From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I grew up with a fear of the heart as an executioner of men in the prime of their lives. We're extraordinarily vulnerable to the functions of our heart, no other organ can cause sudden death.
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.
People have been told that asthma is an incurable condition, that they'll need to rely on a bronchodilator every few hours for life. But that's just not true. The way you breathe is deeply connected to asthma symptoms.
The world simply cannot manage Covid-19 without international cooperation around the production and distribution of medical equipment, research and distribution of a vaccine, and the cooperation between economies needed to ensure that we all return to growth.
Ancient philosophy almost hasn't been bettered as a kind of therapeutic toolbox in 2400 years, and have a certain aesthetic to them which makes you feel part of a long tradition... You're part of a three millennia old tradition of wisdom that thousands and thousands of people have read the same book that you're reading, and found it therapeutic in very dark times.
We behave like an entire culture suffering from a severe right-hemisphere brain injury or stroke. It's almost as if our culture has pulled us into the left hemisphere, where anxiety lives, and refuses to let us return.
These accumulating errors can foster feelings of the world being against us, a sense of continuous misfortune, and the magnification of everyday stresses and unhappiness.
The potential of wearable health monitoring is enormous, and under appreciated by a lot of society, because version-1 of wearables were – to put it politely – underwhelming. The health care industry spends a lot on curative costs… and if you shift the curative to the preventative, you can save a tonne of money and have better outcomes.
What's special about it as a science subject is that it is so awkward, it doesn't lend itself to easy solutions. It's a multi-factorial problem, very different to- for example- the question of what causes influenza?
We have these floods of ideas when we allow ourselves to slow down – you get this pent-up energy that flows out of you.
Cancer, we now know, is a disease caused by the uncontrolled growth of a single cell. This growth is unleashed by mutations- changes in DNA that specifically affect genes that incite unlimited cell growth. In a normal cell, powerful genetic circuits regulate cell division and cell death. In a cancer cell, these circuits have been broken, unleashing a cell that cannot stop growing.
It took me a long time to figure out that the sensation I was having was anxiety- it's a real, physical, feeling that manifests within you. It's so much more than just being 'in your head' it's your whole body.