Category: ideas

“In recent years I have come to regard a commitment to the humanities as nothing less than an act of intellectual defiance, of cultural dissidence. For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method.”

“We’ve not given up make-believe. We want nothing more than to revive the fake prosperity that preceded the crash. Just like Gatsby, we want to return to a world that was conjured into being from dreams.”

“A beer garden made out of freight containers on an empty plot turns out to be a lot more popular and better for a city than a sad corporate atrium with a few cafe tables and a long list of don’ts on the wall.”

Researcher Gary Marcus explains how birds pick up the grammar of songs.

“In coming years, neuroscience will answer questions we don’t even yet know to ask. Sometimes, though, focus on the brain is misleading.”

“But secular Americans often think that the most important thing to understand about religion is why people believe in God, because we think that belief precedes action and explains choice. That’s part of our folk model of the mind: that belief comes first.”

“Recent attempts to explain how the universe came out of nothing… reveal conceptual confusion beneath mathematical sophistication. They demonstrate the urgent need for a radical re-examination of the invisible frameworks within which scientific investigations are conducted.”

“As we point out regularly here, correlation and causation are very different things. Newly published research concludes those differences reflect the types of kids who decide to participate in music, rather than anything that occurs in the practice room.”

“Happiness becomes less the high-energy, totally-psyched experience of a teenager partying while his parents are out of town, and more the peaceful, relaxing experience of an overworked mom who’s been dreaming of that hot bath all day. … It’s a different way of understanding what happiness is” – as psychologists put it, promotion motivation versus prevention motivation.

“A decade ago, few neuroscientists would have agreed that adults can rival the learning talents of children. But we needn’t be so defeatist. The mature brain, it turns out, is more supple than anyone thought. … Indeed, many researchers believe that an adult’s lifestyle may be the biggest obstacle.”