From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Most people assume a wound heals at its natural pace. But no—it healed according to perceived time. If the clock ran faster, the wound healed faster. If it ran slower, healing slowed.
A complex system is one where the properties of the building blocks, when they interact, can create phenomena that are very different from the building blocks themselves. The human brain is a great example. You take a neuron, which is a cell – you put an electrochemical signal in, electrochemical signal comes out – but somehow you hook 80 billion of them together and you get a brain. You have to hook them together just right, of course, but the result is completely fundamentally different than what you started with.
People have regarded as a paradox- the fact that Newton spent most of his time doing alchemy, which doesn't sound very scientific, and only part of his time doing mechanics and gravitation. Of course, his discoveries in mechanics and his law of gravitation were absolutely foundational to all of quantitative science, engineering, technology and, indeed, everything that came after
When you observe chimpanzees and other apes, you see how extremely humanlike they are in almost everything they do. We have been so indoctrinated to think we are special (as a species) that when you see an ape up close and see they are- in essence- us, you don't know what to do with those feelings.
Our experience is very limited to the surface of this rock we call home. You cannot show-off in space, we must be humble. The only purpose for us to seek journeys into space is to learn about the unknown. That's a spiritual conquest. Leaving the solar system has no commercial benefits.
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.
Despite our huge scientific advances, we're still very-much at the early stages of discovery. Many of our great questions are also stepping into the realms of philosophy. Do we all see the same way? Do we all perceive the same way? It's a hidden frontier.
This tool is truly the best thing that the science has come up with for getting two people to like each other. A little bit of optimisation can be effective—you should be eating healthy and exercising and doing the basics. But I tend to think in terms of relational optimisation: how can I put two people in the best position to share things about themselves that allow them to find conversational pathways that happen to go well?
The standard model of reason is the lone thinker — Rodin’s statue, head on fist. That is exactly the wrong model of reasoning. Reasoning evolved to be done in groups; it is a contested process. We think better in opposition with somebody we disagree with.
Alzheimer's starts its destructive process 30 years prior to its typical diagnosis. If we were to compare this to our approach with heart disease, it's like only making a diagnosis when a coronary bypass is needed.
So far from being a separate evolutionary lineage with deep roots, we humans were in fact embedded within the great ape family. Humans are now, strictly speaking, firmly ensconced within the chimpanzee family.
By consciously and regularly going into the cold- I've learned how to tap into this primordial part of the brain; an area we've lost access to because of our destimulative behaviour. We need to get out into the cold, into the heat, and allow our brain to reconnect to these lost areas.