Category: ideas

“As we embark on a new year, many people are undoubtedly beginning new eating regimens in the name of slimmer waistlines. But as they wrestle with the diet du jour, perhaps it’s worth taking a lesson from the methods of the past.”

“Common understandings of memory centrally involve the idea that memories are unreliable, fickle and capricious. But there is another belief about memory that has been articulated by many figures in memory research: that in some fundamental way, secreted within us are perfect records of past experiences, even if we might never access them consciously.”

“A study from the Netherlands finds allowing ideas to incubate in the back of the mind is, in a narrow sense, overrated. People who let their unconscious minds take a crack at a problem were no more adept at coming up with innovative solutions than those who consciously deliberated over the dilemma.”

“The processes leading to that flash of insight [when you figure out a clue] can illuminate many of the human mind’s curious characteristics. Crosswords can reflect the nature of intuition, hint at the way we retrieve words from our memory, and reveal a surprising connection between puzzle solving and our ability to recognise a human face.”

“Within 15 minutes of hearing the lecture, all the students took a multiple-choice quiz featuring questions based on the lecture material. The results: the students who heard the music-enhanced lecture scored significantly higher on the quiz than those who heard the music-free version.”

Harvard researcher David Weinberger: “In the West, knowledge begins as a winnowing process. … That idea … not by coincidence fits perfectly with the paper medium that we used for it. Paper is expensive, libraries are small, very few people can get published. … In the digital age we filter forward instead of filtering out. As a result, all that material is still available to us and to others to filter in their own ways, and to bring forward in other contexts.”

“Despite our increasing reliance on the mechanical measurement of time to structure our lives, many of us find some part of us resisting it. We find it confining, too rigid perhaps to suit our natural states, and long for that looser structure of the medieval village (while retaining our modern comforts and medical advances, of course). What is behind this resistance?”

“Small, illegal, off-the-books businesses collectively account for trillions of dollars in commerce and employ fully half the world’s workers. Further, these enterprises are critical sources of entrepreneurialism, innovation, and self-reliance.”

“Should brain images be admitted as evidence in court? Could they be used to defend someone with an abnormality, such as a brain tumor, which might impair judgment? Those in the legal professors are very interested in developments in neuroscience.”

“In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.”