Science

Ageing is malleable, we can control it. 20% of our health in old-age is due to genetic factors, and the rest is due to our lifestyle. We can measure this clock. It's literally measuring chemicals in our own DNA.

Longevity researcher & Harvard Medical School professor studying aging and lifespan extension

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.

Neuroscientist & leading researcher on consciousness and perception

The way I prefer to think of perception is as a processor of active construction, a controlled hallucination. Everything we perceive is a kind of inference, a burst guess about what's out there.

Neuroscientist & leading researcher on consciousness and perception

Consciousness is any kind of subjective experience whatsoever. It's what goes away when you fall into a dreamless sleep or go into general anesthesia, and what comes back when you wake-up or come around.

Neuroscientist & leading researcher on consciousness and perception

At a point, we developed language sophisticated enough to transmit abstract ideas with precision from one mind to another. That enables high quality parallel processing of problems such that we literally have emergent cognition. When people gather, they talk about difficult puzzles they face, and the product of their thinking exceeds the sum of their individual capacity to reason through it.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

The thing that makes us so unique is that we, unlike most every other species, have no niche. A niche is an opportunity which a species exploits- and our niche is niche switching. We move from one niche to another, even without major changes to our physical biology.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

We have a growing inequality of rationality. At the top, we've never been so rational – we've accomplished technological miracles… we sequenced the COVID-19 genome in days and deployed vaccines in under a year… we're travelling to space.

Cognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature

The laws of cause and effect which govern our universe don't care about our beliefs – so we'd better find out what those laws are and try and align our beliefs to them to eliminate guesswork.

Cognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature

Truth is an aspiration which none of us can ever know that we have attained. Nobody has a pipeline to the truth; nobody is imbued with divine revelation. We seek truth through institutions like science, journalism, governance, justice systems and record keeping.

Cognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature

The rules of the brain are such that the chimp can freeze our brain, freezing the human out and can make decisions on our behalf.

Psychiatrist and author of "The Chimp Paradox

Emotions are like the reward (or punishment) the brain gives us for getting what we need, want, or could be harmed by.

Psychiatrist and author of "The Chimp Paradox

If only one-quarter melted, it would lead to a 2-metre rise in sea-levels all over the world and would threaten thousands of cities and towns on every continent.

Former President of Iceland (1996-2016)

Surgery, like many other disciplines, is primarily about facts, your relationship with the facts, how you manage, handle, interpret and use those facts. This is something we all begin to do very early in life, in our childhood.

When do we have our best ideas? When we're in the shower… when we're on a long drive with a radio off… when we're on a hike. The research supports this too.

Founder of Practice of the Practice & Mental Health Business Consultant

If you take care of this dualistic biological soul, your immune system, and nurture it, you can live to well-beyond 100 years of age. In fact, my belief is that in the next 50 years we'll see people easily living to 130-150 based on sheer medication availability and nurturing their biology.

Rheumatologist and lupus researcher; author on autoimmune diseases

Our brains are adapted to pick leaders based on characteristics that are no longer adaptive, or necessary today. In times of crisis, we are wired to gravitate towards strong men – strong males who are overconfident and speak of solutions in simplistic terms.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy