You’re wasting your time, he said. You don’t learn how to discover things by reading books on it. And psychology is a bunch of bullshit.
Your amicable words mean nothing if your body seems to be saying something different. —JAMES BORG I
Though you are unaware of it, when you run cool wine over your tongue, you don’t just taste its chemical composition; you also taste its price.
Pauli turned to the audience and argued, Yes, my theory is crazy enough! Then Bohr insisted, No, your theory is not crazy enough!
Paleolithic humans migrated often, and, like my teenagers, they followed the food.
Our species had to engage in complex cooperative behavior in order to survive in the wild, and—as I keep reminding my teenage children—pointing and grunting get you only so far.
Another recent work, an academic article that described research on a single type of nerve cell in the hypothalamus, was over one hundred pages long and cited seven hundred intricate experiments.
True randomness sometimes produces repetition, but when users heard the same song or songs by the same artist played back-to-back, they believed the shuffling wasn’t random. And so the company made th...
They left for California, Einstein had told his wife to take a good look at their house. You will never see it again, he told her.
The human sensory system sends the brain about eleven million bits of information each second.9 However, anyone who has ever taken care of a few children who are all trying to talk to you at once can...
Research on hunter-gatherer groups ranging from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries shows that the average nomad worked just two to four hours each day.
Regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.
If events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability...
Appreciate the absence of bad luck, the absence of events that might have brought us down, and the absence of the disease, war, famine, and accident that have not—or have not yet—befallen us.
We are inclined, that is, to see movie stars as more talented than aspiring movie stars and to think that the richest people in the world must also be the smartest.
Stephen Hawking once told me that there was a sense in which he was glad to be paralyzed, because it allowed him to focus much more intensely on his work.
One trader even believed that relieving himself in the wrong toilet would bring bad fortune. Actually he was a bond trader who confessed his secret to a CNN reporter in 2003.
Modeling himself after Newton, Quételet desired to create a new social physics describing the laws of human behavior. In Quételet’s analogy, just as an object, if undisturbed, continues in its state o...
Little is known about Boyle’s mother, other than that she was married at seventeen and proceeded to bear fifteen children in the next twenty-three years, then dropped dead of consumption, which by the...
Let all the disciples of Aristotle…, he would write, recognize that experiment is the true master who must be followed in Physics.6