From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Every single process in the body, and every operation of the brain, is powerfully enhanced when we get sleep, and demonstrably impaired when we don't get enough sleep.
The world lacks creative imagination when it comes to mother nature- we believe that we have the power to bend nature to our desires and forget that we're vulnerable. Nature is a combination of biology, physics and chemistry- they are collectively much stronger at bending the world than we are.
The problem is that you put cells in the same vat and ask them to grow and they're producing ammonia, you're going to have a nice glass of urine! We must solve all of that!!
Our brains actively construct a model of the world, which is our actual experience. Incoming sensory data serves mainly to verify and correct this internal model. A familiar example is predictive texting on smartphones. You start typing, and the phone anticipates the rest of the word. This process mirrors how our brains handle sensory input, triggering various internal models.
The central premise of my book, the concept of the brain being 'rewired', essentially posits that any change in our behavior results in a change in our brain. This isn't mere conjecture; it's a neurobiological fact. Small behavioral changes trigger small changes in the brain, whereas significant behavioral shifts lead to substantial neural alterations.
Our knowledge of the world is always fragmentary and incomplete and our explanations of how the world works have therefore to be considered as provisional. This means we have to accept that sometimes we will turn out afterwards to have been wrong.
Behind every free‑will decision there must be comprehension and intention—and that's where consciousness comes in: the capacity to understand the meaning of symbols. In science, 'information' refers only to the probability of symbols occurring, not to their meaning. Thus science's definition of information discards meaning from reality, but for conscious beings, meaning—not the symbol itself—is what truly matters.
Our brains are constantly taking shortcuts to inform us about the world and this introduces an intrinsic error which our brains are filling in. By the time we 'see' something perceptually, we're a fraction of a second behind real-time.
Anyone worth following in peak performance will tell you that 90% of human performance is mental. The understanding of that mental aspect of the game is brand-new – perhaps 10-20 years old.
World poverty has been reduced significantly- and whilst everyone seems to think the world is getting more impoverished, this simply is not the case. Scientific cooperation has improved too, and this has allowed significant advances in global health.
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.
Galileo strips the physical world of its qualities so that we can exhaustively describe it in purely quantitative mathematics. This was the start of mathematical physics and it depended on this separation of reality into two domains, – the quantitative physical world, the physical world of the purely mathematical properties and the qualitative domain of consciousness.