Category: ideas

“Think about how we all instinctively turned to artists to help interpret unthinkable events for us. It was our singers and musicians, our writers and poets that we, all of us everywhere, wanted to hear from. It was our artists that gave voice to our national agony and helped make the incomprehensible tolerable.”

“The void left by a dead mother used to be filled by an evil stepmother, but in recent years another figure has stepped in to take her place: the ‘perfect father.'”

“Parton’s skill at being many things to many people accounts for the diversity of her fan base, capacious enough to hold drag queens and the sorts of hard-core emotional supplicants depicted in the documentary For the Love of Dolly, as well as the more mainstream country fans who surrounded us at her parade, which kept going long after Parton had fled the scene.”

“Models and imaging provide the veneer of precision; they appear to be objective, quantifiable measures of the brain. Pictures of brain activity: You can’t get more scientific than that! We just look at where the brain lights up, and that tells us … what, exactly? And that’s the problem.”

“We are all cartographic obsessives these days. It’s great in some ways, but it also feeds into the unhealthy situation in which if we don’t know exactly where we are and where everything else is in relationship to us, we start prodding our screens and thinking something is amiss. This is profoundly disempowering, for it suggests that without constant expert advice, we would all be driving in circles or off cliffs.”

“Of course, for many, academic philosophy proves a disappointment – an endless slog to publish, the tedium and heartache of departmental politics, and a dismal job market that tends to people to far-flung college towns, far away from family and friends. So what is a budding philosopher to do?” Quite a bit, actually.

“Over time, humans have learned how, under certain conditions, to sit still and give someone or something undivided attention. Such learning, though, runs counter to who we instinctively are. We are hardwired to pick up the slightest distraction in our environment and to move toward or away from that distraction. The popularity of events such as Wimbledon and the World Cup reminds us that most of us feel far more at home in stadium culture—getting up, moving around, making noise, attending off and on—than in sanctuary culture.”

“Considering the many challenges life has to offer, entertaining yourself with your own thoughts for a few minutes seems like one of the easier hurdles to overcome. … But it turns out that people find this assignment incredibly hard. And, according to new research, they’ll even resort to giving themselves electric shocks to keep themselves entertained.”

“A research team led by neurologists Anne Bolwerk and Christian Maihofner reports “the production of visual art improves effective interaction” between certain regions of the brain.”

“You might suppose that a scientist motivated by a desire to discover facts and by a desire to achieve renown will do better work than a scientist motivated by just one of those desires. Surely two motives are better than one. But as we and our colleagues argue in a paper newly published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, instrumental motives are not always an asset and can actually be counterproductive to success.”