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We are eroding attention – the most crucial building block of wisdom, memory, and ultimately the key to societal progress.

Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.

…research shows that memories of stressful experiences are formed almost instantaneously in the human brain, and they can be recalled very quickly during times of crisis.

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

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

The events that happen the first time you are exposed to information play a disproportionately greater role in your ability to accurately retrieve it at a later date.

At the moment of learning, environmental features – even ones irrelevant to the learning goals – may become encoded into the memory, right along with the goals.

…repeated exposure to information in spaced intervals provides the most powerful way to fix memory into the brain.

A very useful thing to remember: appearances can be deceiving… Truth is, they nearly always are.

…the sensitivity we show to price changes might in fact be largely a result of our memory for the prices we have paid in the past…