From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
For nutrition, the game-changer according to the Pareto principle is cutting out ultra-processed foods. These are the items produced in factories, laden with chemicals, inflammatory oils, and excessive sugars, all of which severely compromise your immune system.
Interaction is paramount for cognitive development, enhancing intelligence through the growth of brain cells and the formation of new neurotransmitter connections. This concept of active engagement contrasts sharply with more passive forms of media consumption.
We are under an existential threat now as humankind. Even a simple two-cell yeast has a survival instinct and evolves fast enough to try and survive. I don't understand why humans who are supposed to be these very complex creatures can see that we're heading towards a very, very dangerous future which could be irreversible, and why we're not doing absolutely everything possible now.
Cancer cells grow faster, adapt better. They are more perfect versions of ourselves.
The people of the world are gambling for colossal stakes. Two centuries of scientific enquiry, founded in basic physics and powerful evidence, indicate that the risks from a changing climate over the next hundred years and beyond are immense.
Aging is a side-effect of being a machine with moving parts. All such machines, whether living or not, inherently create entropy in their structure. Living organisms have immensely sophisticated systems for exporting that entropy, but those systems are generally not 100% comprehensive, so aging still happens.
Music can help us heal and achieve therapeutic outcomes by tapping into various neurochemical circuits that influence mood and behaviour. Ours was the first lab to show that listening to music releases the brain's natural pain relievers—opioids. Relaxing music can modulate prolactin, a soothing, tranquilizing hormone. Music also releases dopamine which helps us to focus and motivates us to stay on task.
Emotions are perception, but perception of the body itself. You see something scary like a bear, that triggers all kinds of physiological changes in your body. Your heart rate increases, your breath quickens, and the perception of those changes is the emotion. Emotion is another kind of controlled hallucination but geared to the interior of the body rather than the outside world.
Sometimes people view disability as something permanent when, in fact, our bodies are malleable with technology. One could be disabled for a portion of one's life, and then not be for another; the body is malleable and transformable with technology. Disability is not a fixed condition, it's fluid. This is good news- it means that we can ultimately eliminate disability
Einstein famously said time is what a clock measures, which was a half-joke but also the best answer he could give. A clock measures the 'distance' it travels through spacetime between events. That's fascinating, but it still doesn't tell you what time actually is.
The brains of our ancestor Homo sapiens were the same as our brains. How to draw, how to write, how to think, have all been learned, sometimes with great difficulty, and the learning has been passed on.
Quantum mechanics is the most radical break in our thinking of reality that we have ever encountered... Quantum mechanics comes along and says that whole experience is misleading, and that the best you can ever do is to predict the probabilities of outcomes. Quantum mechanics says our world is nebulous, fuzzy, a haze of possibilities until it somehow snaps to attention upon an appropriate interaction, observation or measurement.