62 Quotes by John Medina

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.