Category: ideas

“The paradox of this bias against creativity lies in the fact that creativity — along with its close cousin innovation — is frequently celebrated in business as a most desired organizational trait. Reports of management excellence from McKinsey to KPMG state that creativity among the workforce is a basic requirement for long-term business success. Why then does the organizational immune system kick into high gear whenever exposed to the very thing it needs to survive?”

Even astronomer Phil Plait finds the physics a bit confounding, but here – complete with animated cartoons – is the explanation he’s gotten from his buddy Sean Carroll, a cosmologist. (Basically, it’s all about entropy.)

“If you’ve ever been befuddled by a dream, take heart: You’re following a 4,000-year tradition of confusion. Over that time, humanity – in the form of religion, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience – has actually come to somewhat understand what exactly the mind is doing in its slumbering states. To that end, here are five of the leading theories for what dreams are and what they do to us.”

“In this study, researchers asked people their preferred way of taking in new information: Would they rather read? Or do images seem to do a better job of helping new facts take root within their brains? The researchers then showed them 30 pairs of words and 30 pairs of images; later, the experimenters tested how well the volunteers remembered those words and images. Their professed favorite learning style made no difference in how well they remembered either the words or the pictures.”

“If one progresses at the current rate of technology a few decades into the future, very quickly we will be a society where there are artificial entities living in simulations that are much more abundant than human beings.”

“Rats in experiments solve mazes without the words ‘Remember that left turn.’ So why do human brains so often rely on language in order to reason and remember? [Research psychologist Charles] Fernyhough has an answer in mind.”

“You might find it easier to pick up Chinese, but you might also remember more acutely all the disappointments and traumas that you’d prefer to forget.”

Blame Wilkie Collins, but also, “a cynical interpretation would be that it is a thriller that an intelligent person is happy to be seen reading. Hawkins’s novel gained a place on Barack Obama’s summer reading list, thereby endorsed as the thinking person’s page-turner. A couple of years ago it was Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, also made into a glossy and violent film, that successfully filled this niche.”

“It’s not surprising that ambitious changes like these would be hard to implement. After all, teaching kids to adopt a scientific mindset is a subtler and more complex task than having them memorize the parts of a cell. For one thing, it requires teachers who inhabit that mindset themselves, and they’re harder to find.”