I've known many individual monkeys and apes, and I'm struck by how much diversity and gender diversity there is which I have been ignoring. We always look for typical behaviours… a typical male does X… a typical female does Y. We overemphasise the typicality of men and women. If we start looking in primates, we'll almost certainly find the same sort of gender diversity we find in humans.
— Frans de Waal Primatologist & behavioral psychologist who studies animal cognition and emotionsOver Thousands of Years, globalisation has progressed through travel, trade, migration, spread of cultural influences and dissemination of knowledge and understanding
Materials move much more easily than knowledge. But when people mistakenly believe that the material is the binding constraint, they tend to come up with these bone-headed development strategies. Silicon Valley didn't specialize in silicon transistors because there was a lot of sand nearby.
I want to take African rhythm and put it into classical music, European jazz, and symphonies. I want people to come together from all over the place, through music. That's my legacy.
Racism, like sexism and any other form of discrimination, is an utterly futile exercise… nobody benefits. Societies are better for diversity in all forms, and time and time again we've seen that the more homogenous people become, the less they are able to flourish.
I don't believe that social media is directly responsible for mental health issues. I see social media more as an accelerant than a cause. It tends to amplify pre-existing conditions, speeding up and enlarging problems rather than creating them.
The brain is definitely not doing computation in the purest sense. We are not crunching numbers in binary ones and zeros in our heads. When people ask me how our system compares to an NVIDIA GPU in terms of FLOPS, I tell them they're asking the wrong question. A more important question is: what are your inputs, what output do you want, and how intelligently can the system get from one to the other?
Success and fame, especially fame, can instigate fundamental shifts within us at a cellular level. The very nature of fame is peculiar; it's akin to an insatiable flame that ceaselessly yearns for more, compelling you to endlessly seek something, despite its ultimate emptiness.
We have the ability to push much further than we think is possible, but the brain wants us to rest to allow the body to recover. With practice and training we can overcome almost any discomfort.
I was studying at Xavier's College, Mumbai doing my 11 standard, and I was taken ill with Typhoid. I was recuperating at home, and my closest friend Manisha saw a poster put-up in college which was basically a shout-out to all aspiring actors to audition for a campus based TV show. She knew I'd just done a 2 month production oriented drama workshop at Prithvi Theatre, and she called me and said, '…would you be interested? They're asking for pictures!' – I didn't have any, and didn't know how to go about getting headshots, and I wasn't well!
The objective isn't to become the world number one; it's about consistently reaching your best or performing adequately in moments that matter to you.
By measuring skulls from 400 years ago, you'll find that our ancestors had straight teeth, prognathic faces, and very wide jaws. Compare these to modern skulls, which show very slender, narrow faces and small jaws. It's all there, plainly evident, yet it seems as though nobody is really talking about this or acknowledging the rapid changes that have occurred over just a couple of hundred years.
We often talk about misinformation and disinformation, but the deeper issue is the speed and flow of trust, because we're responding to feeling rather than expertise and credibility.