Category: ideas

Arab astrophysicist Nidhal Guessoum talks about what has held back scientific advancement in the Arab/Muslim world since the great achievements of the Midde Ages – singling out fundamentalists and authoritarian governments and arguing that “Islamic culture has never seen any serious conflict between science and religion.”

“[An] emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us … and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking.”

“No one denies that Hinduism’s most sacred and ancient texts, including the Bhagavad Gita, describe different kinds of yogic practices. But what does this ancient and sacred tradition of yoga have to do with what people all around the world do in yoga classes in gyms and fitness centres today?”

“Despite all the heady social theorizing of Clay Shirky and the Wired set, the web has not, in fact, abolished the conventions of market value or rewritten the rules of productivity and worker reward. It has, rather, merely sent the rewards further down the fee stream to unscrupulous collectors like Chris Anderson.”

“Is cool-headedness born, people wanted to know, or is it made? … Poise under pressure, it turns out, does indeed have a strong genetic component – yet our poise is mostly the result of what we do to build it up throughout our lives.”

Researchers have identified a 23-year-old man named Mathieu “as the first documented case of beat deafness, a condition in which a person can’t feel music’s beat or move in time to it.”

“In the brains of people blind from birth, structures used in sight are still put to work – but for a very different purpose. Rather than processing visual information, they appear to handle language. Linguistic processing is a task utterly unrelated to sight, yet the visual cortex performs it well.”

The role of Facebook and Twitter among young people “reminds me a bit of how Homer’s poetry defined, to a large extent, what it meant to be Greek in the 7th century BCE: myths unite people, and the power of social networking has now mythic force. To be young is to know how to connect via Facebook and Twitter, is to understand the new digital code of conduct and live by it.”

“Suppose we found that computers are diminishing our capacity for certain pleasures, or making us worse off in other ways. Why couldn’t we simply spend less time in front of the screen and more time doing the things we used to do before computers came along – like burying our noses in novels? Well, it may be that computers are affecting us in a more insidious fashion than we realise.”

Astrphysicist Adam Frank: “For the last 500 years humanity has suffered one humiliation after another at the hands of the cosmos. … Well today, my friends, I am here to tell you that Copernicus, or at least a reflexive Copernicanism, is wrong.”