Category: ideas

“One finds the word frequently in private letters, public newspapers, and on crooked headstones in churchyards from the period. To judge without prejudice, to observe without inclination, to weigh the ‘facts’ (another 18th century word) without placing a thumb on the scale – this was a measure of greatness.”

“We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows.”

“The net result is a society of winners as whiners, where people who are not only doing fine but doing much better relative to the median than they were a generation ago nonetheless feel left behind.”

“‘Attention Restoration Theory’ or ART, which posits that a walk in the woods helps refocus the mind and revive the spirit, has been a growing field of research for the past 20 years. New studies are quantifying the restorative powers of nature and suggesting how the restorative process works.”

Neurologist Kevin Nelson: “But what generally happens is the pleasure system of the brain is engaged. This happens with spiritual experiences in general. … The dopamine reward system seems to be activated when a person believes they are near death, and the REM system, counterintuitively, is also activated.”

“[The public] allure of many neuroscience studies is that they can be made to offer ‘deceptively simple messages’ about human behavior. … [That] spiritual feelings can be localized to specific parts of the brain is important to neuroscientists. But how important is it to you? Put another way, is it really surprising that religious and spiritual feelings occur in the brain?”

“As every student used to know, just choosing and copying passages from one’s own reading is an excellent way of mastering a subject. But in earlier times, when individual books were scarce and expensive, students and preachers, princes and philosophers often turned to digests and compendia – the equivalent of the Encyclopaedia Britannica or “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” – for much of their knowledge.”

There are well-conducted studies that show that, for example, exposing a child to a violent videogame, leads to an increased likelihood of aggressive behaviors. So why has violent crime been going down?

“Google’s prototype language translator, Conversation Mode, uses Android phones to record spoken words and then play them back in a different language.”

“While dopamine normally helps us feel the pleasure of eating or having sex, it also helps produce euphoria from illegal drugs. It’s active in particular circuits of the brain. The tie to dopamine helps explain why music is so widely popular across cultures.”