Wisdom in fragments

You need one strong relationship in your life to remain sane. You need a relationship that doesn't depend on digital transmission! You need somebody who you understand deeply, who you can talk to directly, who can give you a reality check when everything coming through your computer and phone is bewildering.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

Fundamentally, we must slow-down the process of change. We should recognise that most change is not progress- and therefore, it is in our interests to slow down without interfering too much with actual solution making.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

We have layer upon layer of novelty, and today we are in an era of hyper-novelty. The rate of change of the novelty we face is so fast that it has outstripped our evolutionary capacity to keep up.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

At a point, we developed language sophisticated enough to transmit abstract ideas with precision from one mind to another. That enables high quality parallel processing of problems such that we literally have emergent cognition. When people gather, they talk about difficult puzzles they face, and the product of their thinking exceeds the sum of their individual capacity to reason through it.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

The thing that makes us so unique is that we, unlike most every other species, have no niche. A niche is an opportunity which a species exploits- and our niche is niche switching. We move from one niche to another, even without major changes to our physical biology.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

We can become resilient however, and learn to have peace of mind, even when we experience traumatic events. We can learn to have stable peace of mind... happiness? Maybe not. It's unhelpful to say to someone, 'do these 10 things to be happy' – there are things you can do to get peace of mind, increase your probability of happiness, and your probability of having successful relationships.

Psychiatrist and author of "The Chimp Paradox

The reason we can't be happy, and not worry about other people's opinions, is that we're sharing our minds with a machine that does worry about other people's opinions and which does get anxious. If we can dissociate from that, and learn to manage it, it can improve our lives significantly.

Psychiatrist and author of "The Chimp Paradox

Emotions are like the reward (or punishment) the brain gives us for getting what we need, want, or could be harmed by.

Psychiatrist and author of "The Chimp Paradox

You can almost think of it like three sock puppets! You, this little chimp, and a computer, trying to run your life.

Psychiatrist and author of "The Chimp Paradox

I define robustness as saying that we're fit for purpose, 'I'm sat in my house in the morning, I'm in a great place, I'm robust and ready to face the world and deal with any emotions my brain throws up' It's having a plan and being ready. Once I open the door and life happens to me, I've got to say robust, that's resilience. Robustness is being in a good place and having a plan, resilience is being able to implement that plan and stay in a good place.

Psychiatrist and author of "The Chimp Paradox

For me- I think we're all here to uplift the human condition, making lives better for ourselves and others.

Words like mistake, error and complication are not helpful. They carry visceral, emotive, weight which hampers learning and thus obscures what you may be able to take from an event. Over the past 20 years, we've moved away from that terminology towards the language of adverse events.

With technology, we're creating a lot more hammers – and with more hammers, we're able to find more nails. The question is whether those hammers are being made for the right purposes, and whether they will serve the right purpose. I often worry that when we talk about health-tech – it almost seems that in certain areas the tech is taking over the health.

Super-specialisation at the expense of a breadth of knowledge is a modern-day fallacy. Fundamentally, we need to be able to address facts in an unbiased fashion. If you're super-specialised in one particular area, at the expense of that breadth, at the expense of clarity of vision, it is natural you will accumulate biases that will factor into your decision making.

You need clarity of vision and purpose. You need to know the reason you're there at that surgical table with a knife in your hand. You have to be clear that you are using these sophisticated tools (tools which can cause a lot of harm) to fundamentally and primarily help that entity, that child in front of you. That mindset provides the energy and focus needed to carry out the task.

Surgery, like many other disciplines, is primarily about facts, your relationship with the facts, how you manage, handle, interpret and use those facts. This is something we all begin to do very early in life, in our childhood. We look at information coming in from the external world, determine what is useful, determine how we understand it, build a fuller picture and effect change. A surgical mindset is very much that.