Sal Khan Quotes

The U.S. has spent billions of dollars on educating and supporting teachers or developing curricula but no resources are applied to 'improving the brain' that a student brings to the classroom.

It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning.

I've always been fascinated by intelligence and how our brains work, and how they can be improved.

I certainly believe that improving our intelligence is of important national interest.

Your brain - every brain - is a work in progress. It is 'plastic.' From the day we're born to the day we die, it continuously revises and remodels, improving or slowly declining, as a function of how we use it.

Just as physical exercise is a well-known and well-accepted means to improve health for anyone, regardless of age or background, so can the brain be put 'into shape' for optimal learning.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

There is this mythology that says that when people are born, their brains are essentially fixed very early on and they're not able to change their connections. I was aware that was a myth and that people could learn new skills.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise.

How we learn has nothing to do with how brilliant we are.

Mediums change you by their very existence. They do this on fundamental levels because they force you to favour certain parts of your brain over others.

Children love this idea that their brain is like a muscle that gets stronger as they use it.

I am an apologist for the reading brain. It represents a miracle that springs from the brain's unique capacity to rearrange itself to learn something new.

Reading requires the brain to rearrange its original parts to learn something new.

Do you think it is possible to increase your intellectual ability? For decades, I have studied the power of this belief to become reality and watched as the concept of maintaining a 'growth mindset' has taken root in education and parenting circles.

There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain's protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way.

Your mind grows through use.

Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.

Neuroplasticity research showed that the brain changes its very structure with each different activity it performs, perfecting its circuits so it is better suited to the task at hand.

I think it's good to stimulate your mind.

For the mind is all the easier to teach before it is set.

All of imagination - everything that we think, we feel, we sense - comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape.

IQ in general has improved since tests first began. Psychologists think that this is because modern life becomes ever more complicated.