Categories

You keep the message separate from the messenger. In this way, we might learn how to change our minds before our brains freeze our thoughts into consistent patterns.

…the best corporate leaders… remain students of their work, relentlessly asking questions – why, why, why? And have an incurable compulsion to vacuum the brains of people they meet.

Get the maximum number of brains on the problem even if the problems represent existential threats.

To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we’re better off shifting to a process called brainwriting. The initial steps are solo.

An awful lot of what we remember is actually stored outside our brains.

Without a symphonic conductor, the music of the brain disintegrates into cacophonic noise.

…even for those of us with healthy brains, focus itself creates a kind of blindness. When we shine our attentional spotlight on an object, the rest of the scene doesn’t go blank, but its suppression is truly dramatic.

This miraculous cultural invention [reading], a feat so unnatural that it necessitates a painstaking rewiring of the brain to learn, shapes our understanding of life.

Nothing much happens if you’re on the outside looking in, because learning to read requires a miraculous feat of brain circuitry, fueled by a crucial and equally invisible ingredient: attention.

To navigate the literate world, we must build a literate brain, then work past uncertainty to construct our own frameworks of interpretation.