Category: ideas

“VARK, which stands for ‘Visual, Auditory, Reading, and Kinesthetic,’ sorts students into those who learn best visually, through aural or heard information, through reading, or through ‘kinesthetic’ experiences. … Experts aren’t sure how the concept spread, but it might have had something to do with the self-esteem movement of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Everyone was special – so everyone must have a special learning style, too. … [But] a lot of evidence suggests that people aren’t really one certain kind of learner or another.”

“Some say the gap—between nerve cells and life, the brain and the mind, objective reality and the subjective—will never be understood, because such understanding is beyond our human capacity. But I think it is possible to answer the question of how the brain becomes the mind. We just need to change our thinking.”

Julia F. Christensen, a neuroscientist at the The Warburg Institute at the University of London who studies people’s responses to dance choreography, argued that many of us have been turned into “mindless pleasure junkies, handing over our free will for the next dopamine shoot” provided by social media, pornography and sugar. She offered up an unconventional solution: art, which she says engages us in ways these other pleasures do not and can “help overwrite the detrimental effects of dysfunctional urges and craving.”

“There are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs. But they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.”

The reference to modern physics reminds us of a commonly cited fact – that philosophy came first and gave birth to science – that could in its own way seem to delegitimise or quickly answer the progress question. Didn’t philosophy lose its truth-related raison d’être after that generous act, having handed the baton to the sciences? Haven’t all the questions in its textbooks gradually migrated into scientific textbooks? Actually, not so.

Just because an academic field is timeless doesn’t mean it should never change. If the humanities are ever to enjoy a true resurgence, it will come as a result of a reinvention that embraces a fresh new take on old disciplines.

Natasha Jen of Pentagram: “Design thinking embodies our obsession with prescription. … We crave prescriptions and mythology in general – as a profession and as a society. … Prescriptions create a kind of prison, in terms of how we can think about things and how we work. But a very linear methodology-based way of working completely removes other possibilities.”

Khoi Vinh of Adobe: “Design thinking has a lot of downsides. It can be very superficial. It can be very misleading and the outcomes that it produces can be disappointing. It can lead to bad design. But it offers a useful lesson on how designers think about democratization of our craft.”