Category: ideas

“Scientists … have spent the last few decades quietly building up a body of research into what they call ‘cryptophasia’ or ‘twin language,’ and they are of two minds about it. They find it fascinating, as a window onto the origins of human language, but they also worry that it hampers children’s development.”

“In normal circumstances, there is an internal relationship between what we do and the satisfactions that result. … You read the book, and the pleasure results from reading itself; it is not a state imposed on you by having read. With addiction, in contrast, the relationship between action and pleasure is … mere cause and effect; you press the button, the elevator goes up. There is no such thing as learning to press the button well.”

“A new paper from some Stanford neuroscientists argues that the function of sleep is to reorganize neural connections – a bit like a disk defrag for the brain – although it’s also a bit like compressing files to make more room, and a bit like a system reset.”

“When a bee flies into your garden, it doesn’t see what you and I see. Flowers leap out from much darker-looking leafy backgrounds, and they have ultraviolet-reflecting landing strips that show the way to the nectar.”

“Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price.”

Stop being so neurotic about avoiding spoilers, professors and film critics say. “What a spoiler does is enable you to get the plot out of the way and you can watch the thing unfold with greater attention to the cleverness, the beauty, the commentary on the human condition, the examination of a life.”

“In general, art and science seem to eye each other uncomprehendingly. … Can the divide ever be breached?”

“We should probably, after giving the thing a slow clap for its bold attempt to transform the Death of the Big Idea into a Big Idea of its own, just dismiss it as so much linkbaitery, and then get on with our (ever more trivial, ever more egotistical, ever more tweet-addled) lives. But the essay’s wrong, actually, in an interesting way.”

Spend a lot of time switching lanes during the commute? Your brain might not be able to resist three drinks and two pieces of pie later in the day. When humans have to make a lot of decisions, things go haywire. It’s called decision fatigue — and it’s hard-wired into our brains.

“You probably look in a mirror every day without thinking about it. But mirrors can reveal a great deal about the brain, with implications for psychology, clinical neurology and even philosophy. They can help us explore the way the brain puts together information from different sensory channels such as vision and somatic sensations (touch, muscle and joint sense).”