Category: Sunday quote

‘We began to see the same themes, the same attributes, reflected in a wide range of successful ideas. What we found based on Chip’s research – and by reviewing the research of dozens of folklorists, psychologists, educational researchers, political scientists, and proverb-hunters – was that sticky ideas shared certain key traits. There is no “formula” for a sticky idea – we don’t want to overstate the case. But sticky ideas do draw from a common set of traits, which make them more likely to succeed. It’s like discussing the attributes of a great basketball player. You can be pretty sure…

‘The behavioural neurologist Norman Geschwind suggested that for most children myelination of the angular gyrus region was not sufficiently developed till school age – that is, between five and seven years. Geschwind also hypothesised that myelination in these critical cortical regions develops more slowly in some boys; this might be one reason why more boys are slower to read fluently than girls. To be sure, our own research on language finds that girls are faster than boys until around age eight on many timed naming tasks. Geschwind’s conclusions about when a child’s brain is sufficiently developed to read received support…

‘My first daughter taught me a necessary lesson: she is able to signal when I am becoming over-involved in any aspect of her life, protect herself from my undue desire to control, and emerge with the skills she herself wants to pursue. She teaches me constantly that we are really on the same side. She wants to strike forward in life and fulfil herself, just as I would wish her to do, but she will move in her own time and from her own initiative. These days I try not to define success (or failure) in terms of the behavioural…

‘The adult brain shuts down nightly, like an office block, for routine maintenance. In the newborn, the cleaners are wandering around all day long. The supervisor has gone missing. The technicians are reinstalling software and upgrading the phone system even as a poor drone is trying to work. For the neonate, this means that, whatever kind of consciousness she has, it is maintained more or less around the clock. As a result, her sleeping brain is very far from being cut off from what is going on around it. EEG studies have shown that newborns’ brains, unlike adults’, remain active…

‘Most of us assume that there exists a single thing called “motivation,” which people can have a lot of, a little of, or none of. Naturally, we want our kids to possess copious quantities of it, which is to say, we want them to be highly motivated to do their homework, to act responsible, and so forth. The trouble, though, is that there are actually different kinds of motivation. Most psychologists distinguish between the intrinsic kind and the extrinsic kind. Intrinsic motivation basically means that you like what you’re doing for it’s own sake, whereas extrinsic motivation means you do something as a…

‘The classic view of learning is encapsulated in seven words familiar to every speaker of English: You learn from the company you keep. You don’t learn by consciously modelling yourself on the company you keep, or by deliberately imitating other people. You become like them.  We all know this and organise our lives accordingly. I have found a similar proverb or saying in every language I have encountered. We take it for granted that the people around us influence the way we are. That is why the point of view is classic – we rarely think about the continual learning that…

‘For curiosity, interest, and a longing to know more and more types of experience are the qualities that stimulate a desire to know about life and to understand it. They provide the zest that makes it possible to meet any situation as an adventure. Without that spirit of adventure, life can be a dull business. With it, there is no situation, however limiting, physically or economically, which cannot be filled to the brim with interest. Indeed, without interest, it is almost impossible to continue to learn; certainly, it is impossible to continue to grow. Now and then, I am surprised…