Category: ideas

“[M]otivations for fire-setting behavior are notoriously slippery, and labeling someone properly as a pyromaniac is no easy task for psychiatric investigators. What separates ‘normal’ childhood experimentation from the serious cases … still isn’t entirely clear.”

“Researchers have known for decades that residents of densely populated areas have higher rates of mental illnesses, including anxiety disorders and schizophrenia. But do the brains of city dwellers function any differently from those of rural folk? Studies are showing that they do.”

“The artistic and literary scene that flourished paradoxically under censorship and repression has died off. … The people of Central Europe traded in ideas for groceries and for not being beaten to death by the police. No one could possibly blame them, but at the same time, Havel and the other leaders had no sense of the true cost of democracy.”

“That [would be] a bit like saying that eating is a phenomenon of the stomach. The stomach is an important part of the story. But don’t forget the mouth, the intestines, the blood, and don’t forget the hunger, and also the whole socially-sustained practice of producing, shopping for and cooking food.”

“We have always considered ourselves the gold standard of intelligence, but it’s time to give up the notion that our brains are the benchmark.” Some researchers are working on a “universal intelligence test” that would correct for a pro-human bias.

“While religion is a popular motif for describing national or international strife, a closer look suggests that’s really just a veneer for less spiritual issues.”

“When Moses received the Ten Commandments, ‘[A]ll the people perceived the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the voice of the horn, and the mountain smoking.’ Could this be because all the people themselves were themselves smoking – or otherwise consuming – a hallucinogen (or hallucinogens)?”

“If, as Dan Savage suggests, we’re not cut out for monogamy as a species, we’re not alone here. Quite the reverse. Scarcely a month goes by without some creature, once thought to be a heart-warming example of lifelong fidelity, being exposed as a serial philanderer.”

“All this stuff was way beyond surrealism. It was deliberately indiscriminate weirdness: the ordinary was made to seem in some way excessively other, like stage props for a chaotic rather than reasoned reality. It was almost pose-modern.”

“People spend more time playing doubles than watching it for a reason. It parallels too closely the struggles of our own lives: working with others; toiling in the shadows; getting second billing. Not getting paid enough. Maybe we don’t watch doubles because we are all doubles players.”