From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Our brain was designed for survival and was developed in the 99.9% of human history that occurred before culture and civilisation. As a result, there are situations in our lives today where the brain doesn't work so-well. We call this an emotional hijack.
In comparing alternative explanations, it is not necessarily the one with the most evidence apparently in its favour that we should choose but the one with least evidence against it. One solid piece of evidence can demolish a hypothesis.
The only way for you to discover something new is to acknowledge the ocean of ignorance in which you are just an island. Experts have a problem with that – they want to get prizes, and get recognised by their colleagues and peers as being very smart.
A particular individual trait that has piqued my interest through research is intellectual humility. Embracing the possibility of being wrong enhances the likelihood of being right—a somewhat magical paradox. This notion dovetails with the scientific ethos, where the quest isn't about proving oneself right.
The iron in the haemoglobin in your blood was cooked up in the heart of a massive star that blew up about 8 billion years ago. We understand now in pretty good detail, how intimately connected we are with the cosmos.
There's no way electrical signals alone can produce the sensation of taste. That's the hard problem of consciousness: qualia—the sensations and feelings through which we know the world and ourselves—bear no resemblance to electrical impulses, and physics offers no explanation for how one could give rise to the other.
You can think of the human mind as a measuring instrument. We're making judgements all the time and studies show that on a day-to-day basis, when presented with the same evidence, our judgements may be different. If you see the mind as a measuring instrument, you start to see it as a scale, a bafflingly variable and noisy scale.
I grew up in the age of space exploration, reading Asimov, Le Guin and Clarke, getting lost in the worlds they had created which were littered with aliens, robots and AI. For me, I think it was a combination of Star Trek, far too much Asimov and the niggling question of understanding ourselves better through computing technologies.
It forces you to confront the fact that we know almost nothing about the true nature of reality. Whatever image you have of what's real or possible is obliterated in an instant. You're faced with a world that isn't just strange, but so utterly incomprehensible that it transcends imagination.
Music can help us heal and achieve therapeutic outcomes by tapping into various neurochemical circuits that influence mood and behaviour. Ours was the first lab to show that listening to music releases the brain's natural pain relievers—opioids. Relaxing music can modulate prolactin, a soothing, tranquilizing hormone. Music also releases dopamine which helps us to focus and motivates us to stay on task.
The scale of our damage on the animal world is unimaginable. We inflict pain and suffering on wild and domestic animals. We take away their wild lands and habitats, we use them to test our medicines and they're affected by climate change, pollution and many other aspects of our world.
There's so much data that's been collected around fitness, but a lot of this has been based on male subjects and isn't always right to apply to women. Having been through the journey myself, I want to help more women become body-literate and motivated to enjoy exercise.