Category: ideas

“Our usual ideological responses to reminders of death—to cling more tightly to the comforting components of religion, and to “double down on your group values” by denigrating a critical outsider—were far less pronounced when one specific region of the brain was largely de-activated.”

“The basic idea behind tipping, of course, is that service workers are getting rewarded for doing a good job, but the science simply doesn’t back this up. There’s decades’ worth of consumer-psychology research demonstrating that tipping hardly improves service at all.”

“To approach someone else convincingly you must do so with open arms and head held high, and your arms can’t be open unless your head IS high. … The key word is reciprocity.”

“Almost a century ago, a fad for sleep-learning swept the industrialised world, ending only after neuroscientists determined it was physiologically impossible. Yet today, a growing body of research suggests they were wrong. Sleep-learning appears to be heading for a revival, on a far more solid scientific basis than its earlier incarnation.”

“With each post, each tap of the screen, each drag and click, I am becoming a different person — solitary where I was once gregarious; a content provider where I at least once imagined myself an artist; nervous and constantly updated where I once knew the world through sleepy, half-shut eyes; detail-oriented and productive where I once saw life float by like a gorgeously made documentary film.”

“By the end of the 20th century, the humanities departments in universities had become closed enclaves. The writing of scholars in these disciplines had grown increasingly dense and jargon-filled, inaccessible to anyone without years of graduate study. For some academics, this enforced isolation became stifling. They sought new forms of expression. Thus literary theorists Wendy Steiner, Frank Lentricchia and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have turned to opera librettos, mystery novels and PBS documentaries.”

Miswanting. “It’s the name for the scrambled logic behind our wants, and our tendency to poorly align those wants with what we’ll actually enjoy.”

“To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had … you wanted someone, you felt deprived of something, and then it seems to be there. … It is as if, oddly, you were waiting for someone but you didn’t know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want.”

“[We’re] in the midst of a great cultural identity migration. Gender roles are merging. Races are being shed. In the last six years or so, but especially in 2015, we’ve been made to see how trans and bi and poly-ambi-omni- we are. … There’s a sense of fluidity and permissiveness and a smashing of binaries. We’re all becoming one another. Well, we are. And we’re not.”