Top 40 John Medina Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— John Medina

2. “You’ve got seconds to grab your audience’s attention and only minutes to keep it.”

— John Medina

3. “Empathy works so well because it does not require a solution. It requires only understanding.”

— John Medina

4. “Don’t start with the details. Start with the key ideas, and in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions.”

— John Medina

5. “The brain remembers the emotional component of an experience better than any other aspect.”

— John Medina

6. “What’s obvious to you is obvious to you.”

— John Medina

7. “WE DO NOT SEE with our eyes. We see with our brains.”

— John Medina

8. “We must do a better job of encouraging lifelong curiosity.”

— John Medina

9. “Repeat to remember.”

— John Medina

10. “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.”

— John Medina

11. “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.”

— John Medina

12. “If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you would probably design something like a classroom.”

— John Medina

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

— John Medina

14. “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.”

— John Medina

15. “We are human because we can fantasize.”

— John Medina

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

— John Medina

17. “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.”

— John Medina

18. “What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like – it literally rewires it.”

— John Medina

19. “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.”

— John Medina

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

— John Medina

21. “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.”

— John Medina

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

— John Medina

23. “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.”

— John Medina

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

— John Medina

25. “Though we have been stuffing them into classrooms and cubicles for decades, our brains actually were built to survive in jungles and grasslands. A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary.”

— John Medina

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

— John Medina

27. “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.”

— John Medina

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

— John Medina

29. “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.”

— John Medina

30. “Emotionally charged events are better remembered – for longer, and with more accuracy – than neutral events.”

— John Medina

31. “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.”

— John Medina

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

— John Medina

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

— John Medina

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

— John Medina

35. “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.”

— John Medina

36. “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.”

— John Medina

37. “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.”

— John Medina

38. “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.”

— John Medina

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

— John Medina

40. “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.”

— John Medina

41. “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.”

— John Medina

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

— John Medina

43. “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?”

— John Medina

44. “The mammalian brain’s functions include what researchers call the “four F’s”: fighting, feeding, feeling and... reproductive behavior.”

— John Medina

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

— John Medina

46. “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.”

— John Medina

47. “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.”

— John Medina

48. “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.”

— John Medina

49. “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.”

— John Medina