Category: ideas

“When people plan a route based on their mental representation, they have to form a sequence of these landmarks, and follow this plan by reaching landmark after landmark. When people use navigation systems, they don’t do this planning any longer. … Basically, people don’t really learn their environments.”

Set your deadlines now. That “doesn’t mean right this second, but it does mean now, as in this month, this year, or whatever time-frame feels most like the present rather than the future.”

“There are dozens of better options out there, but this one is cheap, easy, and we know what we’re getting. It doesn’t challenge, inspire, or ask anything of us at all beyond our fleeting attention span. We know there are better things out there.”

“Not certainty but the kind of uncertainty that encourages us all to struggle with our convictions to some point of moral balance, played its part in engaging me emotionally with the past.”

“Most of the rest of the world shrugged. But conservatives noticed, and they were furious. The framework, resolved the Republican National Committee, is a ‘radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.'”

“Now is not the time to compare yourself to others. Personally, I have found that spending too much time reading about the fantastic lives and careers of my friends and colleagues, as presented on Facebook, makes me feel boring and inadequate. If it makes you feel similar, take a break from it.”

“If you have just finished nagging your partner over housework, be sure to praise him five times very soon. Couples who went on to get divorced had four negative comments to three positive ones. Sickeningly harmonious couples displayed a ratio of about 20:1.”

“If you don’t know it already, you should: Many crosswalk and elevator door-close buttons don’t actually work as advertised. … Similarly, the progress bars presented on computer screens during downloads … maintain virtually no connection to the actual amount of time left … But these examples offer only a hint of what we’re liable to see in the near future. … Perhaps now is a good time to ask: How deceitful should our new technologies be?”

“If you have ever felt markedly stupider after a long period of sleep deprivation, a new study may hint at a reason. Years of sleep difficulties seem to be associated with a brain that shrinks in size over time, according to a new paper published online today in Neurology.”

“Part of the difficulty with discussing the effects of Internet use is that there are many ways to use the Internet, and there are many ways for it to have an effect – from how we conduct our relationships to how we think, to how our brains are wired up.”