Tag Archives: Brain

Human brains are terrible at keeping track…

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“Human brains are terrible at keeping track of a series of small numbers, and equally bad at accurately measuring time.

“Searching comes in tiny chunks of time, most only a few minutes or less, spread out over the entire week.

“As an activity, it could not be better designed to fool our brains.”

http://www.meemim.com/2016/04/11/esn-and-intranet-usage-and-their-effects-on-information-accessibility/

“By my definition originality involves introducing and advancing…

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“By my definition, originality involves introducing and advancing an idea that’s relatively unusual within a particular domain, and that has the potential to improve it.”

The faults in defaults. “To get Firefox or Chrome, you have to demonstrate some resourcefulness and download a different browser. Instead of accepting the default, you take a bit of initiative to seek out an option that might be better. And that act of initiative, however tiny, is a window into what you do at work.”

“The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists.”

“Regardless of political ideologies, when a candidate seemed destined to win, people liked him more. When his odds dropped, they liked him less.”

“Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit.”

“Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another.”

“The biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation—it’s idea selection.”

“When it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality.”

“Our intuitions are only accurate in domains where we have a lot of experience.”

“Power involves exercising control or authority over others; status is being respected and admired.”

“To form alliances with opposing groups, it’s best to temper the cause, cooling it as much as possible. Yet to draw allies into joining the cause itself, what’s needed is a moderately tempered message that is neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.”

“In general, we tend to be overconfident about our own invulnerability to harm.”

Some lessons on groupthink. “The evidence suggests that social bonds don’t drive groupthink; the culprits are overconfidence and reputational concerns.”

“Bridgewater has prevented groupthink by inviting dissenting opinions from every employee in the company.”

The positive power of negative thinking. “Most people assume it’s better to be a strategic optimist than a defensive pessimist. Yet Norem finds that although defensive pessimists are more anxious and less confident in analytical, verbal, and creative tasks, they perform just as well as strategic optimists.”

— Adam Grant, Originals How Non-Conformists Move The World

The history of science has shown us…

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“The history of science has shown us that you need the tools first. Then you get the data. Then you can make the theory. Then you can achieve understanding.”

“… I worry that medicine does too many moon shots. Almost everything we do in medicine is a moon shot because we don’t know for sure if it’s going to work.


“People forget. When they landed on the moon, they already had several hundred years of calculus so they have the math; physics, so they know Newton’s Laws; aerodynamics, you know how to fly; rocketry, people were launching rockets for many decades before the moon landing. When Kennedy gave the moon landing speech, he wasn’t saying, let’s do this impossible task; he was saying, look, we can do it. We’ve launched rockets; if we don’t do this, somebody else will get there first.


“Moon shot has gone almost into the opposite parlance; rather than saying here is something big we can do and we know how to do it, it’s here is some crazy thing, let’s throw a lot of resources at it and let’s hope for the best. I worry that that’s not how “moon shot” should be used. I think we should do anti-moon shots!”


— ED BOYDEN, M.I.T.

http://edge.org/conversation/ed_boyden-how-the-brain-is-computing-the-mind

Which brings us back to San Francisco…

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“…Which brings us back to San Francisco. If memories and functions can flow seamlessly across devices, people, and artefacts, then why can’t we consider an entire city to be a kind of genius? Like the brain, it is using stored information and solving problems. Chief among these is how people can stay alive, and even flourish, under high geographic density. This is a considerable challenge, and one that the city itself solves—in fact, the larger the city, the better it seems to solve its own problems. ”


“…Perhaps increasing the number of technologies, people, and level of communication in a city benefits intelligence in the same way that a larger number of neurons makes possible the great intelligence of human beings.”


“If people are to cities as neurons are to brains, and cities (unlike brains) do not have any known limit to their size, then gigantic cities of the future might produce innovations on a scale that wouldn’t be possible for the cities of today. Faced with pollution, disease, and scarcity, should we be looking to creative environments rather than to individual innovators? Where will we turn to find solutions to the pressing problems of the 21st century? ”


— Jim Davies is an associate professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, where he is director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory

http://nautil.us/issue/18/genius/san-francisco-is-smarter-than-you-are

Systems are nothing more or less than…

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“Systems are nothing more or less than a cohesive set of patterns. Large patterns. Unfortunately, while the brain is excellent at detecting small patterns, large patterns are almost completely invisible to us. And nowhere is this more true than with learning.”


“if you want to learn how you learn, it helps to learn a bunch of different skills at once, because only then will the larger patterns reveal themselves.’

“…if you want to learn how you learn, it helps to learn a bunch of different skills at once, because only then will the larger patterns reveal themselves….”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2015/05/04/tim-ferriss-and-the-secrets-of-accelerated-learning/