Category: ideas

“Americans’ insecurity with the ticking clock was in some ways born out of the opportunities for growth and expansion that did not exist in other parts of the world. We worked harder and competed with one another because there was a chance for upward mobility. Other nations are now taking our lead.”

“The failure to solve it without resorting to religion or quasi-religious ‘intelligent design’ … strikes many observers as dangerous. Dangerous because it threatens the foundation of scientific rationalism and materialism. Dangerous because it disrupts one’s sense of any order in the universe and opens the floodgates of chaos.”

“A new study suggests that feelings of loneliness can spread through social networks like the common cold. ‘People on the edge of the network spread their loneliness to others and then cut their ties,’ says [a co-author of the new study]. … ‘It’s like the edge of a sweater: You start pulling at it and it unravels the network.'”

“People with the condition find it easy to interpret large images or scenes, but struggle to ‘spot the difference’ in fine detail. The finding hints at visual training as a possible treatment.”

“While the source of remembered information can be crucially important (Did I read that in The Onion or the daily newspaper?), so is its destination.” And yet we frequently don’t remember what we’ve already told to whom. Research suggests “that destination memory is relatively weak,” which “helps explain several embarrassing, and annoying, kinds of social interaction.”

Some biologists have come to the conclusion “that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help.”

“Patterns in brain activity can be used to determine whether someone is looking at a surrealist landscape by Salvador Dali or the cubist lines of Pablo Picasso.”

“Positive deviance” is “an approach to behavioral and social change. Instead of imposing solutions from without, the method identifies outliers in a community who, despite having no special advantages, are doing exceptionally well. By respecting local ingenuity, proponents say, the approach galvanizes community members and is often more effective and sustainable than imported blueprints.”

“What changes take place inside our head between kindergarten and second grade, when most of us start to take literacy for granted? How do we go from sounding out syllables, carefully parsing the phonetics of each word, to becoming fluent readers? And how does this incredibly complicated act become automatic, so that evn ths sntnce cn b quikly undrstd?”

“The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness. I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources–cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them–it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas.”