characteristics has got to be the willingness to explore.

  John Medina

  Views, Curiosity, Characteristics

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• 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.

  John Medina

  Thinking, People, Creative

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Human learning is a very aggressive style in its native state. I am not sure why, though it is a very useful trait in an unstable, unpredictable living environment.

  John Medina

  Style, Environment, States

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• 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.

  John Medina

  Yelling, Brain, Purpose

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Babies learn through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas. They use very sophisticated hypothesis testing strategies to find out about their world.

  John Medina

  Baby, Self, Ideas

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• 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.

  John Medina

  Color, Smell, Brain

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• 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.

  John Medina

  Men, Details, Gist

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• The more senses recruited at the moment of learning, the more likely you are to recall it later.

  John Medina

  Moments, Recalls, Senses

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• 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.

  John Medina

  Home, Brain, Capable

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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

  John Medina

  Memories, Stress, Parent

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• 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.

  John Medina

  Emotional, Years, Elephants

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• 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.

  John Medina

  Fashion, Cells, Heaven

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• 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.

  John Medina

  Powerful, Loss, Exercise

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• The brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an outdoor setting, in unstable meteorological conditions, and to do so in near constant motion.

  John Medina

  Brain, Problem, Unstable

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• 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!

  John Medina

  America, Design, Brain

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Not even identical twins can have the exact same experiences, and their brains are not wired the same way.

  John Medina

  Brain, Way, Twins

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• People try to apply directly results from the cognitive neurosciences directly to classroom practice and I have to tell you I am very skeptical about the exercise. We don't know very much about how the brain works - we don't even know how you remember to write your name.

  John Medina

  Writing, Exercise, Practice

  Source: bobmorris.biz

• Every brain is wired differently from every other brain, and learns in ways unique to that wiring.

  John Medina

  Unique, Brain, Way

  Source: bobmorris.biz