From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes...
Music ties into memory in two ways. First, music itself can be tremendously impactful, so we remember it — and we also remember everything happening around us when we heard it.
Our brains actively construct a model of the world, which is our actual experience. Incoming sensory data serves mainly to verify and correct this internal model.
Sensory data by itself is not red, it's not anything. It's just energy. Sensory signals don't come with labels attached. Redness is coming from within my brain, as a way of predicting how certain patterns of light appear.
The real culprit behind the sickness often goes unnoticed: it's the disruption to our circadian rhythm caused by traveling across time zones. Our bodies are designed to operate on a natural rhythm.
In the spring, when we lose an hour of sleep, we observe a consequential 24% increase in heart attacks the following day. In the Autumn, when we gain an hour, we see a corresponding 21% reduction in heart attacks.
Once you land, it's total excitement, 'I'm on the Moon!' – you're bubbling with enthusiasm like a little kid on holiday.
You have this very activist sociology rather than a dispassionate or objective sociology informing a broadly humanist framework of caring about flourishing versus suffering. When your sociology has decided that the point of studying society is to change it, you've got a problem.
So far from being a separate evolutionary lineage with deep roots, we humans were in fact embedded within the great ape family. Humans are now, strictly speaking, firmly ensconced within the chimpanzee family.
A true pet's value lies entirely in its relationship with us, and vice versa. The first fossil evidence of that bond goes back around 30,000 to 40,000 years: dogs buried with humans, including one remarkable case of a dog that had survived two bouts of canine distemper, presumably because its human companion cared for it.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about demography and one of the biggest misunderstandings is that it's destiny. If it's destiny, it is not that interesting to study, but it's not destiny.
When you observe chimpanzees and other apes, you see how extremely humanlike they are in almost everything they do. We have been so indoctrinated to think we are special (as a species) that when you see an ape up close and see they are- in essence- us, you don't know what to do with those feelings.