Maria Konnikova Quotes

It's easier to learn things for life by the age of 12 and not the age of 18. This is just my guess.

Children are a lot smarter than we give them credit for.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

I always wonder: the images that hit your brain when you're young are so significant, because there's not that much information in your brain. As you get older, things just bounce off. I can remember these minute details of stupid TV shows from the '70s, and I can't remember a book I read yesterday.

Language was a huge expansion of that capacity to deal with information.

Children take in more information than we'd like to believe.

Children are very smart, in their own stupid way. A child's brain is like a sponge, and you know how smart sponges are.

The years from about eight to twelve constitute a unique period of human life.

I think much of what you learn as a kid comes before age seven.

Hottest space that I think is interesting would be education, particularly, like, ages 3-10.

A problem of future research is to clarify how young children learn what type of social comparative information is most useful for efficacy evaluation

Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren't just what we're taught. It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?

Interestingly, the British government announced a few weeks ago that they were going to introduce 500 educational targets for preschool children. And teachers complained that “when are the children going to have time to play?” Well, they’re not supposed to play, because play is a right-brain, ad-lib, creative pursuit. The idiot politicians who are introducing it don’t understand this, but the shadow-people from which it is generated certainly do. They want to stimulate the left brain as early as possible.

The development of the child during the first three years after birth is unequaled in intensity and importance by any period that precedes or follows in the whole life of the child.

I have also considered many scientific plans during my pushing you around in your pram!

How children learn to use diverse sources of efficacy information in developing a stable and accurate sense of personal efficacy is a matter of considerable interest

It is a strong proof of men knowing most things before birth, that when mere children they grasp innumerable facts with such speed as to show that they are not then taking them in for the first time, but are remembering and recalling them.

If we allow our one-and-a-half year old to "help" us fold laundry he will learn something about buttons, zippers, snaps, where things go, the physical properties of cloth, what happens when you drop it, how easy or hard it is to carry compared with everything else he has ever carried, what clean clothes smell like, how a big towel can turn into a small bundle, how the small bundle you just folded can turn into a big towel again, plus any songs we care to sing or stories or related or unrelated facts we care to pass on.

There is in the child a special kind of sensitivity which leads him to absorb everything about him, and it is this work of observing and absorbing that alone enables him to adapt himself to life

I believe that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed.

One of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is high-quality early education.

Those who grew up digital have different brains.

We spend the early years feeding our brains with information and the latter half trying not to think about it all.

Great changes in the destiny of mankind can be effected only in the minds of little children.

The most important period of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six.