Category: ideas

“Like Malcolm Gladwell and David Brooks, Jonah Lehrer writes self-help for people who would be embarrassed to be seen reading it. For this reason, their chestnuts must be roasted in “studies” and given a scientific gloss. The surrender to brain science is particularly zeitgeisty. Their sponging off science is what gives these writers the authority that their readers impute to them, and makes their simplicities seem very weighty. Of course, Gladwell and Brooks and Lehrer rarely challenge the findings that they report, not least because they lack the expertise to make such a challenge.”

“The total proportion of population in 2011 who are internet users is 30 per cent (Internet World Stats 2011a). So if the internet is bringing the world together, it is primarily the affluent who are being brought into communion with each other. Most of the world’s poor are not part of this magic circle of ‘mutual understanding’.”

The caves in Lascaux aren’t just great art – they’re great film, as seen by paleolithic stone disks and flickering torchlight.

“In the 19th century, William Morris preached a social revolution in which exploitative ‘useless toil’ would be replaced by ‘useful work’. He dreamt of a world that would reject shoddy mass-produced goods in favour of objects made with care and craftsmanship. Any business that sells ‘artisanal’ goods, whether the goods be curtains or crumpets, is essentially quoting Morris and referring to his promise.” And so are these chocolatiers in sailboats.

“When people doll up declining linguistic standards as ‘cultural diversity’, they’re really making a virtue out of dumbness, turning illiteracy into just a variant form of literacy. It is insulting to assume that young people, especially poor young people, are incapable of mastering standard language, of conquering English and all its glorious complications, and so instead must be allowed to write ‘potatoe’ instead of ‘potato’.”

“The universe may have the same surreal geometry as some of art’s most mind-boggling images. That’s the upshot of a study by the world’s most famous living scientist, Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge.”

“We may start with Aristotle, who decided that ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’ and thus declared that there was no such thing as nothing, understood as absolute emptiness.” Theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser continues with Descartes (who agreed) and Newton (who completely disagreed) and on to Einstein and Heisenberg (of Uncertainty Principle fame).

Botanist Daniel Chamovitz argues that a plant “can see, smell and feel. It can mount a defense when under siege, and warn its neighbors of trouble on the way. A plant can even be said to have a memory. But does this mean that plants think – or that one can speak of a ‘neuroscience’ of the flower?”

“Frequent exposure to favorite melodies is a painless and ‘inexpensive way to help stroke patients cope with the adverse emotional and psychological impacts of stroke, as well as to support their cognitive recovery, especially in the early post-stroke stage,’ write the University of Helsinki’s Teppo Särkämö and David Soto of Imperial College London.”

“It turns out that whenever we are slightly bored–when reality isn’t quite enough for us–we begin exploring our own associations, contemplating counterfactuals and fictive scenarios that only exist within the head.”