Category: ideas

A 17th-century thought experiment asks “about a person, blind from birth, who could tell apart a cube and a sphere by touch: If his vision were restored and he was presented with the same cube and sphere, would he be able to tell which was which by sight alone?” Dr. Pawan Sinha, who has organized sight-restoring surgery for hundreds of blind children in India, has an answer.

Adam Gopnik: “The best argument for reading history is not that it will show us the right thing to do in one case or the other, but rather that it will show us why even doing the right thing rarely works out. … What history generally ‘teaches’ is how hard it is for anyone to control it, including the people who think they’re making it.”

“When scientists have studied procrastination, they’ve typically focused on how people are miserable at weighing costs and benefits across time. … In the last few years, however, scientists have begun to think that procrastination might have less to do with time than emotion.” As one researcher says, “To tell the chronic procrastinator to just do it would be like saying to a clinically depressed person, cheer up.”

“As the rest of the society, from business and economics to journalism and art, wakes up to the power of big data, the world of research is, ironically, not doing nearly enough to embrace the power of information. A big-data mindset involves more than having a lot of petabytes on your hard drive, and science is falling short in three main areas.”

“The Internet does make it easier to gather – aggregate, as the jargon goes – information, but not necessarily to make sense of it. An overabundance of raw information devoid of context and interpretation can actually be detrimental to knowledge. Knowledge springs from the act – the art – of interpreting, digesting, and integrating new information with our existing understanding of the world.”

“Your alarm goes off on your phone, and instead of turning it off or hitting snooze, you pick it up and stupidly say, ‘Hello?’ You are, to use the technical term, in the throes of sleep drunkenness.”

Adam Gopnik looks at walking to be alone, walking to be with others, “contemplative country hikers and argumentative city schleppers” and flâneurs – and looks back to a time when endurance walking was a wildly popular spectator sport.

“All things being equal, a bunch of research has shown, the purchase of experiences appears to bring more happiness than the purchase of things.” A new paper suggests that “we also derive more pleasure from anticipating experiences than material objects … and offers a useful hint about how to ‘hack’ your purchases of experiences to maximize your enjoyment of them.”

“When you get stuck, you’ve run out of ideas, distraction is really your best friend. You need to stand up, let it go — walk around the block, go to the cafe, drink a beer, whatever it is — and that is really your best shot at loosening the gears a little bit.”