John Medina Quotes

Children have never been good at listening to their parents, but they have never failed to imitate them.

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.

We must do a better job of encouraging lifelong curiosity.

What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like—it literally rewires it.

One of the greatest predictors of successful aging, they found, is the presence or absence of a sedentary lifestyle. Put

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.

You may think that grown-ups create children. The reality is that children create grown-ups. They become their own person, and so do you. Children give so much more than they take.

Having a first child is like swallowing an intoxicating drink made of equal parts joy and terror, chased with a bucketful of transitions nobody ever tells you about.

Emotionally charged events are better remembered—for longer, and with more accuracy—than neutral events.

The most common communication mistakes? Relating too much information, with not enough time devoted to connecting the dots.

How People Learn. If you want people to be able to pay attention, don’t start with details. Start with the key ideas and, in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions. Meaning before details.

The problem in today’s economy is that people are typically starting a family at the very time they are also supposed to be doing their best work. They are trying to be productive at some of the most stressful times of their lives. What if companies took this unhappy collision of life events seriously? They could offer Gottman’s intervention as a benefit for every newly married, or newly pregnant, employee.

(preschoolers demand some form of attention 180 times per hour, behavioral psychologists say),

People view their own behaviors as originating from amendable, situational constraints,but they view other people's behavior as originating from inherent, immutable personality traits.

The brain appears to be designed to (1) solve problems (2) related to surviving (3) in an unstable outdoor environment, and (4) to do so in nearly constant motion. I call this the brain’s performance envelope.

The more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids’ linguistic abilities become

The more you exercise, the more tissues you can feed and the more toxic waste you can remove.

To put it bluntly, research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously.

Repeat to remember.

After years of investigating aging populations, researchers’ answer to the question of how much is not much. If all you do is walk several times a week, your brain will benefit. Even

Over the long term, however, too much adrenaline produces scarring on the insides of your blood vessels. These scars become magnets for molecules to accumulate, creating lumps called plaques. These can grow large enough to block the blood vessels. If it happens in the blood vessels of your heart, you get a heart attack; in your brain, you get a stroke.

A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary.

Though we have been stuffing them into classrooms and cubicles for decades, our brains actually were built to survive in jungles and grasslands. We have not outgrown this.

There are two ways to beat the cruelty of a harsh environment: You can become stronger or you can become smarter.

Stress hormones can do some truly nasty things to your brain if boatloads of the stuff are given free access to your central nervous system.

WE DO NOT SEE with our eyes. We see with our brains.

When the brain is fully working, it uses more energy per unit of tissue weight than a fully exercising quadricep.

One of the greatest predictors of performance in school turns out to be the emotional stability of the home.

Kids come into the world before their brains are fully developed. The result? Parenthood.

The mammalian brain's functions include what researchers call the "four F's": fighting, feeding, feeling and ... reproductive behavior.

There are four nutrients you will want in your behavioral formula, adjusting them as your baby gets older: breast-feeding, talking to your baby, guided play, and praising effort rather than accomplishment. Brain research tells us there are also several toxins: pushing your child to perform tasks his brain is not developmentally ready to take on; stressing your child to the point of a psychological state termed “learned helplessness”; and, for the under-2 set, television.

As C.S. Lewis observed in The Silver Chair, one book in the Chronicles of Narnia series: “Crying is all right in its own way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.

Many families actively discourage the expression of tough emotions like fear and anger. Happiness and tranquility, meanwhile, make it to the top of the list of “approved” emotions. There is no such thing as a bad emotion. There is no such thing as a good emotion. An emotion is either there—or it is not. These parents seem to know that emotions don’t make people weak and they don’t make people strong. They only make people human. The result is a savvy let-the-children-be-who-they-are attitude. -They do not judge emotions. -They acknowledge the reflexive nature of emotions. -They know that behavior is a choice, even though an emotion is not. -They see a crisis as a teachable moment.

The more personal an example, the more richly it becomes encoded and the more readily it is remembered.

Public speaking professionals say that you win or lose the battle to hold your audience in the first 30 seconds of a given presentation.

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.

People usually forget 90 percent of what they learn in a class within 30 days. He further showed that the majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours after class.

The brain appears to be designed to (1) solve problems (2) related to surviving (3) in an unstable outdoor environment, and (4) to do so in nearly constant motion.

Money increases happiness only when it lifts people out of poverty to about $50,000 a year in income.

Author Elizabeth Stone once said, “Making a decision to have a child—it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

But what you do in your child’s first five years of life—not just the first year—profoundly influences how he or she will behave as an adult.

The Mozart Effect comes to mind: the popular idea that listening to classical music makes students better at math.

Worrying is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere. —Anonymous

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.

We know when our actions fail to match our inner thoughts and feelings, but we often forget that this knowledge is not available to others.

Verbalizing has a soothing effect on the nervous systems of children. (Adults, too.)

There are great reasons to fear what happens if you don’t create a robust social schedule for the rest of your life or practice mindfulness meditation for the rest of your life.

One of the reasons empathy works so well is because it does not require a solution.

souls should, by definition, also teach about “the metaphysical dimensions

People don't pay attention to boring things.

If you are trying to get information across to someone, your ability to create a compelling introduction may be the most important single factor in the later success of your mission.

The perfect storm of occupational stress appears to be a combination of two factors: (1) a great deal is expected of you, and (2) you have no control over whether you will perform well.

Regardless of who you are, the brain pays a great deal of attention to several questions: “Can I eat it? Will it eat me?” “Can I mate with it? Will it mate with me?” “Have I seen it before?

The more handles one creates at the moment of learning, the more likely the information is to be assessed at a later date. The handles we can add revolve around content, timing, and environment.

Music has been a part of the cultural expression of virtually every culture ever studied. It may even extend into prehistoric times. A 35,000-year-old flute made from bird bone has been discovered,

If you want people to be able to pay attention, don’t start with details. Start with the key ideas and, in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions. Meaning before details.

Teachers find many children emotionally distracted, so upset and preoccupied by the explosive drama of their own family lives that they are unable to concentrate on such mundane matters as multiplication tables.

Jill was born into an inner-city home. Her father began having sex with Jill and her sister during their preschool years. Her mother was institutionalized twice because of what used to be termed “nervous breakdowns.” When Jill was 7 years old, her agitated dad called a family meeting in the living room. In front of the whole clan, he put a handgun to his head, said, “You drove me to this,” and then blew his brains out. The mother’s mental condition continued to deteriorate, and she revolved in and out of mental hospitals for years. When Mom was home, she would beat Jill. Beginning in her early teens, Jill was forced to work outside the home to help make ends meet. As Jill got older, we would have expected to see deep psychiatric scars, severe emotional damage, drugs, maybe even a pregnancy or two. Instead, Jill developed into a charming and quite popular young woman at school. She became a talented singer, an honor student, and president of her high-school class. By every measure, she was emotionally well-adjusted and seemingly unscathed by the awful circumstances of her childhood. Her story, published in a leading psychiatric journal, illustrates the unevenness of the human response to stress. Psychiatrists long have observed that some people are more tolerant of stress than others.

mothers suffered from major nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. When the children reached school age, 21 percent scored 130 or more points on a standard IQ test, a level considered gifted. If their mothers had no morning sickness, only 7 percent of kids did that well. The researchers have a theory—still to be proven—about why. Two hormones that stimulate a woman to vomit may also act like neural fertilizer for the developing brain.

As always, there are exceptions. Adults with training can still learn to distinguish speech sounds in other languages. But in general, the brain appears to have a limited window of opportunity in an astonishingly early time frame. The cognitive door begins swinging shut at 6 months old, and then, unless something pushes against it, the door closes. By 12 months, your baby’s brain has made decisions that affect her the rest of her life.

Imaging studies have shown that exercise increases blood volume in a region of the brain called the dentate gyrus. That’s a big deal. The dentate gyrus is a vital constituent of the hippocampus, a region deeply involved in memory formation.

Just about every mental test possible was tried. No matter how it was measured, the answer was consistently yes: A lifetime of exercise results in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary.

Is there something to the notion "Let me sleep on it."? Mountains of data says there is. For example, Mendeleyev - the creator of the Periodic Table of Elements - says that he came up with this idea in his sleep. Contemplating the nature of the universe while playing Solitaire one evening, he nodded off. When he awoke, he knew how all the atoms in the universe were organised, and he promptly created his famous table. Interestingly, he organised the atoms in repeating groups of seven, just the way you play Solitaire.

Ethan’s parents constantly told him how brainy he was. “You’re so smart! You can do anything, Ethan. We are so proud of you, they would say every time he sailed through a math test. Or a spelling test. Or any test. With the best of intentions, they consistently tethered Ethan’s accomplishment to some innate characteristic of his intellectual prowess. Researchers call this “appealing to fixed mindsets.” The parents had no idea that this form of praise was toxic. 　　Little Ethan quickly learned that any academic achievement that required no effort was the behavior that defined his gift. When he hit junior high school, he ran into subjects that did require effort. He could no longer sail through, and, for the first time, he started making mistakes. But he did not see these errors as opportunities for improvement. After all, he was smart because he could mysteriously grasp things quickly. And if he could no longer grasp things quickly, what did that imply? That he was no longer smart. Since he didn’t know the ingredients making him successful, he didn’t know what to do when he failed. You don’t have to hit that brick wall very often before you get discouraged, then depressed. Quite simply, Ethan quit trying. His grades collapsed. What happens when you say, ‘You’re so smart’ 　　Research shows that Ethan’s unfortunate story is typical of kids regularly praised for some fixed characteristic. If you praise your child this way, three things are statistically likely to happen: 　　First, your child will begin to perceive mistakes as failures. Because you told her that success was due to some static ability over which she had no control, she will start to think of failure (such as a bad grade) as a static thing, too—now perceived as a lack of ability. Successes are thought of as gifts rather than the governable product of effort. 　　Second, perhaps as a reaction to the first, she will become more concerned with looking smart than with actually learning something. (Though Ethan was intelligent, he was more preoccupied with breezing through and appearing smart to the people who mattered to him. He developed little regard for learning.) 　　Third, she will be less willing to confront the reasons behind any deficiencies, less willing to make an effort. Such kids have a difficult time admitting errors. There is simply too much at stake for failure. 　　  　　What to say instead: ‘You really worked hard’ 　　What should Ethan’s parents have done? Research shows a simple solution. Rather than praising him for being smart, they should have praised him for working hard. On the successful completion of a test, they should not have said,“I’m so proud of you. You’re so smart. They should have said, “I’m so proud of you. You must have really studied hard”. This appeals to controllable effort rather than to unchangeable talent. It’s called “growth mindset” praise.

Are you a lark, an owl or a hummingbird? Lark, also called early chronotype, is someone who does usually wake up very early. They are most active during morning around 6:00 am. Approximately 10% of people are larks. Owl, also called late chronotype, is someome who does usually wake up very late. They are most active in the evening around 6:00 pm. They usually drink a lot of coffee and accumulate a massive sleep debt as they go through life. Approximately 10% of people are owls. The rest, around 80% of people, are hummingbirds. Some hummingbirds are more larkish, some more owlish and some are in between.

Babies are born with a deep desire to understand the world around them and an incessant curiosity that compels them to aggressively explore it. This need for explanation is so powerfully stitched into their experience that some scientists describe it as a drive, just as hunger and thirst and sex are drives.

Write this across your heart before your child comes into the world: Parenting is a not a race. Kids are not proxies for adult success. Competition can be inspiring, but brands of it can wire your child’s brain in a toxic way. Comparing your kids with your friends’ kids will not get them, or you, where you want to go.

Many couples will fight in front of their children but reconcile in private. This skews a child’s perceptions, even at early ages, for the child always sees the wounding but never the bandaging. Parents who practice bandaging each other after a fight, deliberately and explicitly, allow their children to model both how to fight fair and how to make up.

One of the reasons veteran parents don’t focus on the hardness of having babies is that “hard” is not the whole story. It’s not even the major part. The time you will actually spend with your kids is breathtakingly short. They will change very quickly. Eventually, your child will find a sleep schedule, turn to you for comfort, and learn from you both what to do and what not to do.

The X chromosome does most of the heavy developmental lifting, while the little Y has been shedding its associated genes at a rate of about five every one million years, committing suicide in slow motion. It’s now down to less than 100 genes. By comparison, the X chromosome carries about 1,500 genes, all necessary participants in embryonic construction projects. These are not showing any signs of decay.

Because we don’t fully understand how our brains work, we do dumb things. We try to talk on our cell phones and drive at the same time, even though it is literally impossible for our brains to multitask when it comes to paying attention. We have created high-stress office environments, even though a stressed brain is significantly less productive than a non-stressed brain. Our schools are designed so that most real learning has to occur at home. Taken together, what do the studies in this book show? Mostly this: 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.

Affect detection. First, a person must detect a change in the emotional disposition of someone else. In the behavioral sciences, “affect” means the external expression of an emotion or mood, generally associated with an idea or an action. Kids who are autistic usually don’t get to this step; as a result, they rarely behave with empathy. • Imaginative transposition. Once a person detects an emotional change, he transposes what he observes onto his own psychological interiors. He “tries on” the perceived feelings as if they were clothes, then observes how he would react given similar circumstances. For those of you in the theater, this is the heart of Stanislavski’s Method Acting. For those of you about to have children, you have just begun to learn how to have a fair fight with them, not to mention your spouse. • Boundary formation. The person who is empathizing realizes at all times that the emotion is happening to the other person, never to the observer. Empathy is powerful, but it is also has boundaries.

　　A former fighter pilot, teaching at an aeronautics university, discovered how this works in the classroom. One of his students had been a star in ground school but was having trouble in the air. During a training flight, she misinterpreted an instrument reading, and he yelled at her, thinking it would force her to concentrate. Instead, she started crying, and though she tried to continue reading the instruments, she couldn’t focus. He landed the plane, lesson over. What was wrong? From the brain’s perspective, nothing was wrong. The student’s mind was focusing on the source of the threat, just as it had been molded to do over the past few million years. The teacher’s anger could not direct the student to the instrument to be learned because the instrument was not the source of danger. The teacher was the source of danger. This is weapons focus, merely replacing “Saturday Night Special” with “ex-fighter pilot.” 　　The same is true if you are a parenting a child rather than teaching a student. The brain will never outgrow its preoccupation with survival.

When girl best friends communicate with each other, they lean in, maintain eye contact, and do a lot of talking. They use their sophisticated verbal talents to cement their relationships. Boys never do this. They rarely face each other directly, preferring either parallel or oblique angles. They make little eye contact, their gaze always casting about the room. They do not use verbal information to cement their relationships. Instead, commotion seems to be the central currency of a little boy’s social economy. Doing things physically together

More research has since confirmed and extended these simple findings. In addition to satisfying relationships, other behaviors that predict happiness include:        •    a steady dose of altruistic acts        •    making lists of things for which you are grateful, which generates feelings of happiness in the short term        •    cultivating a general “attitude of gratitude,” which generates feelings of happiness in the long term        •    sharing novel experiences with a loved one        •    deploying a ready “forgiveness reflex” when loved ones slight you If

Couples who regularly practice empathy see stunning results. It is the independent variable that predicts a successful marriage, according to behaviorist John Gottman, who, post hoc criticisms notwithstanding, forecasts divorce probabilities with accuracy rates approaching 90 percent. In Gottman’s studies, if the wife felt she was being heard by her husband—to the point that he accepted her good influence on his behavior—the marriage was essentially divorce-proof. (Interestingly, whether the husband felt heard was not a factor in divorce rates.) If that empathy trafficking was absent, the marriage foundered. Research

This rarely happens in a visit to the pediatrician’s office, but it should. The good doctor would ask you about the health of your baby and give your little bundle of joy a routine examination. Then she’d look you in the eyes and ask some truly intrusive questions about your social life. “Do you have many friends?” the pediatrician would inquire. “What social groups do you and your husband belong to? How important are these groups to you? How diverse are they? How much contact time do you and your husband have with them?” The doctor doesn’t ask about these things because your social life is none of her business. The problem is, it is plenty of the infant’s business.

Money doesn’t make the cut. People who make more than $5 million a year are not appreciably happier than those who make $100,000 a year, the Journal of Happiness Studies found. Money increases happiness only when it lifts people out of poverty to about $50,000 a year in income. Past that, wealth and happiness part ways. This suggests something practical and relieving: Help your children get into a profession that can at least make around $50,000 a year. They don’t have to be millionaires to be thrilled with the life you prepare them for. After their basic needs are met, they just need some close friends and relatives. And sometimes even siblings, as the following story attests.

Three researchers at Stanford University noticed the same thing about the undergraduates they were teaching, and they decided to study it. First, they noticed that while all the students seemed to use digital devices incessantly, not all students did. True to stereotype, some kids were zombified, hyperdigital users. But some kids used their devices in a low-key fashion: not all the time, and not with two dozen windows open simultaneously. The researchers called the first category of students Heavy Media Multitaskers. Their less frantic colleagues were called Light Media Multitaskers. If you asked heavy users to concentrate on a problem while simultaneously giving them lots of distractions, the researchers wondered, how good was their ability to maintain focus? The hypothesis: Compared to light users, the heavy users would be faster and more accurate at switching from one task to another, because they were already so used to switching between browser windows and projects and media inputs. The hypothesis was wrong. In every attentional test the researchers threw at these students, the heavy users did consistently worse than the light users. Sometimes dramatically worse. They weren’t as good at filtering out irrelevant information. They couldn’t organize their memories as well. And they did worse on every task-switching experiment. Psychologist Eyal Ophir, an author of the study, said of the heavy users: “They couldn’t help thinking about the task they weren’t doing. The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can’t keep things separate in their minds.” This is just the latest illustration of the fact that the brain cannot multitask. Even if you are a Stanford student in the heart of Silicon Valley.

I remember a story by a flight instructor I knew well. He told me about the best student he ever had, and a powerful lesson he learned about what it meant to teach her. The student excelled in ground school. She aced the simulations, aced her courses. In the skies, she showed natural skill, improvising even in rapidly changing weather conditions. One day in the air, the instructor saw her doing something naïve. He was having a bad day and he yelled at her. He pushed her hands away from the airplane’s equivalent of a steering wheel. He pointed angrily at an instrument. Dumbfounded, the student tried to correct herself, but in the stress of the moment, she made more errors, said she couldn’t think, and then buried her head in her hands and started to cry. The teacher took control of the aircraft and landed it. For a long time, the student would not get back into the same cockpit. The incident hurt not only the teacher’s professional relationship with the student but the student’s ability to learn. It also crushed the instructor. If he had been able to predict how the student would react to his threatening behavior, he never would have acted that way. Relationships matter when attempting to teach human beings—whether you’re a parent, teacher, boss, or peer. Here we are talking about the highly intellectual venture of flying an aircraft. But its success is fully dependent upon feelings.

Emotions get our attention As the television advertisement opens, we see two men talking in a car. They are having a mildly heated discussion about one of them overusing the word “like” in conversation. As the argument continues, we notice out the passenger window another car barreling toward the men. It smashes into them. There are screams, sounds of shattering glass, quick-cut shots showing the men bouncing in the car, twisted metal. The final shot shows the men standing, in disbelief, outside their wrecked Volkswagen Passat. In a twist on a well-known expletive, these words flash on the screen: “Safe Happens.” The spot ends with a picture of another Passat, this one intact and complete with its five-star side-crash safety rating. It is a memorable, even disturbing, 30-second spot. That’s because it’s charged with emotion. Emotionally charged events are better remembered—for longer, and with more accuracy—than neutral events. While this idea may seem intuitively obvious, it’s frustrating to demonstrate scientifically because the research community is still debating exactly what an emotion is. What we can say for sure is that when your brain detects an emotionally charged event, your amygdala (a part of your brain that helps create and maintain emotions) releases the chemical dopamine into your system. Dopamine greatly aids memory and information processing. You can think of it like a Post-it note that reads “Remember this!” Getting one’s brain to put a chemical Post-it note on a given piece of information means that information is going to be more robustly processed. It is what every teacher, parent, and ad executive wants.

What to say instead: “You really worked hard” What should Ethan’s parents have done? Research reveals a simple solution. Rather than praising him for being smart, they should have praised him for working hard. On the successful completion of a test, they should not have said, “I’m so proud of you. You’re such a bright kid.” That appeals to a fixed, uncontrollable intellectual trait. It’s called “fixed mindset” praise. His parents should have said, “I’m so proud of you. You must have studied a lot.” This appeals to controllable effort. It’s called “growth mindset” praise.

Because we don’t fully understand how our brains work, we do dumb things. We try to talk on our cell phones and drive at the same time, even though it is literally impossible for our brains to multitask when it comes to paying attention.

people don’t pay attention to boring things

Every time I lectured to a group of parents-to-be about baby brain development,

is to teach her impulse control in her early

One study hints that it could, though more work needs to be done. Kids with normal hearing took an American Sign Language class for nine months, in the first grade, then were administered a series of cognitive tests. Their attentional focus, spatial abilities, memory, and visual discrimination scores improved dramatically—by as much as 50 percent—compared with controls who had no formal instruction.

Americans 2 years of age and older now spend an average of four hours and 49 minutes per day in front of the TV—20 percent more than 10 years ago. And we are getting this exposure at younger and younger ages, made all the more complex because of the wide variety of digital screen time now available. In 2003, 73 percent of kids under 6 watched television every day. And children younger than 2 got two hours and five minutes of “screen time” with TVs and computers per day.

•   Information

Dr. Mark A. Gabriel, Ph.D., a former professor of Islamic history at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt has described the contents of the Quran:          “In Medina, Muhammad became a military leader and invader, so   the revelations in Medina talk about military power and invasion in the name of Islam (Jihad). Sixty percent of the Quranic verses talk about Jihad, which stands to reason because Muhammad received most of the Quran after he left Mecca. Jihad became the basic power and driving force of Islam”. (Islam and Terrorism, Charisma House, 2002).

Most of its functions involve what some researchers call the “four Fs”: fighting, feeding, fleeing, and … reproductive behavior.

Los recuerdos declarativos parecen almacenarse definitivamente en los mismos sistemas corticales involucrados en el procesado inicial del estímulo. En otras palabras, la morada final es también la región que sirvió como punto de partida inicial. La única separación es el tiempo, no el lugar. Estos datos tienen mucho que decir no sólo sobre el almacenaje, sino también sobre el recuerdo. La recuperación, diez años más tarde, de una huella de memoria totalmente madura puede constituir simplemente un intento de reconstruir los momentos iniciales del aprendizaje, cuando el recuerdo sólo tenía unos milisegundos de edad.

Los recuerdos declarativos parecen almacenarse definitivamente en los mismos sistemas corticales involucrados en el procesado inicial del estímulo. En otras palabras, la morada final es también la región que sirvió como punto de partida inicial. La única separación es el tiempo, no el lugar. Estos datos tienen mucho que decir no sólo sobre el almacenaje, sino también sobre el recuerdo. La recuperación, diez años más tarde, de una huella de memoria totalmente madura puede constituir simplemente un intento de reconstruir los momentos iniciales del aprendizaje, cuando el recuerdo sólo tenía unos milisegundos de edad.

The trick for business professionals, and for educators, is to present bodies of information so compelling that the audience does this (encoding) on their own, spontaneously engaging in deep and elaborate encoding.

reasoning is a uniquely human talent. It may have arisen from our need to understand one another’s intentions and motivations. This allowed us to coordinate within a group, which is how we took over the Earth.

How do Muslims view Christians and Jews, who the Quran calls “People of the Book”? At first, the early Quaranic verses encouraged Muslims to live peacefully with Christians, though verses about Jews were never favorable. However, after Muhammad moved to Medina, his revelations became very hostile to Christians.

if you get a certain breed of dog or buy a certain model of car, you suddenly start noticing the same dog or car everywhere you go.

Kids praised for effort complete 50 percent more hard math problems than kids praised for intelligence.

We are human because we can fantasize.

Your meta-emotion philosophy turns out to be very important to your children’s future. It predicts how you will react to their emotional lives, which in turn predicts how (or if) they learn to regulate their own emotions. Because these skills are directly related to a child’s social competency, how you feel about feelings can profoundly influence your child’s future happiness. You have to be comfortable with your emotions in order to make your kids comfortable with theirs.