From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Emotions are the brain's way of making us pay attention immediately to what is most important so that we can react as quickly as possible. In evolution, that meant 'survival' – the rustle in the bushes may be our next meal or may make us its next meal – something that we have to chase, or run away from – and in either case, we don't want to have to stop and think.
When it comes to claims like 'pets alleviate depression,' there's really no solid evidence. In fact, the findings so far are pretty ambiguous. And—I don't really want to tell you this—but in one study that found no significant overall effect, cat owners were actually more depressed than the control group.
The discipline I worked in was called SETI- The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Of course, that latter word is a misnomer. We don't know how to define intelligence or detect it at a distance. What we have done is to use technology as a proxy for intelligence- and therefore we have been looking for evidence of someone else's technology.
Conditional on the emergence of the human brain, civilisation was inevitable for many reasons. We had a commendable population in Africa 300,000 years ago and given the fact that these individuals were equipped with the power of the modern brain, the emergence of civilisation was inevitable.
We've had wars, poverty, and homelessness long before anyone went into space. It's not accurate to say, 'we're doing space exploration, and that's why we have poverty' – if we stopped space exploration, those problems wouldn't be solved, they haven't been solved in thousands of years.
I'm advocating for a right to cognitive liberty, a new international human right that would be the right to self-determination of our brains and mental experiences.
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
The brain doesn't make a distinction about whether it's work or home. The key is to practice, practice, practice so that the skills become spontaneous and automatic.
Human intelligence is, for want of a better phrase, a degree of magnitude greater than the intelligence of a Paramecium or, better, of a Chlamydomonas; but the difference is just quantitative and not qualitative.
Music is woven into the fabric of the universe. As far back as Pythagoras and Kepler, scientists were writing about the fact that music was intrinsic in the planets… part of the harmonic series in sound. We also have a whole branch of knowledge called zoomusicology, which shows that an appreciation of music and sound is a part of nature, not just unique to humans.
About 65% of the population mouth breathes at night. If you're breathing through your mouth for eight hours, you increase your susceptibility to respiratory illnesses, sleep apnea, snoring, and allergies. You get less oxygen and overwork your body.
They described, for example, taste as if it were just electrical signals in the brain, but there's no way such 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.