Wisdom in fragments

When it comes to the growth of knowledge, you need to double down on the capacities you already have; you want to build on cities that possess a foundation. When you build in a remote location, costs skyrocket, attractiveness is hard to engineer, and the complementarities that help knowledge stick to a place simply aren't there.

Physicist & Director of MIT Media Lab Connection Science group

Our vision is something we call 'SETI of the mind.' The goal is to treat the DMT space and other altered states as novel domains to be explored, much in the same way we treat outer space.

We assumed matter was fundamental when we probably should have prioritised consciousness. If we viewed consciousness as the prima materia of reality itself, I think we'd know a lot more about these intelligences and hidden agents than we do today.

We never have direct access to the world in itself; we only have access to the model our brain is constructing. It works as a sort of 'best guess.' The brain isn't trying to find the absolute truth or create a perfect replica of the outside world's structure.

It forces you to confront the fact that we know almost nothing about the true nature of reality. Whatever image you have of what's real or possible is obliterated in an instant. You're faced with a world that isn't just strange, but so utterly incomprehensible that it transcends imagination.

Don't give away a majority shareholding the way I had to with HomeServe. I ended up giving away 52% of the shares with my partner for a £500,000 investment we took when we'd run out of money—a terrible time to raise capital.

You absolutely need some funding to get started. But ideally, that should come from remortgaging your house or borrowing a bit from friends, family, or parents—just enough to have a small amount of money, but not too much. That way, you can copy, pivot, test, learn, and prove out your model on a small scale.

How many times have we all heard someone say, 'I had a really good business idea, but then I found somebody else had already done it—so I gave up'? I'd say the opposite: fantastic! If someone's done it, is still in business, and it's working, that's proof you're onto a solid idea.

I think people need to understand that building a business is really, really difficult. That shouldn't put anyone off, but there's no easy road to riches.

For a long time there was a kind of cultural chauvinism: the idea that if you just played Mozart to people in the Amazon or to hunter-gatherer groups in the South Pacific, they'd instantly recognize its greatness, maybe even see God. But of course, they don't experience it that way at all.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

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.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

We tend to remember the things in life that deliver the biggest emotional wallop. The death of a family member, the birth of a child, a wedding, an accident, an injury, or a major global event.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

In real life, emotions rarely arrive in neat, isolated packages. They're layered, overlapping, constantly shifting. Pure happiness, for instance, is rare; most of the time it's tinged with something else. And music, more than words, captures that mixture.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

Music is often better than speech at conveying and understanding emotion, because music has a kind of openness and ambiguity to it. Words, on the other hand, tend to put things into boxes.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

The problem is you cannot achieve all three E's simultaneously. Early work in the subfield of market design shows it's very hard and very unlikely you'll get a hidden market that can successfully allocate things efficiently and equitably in a way that's also easy.

Any time you're in a situation where the price is 'too low'—and I put that in quotes because it might not feel low to you, sometimes things are very expensive, but there are more people who'd like to buy the thing than they have the ability to serve—that's when a hidden market will crop up.