Category: ideas

Though most people in couples won’t admit it, especially to other people, sleep is by nature a solitary activity, and most of us do it better alone. But there are good reasons that humans do, and always have, slept in pairs or even groups.

“By and large, when it comes time to choose, the impulsive, unreflective parts of the brain dominate the analytic parts. Or to put it differently, adults are a lot more like children than we might care to admit.”

“As computers become more powerful and pervasive, our standards shift. Fifty years from now, a soccer-learning, header-calling, wise-cracking machine might seem more like a party trick than a thinking being.”

“Many people correctly solved more problems if the previous person had a high score rather than a low one. But, crucially, this effect was found only for a specific subset of individuals: Those who (a) tended to process information in an intuitive, System 1 way, and (b) actually touched the paper that had allegedly been handled by the previous test-taker.”

“No one publicly celebrates the virtues of balancing one’s books and of audits with great art or gripping characters. Occasionally an accounting hero emerges, bringing a billion-dollar loss to light, but few people appreciate it, as the Dutch did, as a profound moral advance in business and public affairs.”

“Alan Turing’s vision, while resonant, has proved ill-suited to the online world. With even crude spambots fooling humans every day, his test now seems more to do with human gullibility than machine smarts.”

“My first question, then, was how soccer affects the life of a country. My second was how the life of a country affects its soccer.” (Yes, even ArtsJournal will glom onto the World Cup.)

“Quick Quiz: Which of the following are signs of introversion? Highly sensitive. Deep Thinker. Reflective. Introspective. Intelligent. Negative emotions. Socially Anxious. Defensive. Vulnerable. Always prefers solitude over social interaction. Answer: Not a single one.”

Researchers at the University of Minnesota “found that rats expressed regret through both their behavior and their neural activity. Those signals … were specific to situations the researchers set up to induce regret, which led to specific neural patterns in the brain and in behavior.”