Jeffrey Kluger Quotes
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The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.
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Becoming food savvy is one thing, but it's amazing how fast savvy turns to snooty, and snooty leaves you preparing three-hour meals that break your budget and that the kids won't even eat.
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It's far too much to say that effective hoping is the only - or even the biggest - part of what it takes to succeed. If 14% of business productivity can be attributed to hope, that means 86% is dependent on raw talent, fickle business cycles, the quality of the product you're selling, and often pure, dumb luck.
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Never mind what you've heard. Halle Berry was not the first black woman to win an Academy Award for Best Actress. She was actually the 74th white one. And never mind all this talk about America electing its first black President; Barack Obama is actually the 44th white man to hold the job.
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A cockroach likely has no less brainpower than a butterfly, but we're quicker to deny it consciousness because it's a species we dislike.
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Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.
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Toxins love to get you while you're young. Lead, mercury, secondhand smoke and sundry other environmental nasties do a lot more damage when tissue is immature, vulnerable and growing than when it's mature and comparatively fixed.
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Indeed, the best way to think of willpower is not as some shapeless behavioral trait but as a sort of psychic muscle, one that can atrophy or grow stronger depending on how it's used.
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There are a lot of ways to make people not like you, but one of the most powerful - if least fair - is to be really, really successful. Nobody resents the guy who just lost his job. But the guy whose Internet start-up made him a billionaire at 25? That's a whole different kettle of envy.
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Suffering is always hard to quantify - especially when the pain is caused by as cruel a disease as Alzheimer's. Most illnesses attack the body; Alzheimer's destroys the mind - and in the process, annihilates the very self.
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A close family member once offered his opinion that I exhibit the phone manners of a goat, then promptly withdrew the charge - out of fairness to goats.
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As MBA professors endlessly tell their students, companies do best when they stick to what they do well. There's a reason Apple doesn't make blenders. There's a reason Haagen-Dazs doesn't sell meat. And there's a reason drug companies should focus on saving and improving lives - not jeopardizing them.
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The golden child may be the oldest one, unless it's the youngest. It may be the toughest one, unless it's the most sensitive. It's not even necessary that Mom and Dad have the same favorite - and typically they don't.
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Humans have a fraught relationship with beasts. They are our companions and our chattel, our family members and our laborers, our household pets and our household pests. We love them and cage them, admire them and abuse them. And, of course, we cook and eat them.
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There's no such thing as downtime for your brain.
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People with anxiety disorders such as OCD know that nothing can be more paralyzing than having too many options. Go to a store to buy a sweater, find four that you like and the odds are pretty good you'll stare and stare... and buy nothing at all.
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Kids are anarchy writ large.
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More and more NFL players have been willing their bodies to science so that their brains can be studied even if they die of other causes.
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No one ever pretended that shopping for anything is a rational experience. If it were, would there be Fluffernutter? Laceless sneakers? Porkpie hats? Would the Chia Pet even exist?
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For years now, Chinese parents and teachers have lamented what's known as the 'xiao huangdi' - or little emperor - phenomenon, a generation of pampered and entitled children who believe they sit at the center of the social universe because that's exactly how they've been treated.
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Operating-room errors hold a special terror for patients, if only because they seem like the most avoidable kind of complications. The occasional horror stories of patients who have the wrong leg removed or the wrong knee replaced generate the most headlines, as do tales of patients whose identities are mixed up entirely.
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All behavioral or mood disorders - including depression, OCD, ADHD and addiction - have some neurochemical components, but sufferers can still work to overcome them.
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Learning to speak was the most remarkable thing you ever did.
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When our culture shifts, it tends to overcorrect, throwing out everything associated with an era we've moved past, rather than saving what was good and combining it with what is new.