Category: ideas

“It used to be that a peach was a peach and a plum was a plum, and that was it. Now, however, breeders are coming up with complex hybrids between species, such as fruits that are a combination of peaches, apricots and plums, and cherries or nectarines and plums.”

Friend. Google. Text. Party. Chair. “It doesn’t matter whether they’re useful, interesting, or entertaining as verbs; to many people, if a word began its life as a noun, then ‘verbing’ it (like I did there) is just wrong. … The history of English, however, suggests that the language is remarkably flexible in terms of what can be verbed.”

It might seem self-evident (Noam Chomsky’s doctrine of “universal grammar” notwithstanding) that the way a language is used shapes how its users think. Recent research is revealing just how deeply this effect goes: grammar affects the way we perceive such basic things as spatial relationships and the passage of time.

Author Neil Howe “suggest[s] that throughout the 500-year span of Anglo-American history, a more or less predictable cycle has played out, a cycle in which generational types are in a certain stage of life at any given time.”

They use tools. They consider and change strategies in order to solve problems. They make mental maps of their surroundings. They play games with objects. Says one expert, “They make decisions all the time, complicated decisions. People don’t expect that from a creature related to an oyster.”

There’s a line of logic – we do what we do because of how we are; we are how we are because of heredity, early experiences and happenstance, none of which were under our control – which concludes that “ultimate, buck-stopping moral responsibility is impossible, because it requires ultimate responsibility for how one is.” So why do we (except for sociopaths) still feel morally responsible for what we do?

“Money is surprisingly bad at making us happy. Once we escape the trap of poverty, levels of wealth have an extremely modest impact on levels of happiness, especially in developed countries” – where there’s a fundamental, partly sunconscious belief “that dollars are delight in a fungible form.” Why is this? Perhaps because of the “experience-stretching hypothesis” …

A team of researchers has “found that these ‘tweets’ suggest that the west coast is happier than the east coast, and across the country happiness peaks each Sunday morning, with a trough on Thursday evenings. The team calls their work the ‘pulse of the nation’.”

“Scientists at the University of Freiburg, Germany, who previously showed people with depression struggled to detect black-and-white contrast differences, have now carried out tests on the retina which show the impact of the illness is similar to turning down the contrast control on a TV.”

“Observing the human animal in its natural habitat – the shopping mall – [researchers in a classic study] documented 1200 instances of laughter, and found that only 10 to 20 per cent of them were responses to anything remotely resembling a joke. Most laughter was in fact either triggered by a banal comment or used to punctuate everyday speech.”