Category: ideas

Researchers in the field are having a lively dispute over the question. Matthew Hutson lays out the arguments.

“It’s the simple, inspiring idea that when members of different groups – even groups that historically dislike one another – interact in meaningful ways, trust and compassion bloom naturally as a result, and prejudice falls by the wayside.” Jesse Singal offers an explication and a history of the concept.

“Distractions and interruptions are such a common part of our workdays, we don’t even think of them as excessive noise anymore. It’s often more obvious when we don’t hear the noise of distractions around us at work than when we do. A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that knowledge workers have focus periods of just 11 minutes on average in between interruptions.”

Daniel Dennett and others argue, genetic evolution is not enough to explain the skills, power and versatility of the human mind. Over the past 10,000 years, human behaviour and our ability to manipulate the planet have changed too quickly for biological evolution to have been the driving force. In Dennett’s view, our brains turned into fully fledged modern minds thanks to cultural memes: ‘ways of behaving’ — pronouncing a word this way, dancing like so — that can be copied, remembered and passed on.

“While all that instant gratification [that the internet and e-commerce provide] may be convenient, we are warned that it’s ruining a long-standing human virtue: the ability to wait. Well, it’s not waiting itself that’s a virtue; the virtue is self-control, and your ability to wait is a sign of just how much self-control you have.” Alexandra Samuel explains that it’s not really so straightforward.

You’ve been through it, or know someone who has. The two of you can’t choose from among the zillion end tables, or you can’t remember the name of the one you settled on, or you can’t make sense of the cartoon instructions … here’s an explanation of where the disagreements come from, and some tips on how to avoid the biggest dangers.

“Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence,” Musk told an audience at the World Government Summit in Dubai, where he also launched Tesla in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). “It’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output.”

Is quantum entanglement real, or is Einstein’s skepticism about quantum physics justified? Turns out that Einstein may be right. “The universe might be like a restaurant with 10 menu items, Friedman said. ‘You think you can order any of the 10, but then they tell you, ‘We’re out of chicken,’ and it turns out only five of the things are really on the menu. You still have the freedom to choose from the remaining five, but you were overcounting your degrees of freedom.'”

You can speed up YouTube videos, Audible books (this is especially useful for those ponderous history readers), podcasts and more. And maybe you should. “It’s a clever adaptation. In an age where more and more information arrives as multimedia, we’re reinventing the noble art of skimming.”

Sure, many of them are religious – but so are the medieval Christian ‘philosophers’ we study, including Thomas Aquinas. They believed in the Quran, but also “engaged in detailed disputes over such central philosophical issues as free will, atomism and the sources of moral responsibility, and debated such technicalities as the inherence of properties in substances, or the status of non-existing objects.”