From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
From 20,000 miles away however, you couldn't see any civilisation- just the land mass and those three colours… the brown of the land, the white of the clouds and the ice, and the crystal blue of the ocean. Earth was just suspended in the blackness of space and it was an incredibly beautiful sight.
Our research over the past 45+ years shows that when you're actively noticing, your neurons are firing, and that's literally and figuratively enlivening. And what do we do when we're having fun? We notice, we engage. So mindfulness is not just beneficial—it's enjoyable.
There are significant distinctions between what we perceive to be reality and the cold, hard, molecular world we inhabit. Our brains are constantly taking shortcuts to inform us about the world and this introduces an intrinsic error which our brains are filling in.
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.
We're outnumbered by bacteria 1.3:1, we're slightly more bacteria than we are human. We're also stardust. We are also 60% water, and that water in our bodies is billions of years old. At an atomic level, 98% of the hydrogen in our bodies came from the bigbang. We're incredibly ancient beings, perhaps we should see ourselves as aliens!
You have this very activist sociology rather than a dispassionate or objective sociology informing a broadly humanist framework of caring about flourishing versus suffering. When your sociology has decided that the point of studying society is to change it, you've got a problem.
A regional war in say, South Asia, which involved as few as one hundred nuclear bombs would result in firestorms in their urban centres that would put so much smoke and particulate into the atmosphere that the earth would be covered in a cloud that would reflect sunlight back into space and reduce global temperatures but two to three degrees for several years. This would kill most food crops on the planet, resulting in massive famines and starvation.
Sensory data by itself is not red, it's not anything. It's just energy. Sensory signals don't come with labels attached. Redness is coming from within my brain, as a way of predicting how certain patterns of light appear.
Within each of us is a deep, complex network of capillaries, veins and arteries which extend a distance equivalent to more than 3 times the circumference of the Earth, and because our body has lost its conditioning to nature, our hearts have to pump 20-30 times a minute more than if we regularly exposed our body to cold water.
When considering the prevalence of this disease, we're speaking of 7 million diagnosed patients in the US. But how many Americans currently have the initial stages of Alzheimer's already festering in their brains? I concur with the higher estimates, suggesting around 40 million people.
The brain's adaptability is astounding. The brain is continuously rewiring; it's different now than it was just 30 seconds ago. That is fascinating and offers great promise.
We can actually retrain our brains to think about and handle conflict differently. Some of this comes down to self-awareness, but also to taking intentional pauses that help us recognise what we're feeling. There's a lot of research on affective labeling—the act of naming our emotions and fears—which helps reduce what's called limbic irritability.