Psychology

We tend to remember the things in life that deliver the biggest emotional wallop. 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. That makes them highly effective memory tags, because they're anchored to a very specific time and place.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

The brain, if nothing else, is a giant pattern detector. It looks for order in chaos. And those patterns matter: they can mean the difference between life and death. Music taps into that same machinery because it's so highly structured. When your brain says, I thought this path would lead here, but it actually took me somewhere new — you experience pleasure.

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. If I say, I'm happy, but also a bit sad, nervous, winsome, and tired, those words are still boxes. But if I play you a passage of music — maybe something by Elgar — you might think, Yes, that's exactly how I feel.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

Vulnerability isn't oversharing; it isn't necessarily personal. And that's where some of the fear has come from—this sense that leaders might need to role-model less sharing about their personal lives. Yet vulnerability can look very different. Trust benefits from clearer boundaries, because trust needs clear expectations and clear limits.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

Children, because they take fewer physical childhood risks in the real world, are experiencing a decline in trust in themselves and in others. Their ability to take those risks in the world is decreasing, and that is a huge problem.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

AI tools are incredibly good at replicating that. If I share something, they know how to give empathy and validation immediately; they know how to close the loop. And here's the tension: humans aren't practicing the art of trust with each other, or even with themselves, enough. Yet they're outsourcing those trust loops to digital tools almost instantly.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

The number one thing is misread intentions. You assume someone has ill intent toward you—maybe to hurt you, harm you, or make you feel uncomfortable—and you don't check in on those intentions. Then a narrative forms in your head, and that's when you start spiralling. You can apply this to your children, to relationships, and it happens constantly at work.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. And the reason this is so important is that trust isn't, at its essence, an asset or an attribute or a currency. It's a belief. It's what we believe about someone or something. That definition is slightly counterintuitive because, often, when people think about trust, they talk about knowing what to expect from someone or knowing what the outcomes will be. So, they're actually thinking about trust through the language of risk, thinking about it in terms of certainty. And that's not what trust is.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

Our brains are constantly making predictions about the world, and we learn when those predictions turn out to be wrong. So what Marshall did was deliberately redesign training so that people learned how to cope with a wide range of unpredictable challenges—turning the unpredictable into something more predictable.

Training helps you turn fear from something that paralyses you or makes you flee into something that spurs you to take the right decisions in very difficult situations.

I think this is something that would have been a lot less controversial just a few decades ago, when people still remembered that, yes, the material side of war is obviously important, but it's only ever one aspect of it. And so, I'd say the big difference here is that we have to recognise that if we ignore or downplay the human side, we could lose.

Data is showing that the amount of information we're sending them without hope, and the ratio of hope versus negativity, is shutting down the next generation, which is terrifying. And so it's not like, 'Oh my gosh, there's a fire—they're going to go put the fire out.' They're like, 'Oh my gosh, what's the point? The fire is too big.'

What happened was that people saw their place going down while London was booming. It's not countrywide; it's not that everyone in the country is poorer. London's doing fine. So people ask: why are they not doing fine when London's doing fine? They start to blame each other.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa

I once got a troll who read something about me and tweeted, 'The only thing I want to read about you is your obituary...' my comeback, 'well, at least I'll get one mate!' – that accepts his position (that he only wants to read my obituary) and turns it back at him without aggression. That's how you have to do it, that's the basic rule.

British comedian, writer, and television personality; co-founder of Fantasy Football League

I looked at these people as hecklers... as a comedian, that's what you do. You rebound heckling with comedy. I had to think of funny, witty ways to make them look foolish for giving the abuse. The way I did that (and still do it today) is to retweet or screenshot what they said, however vile, extreme or unpleasant – and think of something to say back which defuses it, disarms them, and makes them look stupid.

British comedian, writer, and television personality; co-founder of Fantasy Football League

Humanity has always been concerned with the end of the world!

Co-Founder of Skype & Estonian Entrepreneur & Technologist