Category: ideas

“When you’re trying to be creative, the last thing you need is some sharp-tongued supervisor demeaning your efforts, right? Actually, that may be just the thing you need” – according to some recently published researched from South Korea.

Requiring individual arts organizations to reframe their need for resources in terms of “innovation” is not innovative; it is really just asking them to find new language for the same requests.

“We should guide our future attention not on the basis of the scariest stories or loudest pressure groups, but on objective assessments of where we can do the most good.”

“Using a tablet as a portable radio is by far the best way to access the internet’s vast archive of free literary audio.”

“When we find data that supports our hopes we appear to get a dopamine rush similar to the one we get if we eat chocolate, have sex or fall in love.”

“The shift began in the 18th century when the old patronage system–by which artists were supported by members of the royal court–gave way to the marketplace economy, and artists began being paid by printers and booksellers.”

“It reorients our attention and says, okay, if I’m being rejected from a group, how do I need to change my behavior or what I say or think in order to not be excluded or rejected from that group? It teaches me lessons about how to behave differently in the future.”

“The idea of the selfie is much more like your face is the caption and you’re trying to explain a moment or tell a story.”

“Even when flawed research does not put people’s lives at risk–and much of it is too far from the market to do so–it squanders money and the efforts of some of the world’s best minds. The opportunity costs of stymied progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising.”

The explanation by researchers from Johns Hopkins University “rests on the premise that memories are transformed each time we revisit them. … Every reactivation re-encodes the memory, and depending on what cortical neurons are engaged, can strengthen, weaken or update particular memory features.”