Category: ideas

“Scientists from the University of Oxford have shown that they can improve a person’s math abilities for up to six months. The research could help treat the nearly 20 percent of the population with moderate to severe dyscalculia (math disability), and could probably aid students in other subjects as well.”

Alva Noë: “Your brain is not the thing inside you that thinks and feels. Not because something immaterial does this work for you, but because nothing does. Thinking and feeling is not something that happens in you, not in your brain, or anywhere else. Consciousness is something you achieve. It is something you do.”

“Most of the cognitive illusions out there have been created by magicians. So we can really benefit a lot by using their insights and learning their techniques to accelerate discovery in cognitive neuroscience.”

“There’s a desire to have a physical token of a wish. It’s tangible, and if it worked for someone else, you think it’s more likely to work for you. It has a track record. … It lifts your beliefs in your own capabilities, and gives you a boost.”

“Newly published research suggests [the two] serve the same psychological function. A sense of political stability provides comforting reassurance that our world is orderly and controlled. So does belief in an all-powerful deity. This puts the two in a seesaw relationship: When one goes up, the other goes down.”

As part of a photographer Steve Pyke’s two-decade-long project taking portraits of philosophers, a dozen of the breed – from Kwame Anthony Appiah to Slavoj Zizek – give brief(-ish) statements of what attracted them to their discipline.

“Today, the problems associated with risk and uncertainty are constantly being amplified and, courtesy of our own imaginations, are turned into existential threats. Consequently, it is rare for unexpected natural events to be treated as just that; rather, they are swiftly dramatised and transformed into a threat to human survival.”

“Most people don’t know the basic scientific facts about happiness–about what brings it and what sustains it–and so they don’t know how to use their money to acquire it. … Money is an opportunity for happiness, but it is an opportunity that people routinely squander because the things they think will make them happy often don’t.”

“An aerotropolis is a city of the 21st century, built around a runway in roughly the same way that historic cities grew up around water or rail lines, with a close-in network of businesses, an outer loop of service industries, and suburbs full of homes.”

“Can people strengthen the brain circuits associated with happiness and positive behavior, just as we’re able to strengthen muscles with exercise?” Neuroscientist Richard Davidson and colleagues insist that we can, and he’s got the brain scans to back him up.