Author Profile
Jeffrey Kluger
1954 • American • Writer
63
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 63 quotesIndeed, 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.— Jeffrey Kluger
When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.— Jeffrey Kluger
You do not want to talk to me on the phone. How do I know? Because I don't want to talk to you on the phone. Nothing personal, I just can't stand the thing. I find it intrusive and somehow presumptuous. It sounds off insolently whenever it chooses and expects me to drop whatever I'm doing and, well, engage. With others!— Jeffrey Kluger
In both children and adults, there can be a hard-to-deny link between a robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement.— Jeffrey Kluger
There's a sort of sibling moratorium when you're establishing yourself as an adult. So much of your energy has to be focused on other things like work and kids. But when people become more settled, siblings tend to regroup because now you're building a new extended family.— Jeffrey Kluger
Part-black generally means all-black in Americans' minds. Just as part-Asian or part-Hispanic or part-anything-else usually puts individuals in those minority-groups' camps.— Jeffrey Kluger
Every batch of sperm represents an opportunity for genetic typos - called de novo mutations - to be passed on. A 20-year-old man and woman will each pass on about 20 de novo mutations to a baby they conceive. By the time the couple is 40, a woman's total has remained at 20, while a man's has jumped to 65 - and it keeps climbing from there.— Jeffrey Kluger
Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.— Jeffrey Kluger
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.— Jeffrey Kluger
All behavioral or mood disorders - including depression, OCD, ADHD and addiction - have some neurochemical components, but sufferers can still work to overcome them.— Jeffrey Kluger
It's one of the worst-kept secrets of family life that all parents have a preferred son or daughter, and the rules for acknowledging it are the same everywhere: The favored kids recognize their status and keep quiet about it - the better to preserve the good thing they've got going and to keep their siblings off their back.— Jeffrey Kluger
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.— Jeffrey Kluger
Is there anything sadder than the foods of the 1950s? Canned, frozen, packaged concoctions, served up by the plateful, three meals per day, in an era in which the supermarket was king, the farmer's market was, well, for farmers, and the word 'locavore' sounded vaguely like a mythical beast.— Jeffrey Kluger
If you're an older sibling and you have a younger sibling who needs mentoring or is afraid of the dark, you develop nurturing and empathic skills that you wouldn't otherwise have.— Jeffrey Kluger
A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can't therefore argue that the net doesn't exist. Just ask the fish.— Jeffrey Kluger
Humans are crude linguists from the moment of birth - and perhaps even in the womb - to the extent at least that we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognize different combinations of language sounds.— Jeffrey Kluger