We want to see ourselves in a positive light so we see our own ideas as more important than the ideas of others.
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Ray Jayawardhana: It’s valuable to push your imagination and try to come up with all sorts of ideas and discuss them, debate them, test them, because it allows us to push what’s possible and open up new avenues.
There really is no difference between donors and doers.
Some people say, “I went white water rafting in Canada and I felt alive” or “I went to Thailand and I felt alive.” Proust’s lesson is, “I lay in bed, and by looking at things properly, I felt properly alive.”
You have to have a very quick mind and you have to have this peculiar ability to speak whilst you’re listening.
Michael Gazzaniga: Why does the human always seem to like fiction? Could it be that it prepares us for unexpected things that happen in our life?
2.5 billion people in the world don’t have access to improved sanitation.
We are so conditioned to relating to others in adversarial terms that we seldom think of how futile that is as an everyday code of conduct.
Whenever we see examples of ethical or moral failure our knee-jerk reaction is to say “that was a bad person.”
The things you really appreciate aren’t the complicated things. They’re the simple things that work just the way you expect them to.
On October 17th, 2005, comedian Stephen Colbert introduced the persona “Stephen Colbert” on the first episode of The Colbert Report by also introducing to the world the concept of “Truthiness.” […]
John Horgan: The United States is an extremely militaristic culture right now and we are armed to the teeth and we are very aggressive in pursuing our interests violently around […]
An extraordinarily simple explanation of the most mind-boggling concept of modern science. “In the confusion we stay with each other, happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word.” -Walt […]
If spiral galaxies have a preferred direction, it just might be. “Since the beginning of physics, symmetry considerations have provided us with an extremely powerful and useful tool in our […]
To create a happy family, you don’t need some big, new scheme that’s going to be hard to set up and impossible to follow.
Your computer will be able to answer your questions before you ask them or even before you realize you have a question.
An amazing art project casts your heroes of TV and film as an imagination-firing set of Marvel superheroes! “Hard times don’t create heroes. It is during the hard times when […]
The issue is learning the best questions to ask and learning how to interact once you have the knowledge to create new knowledge.
When I first learned about Snapchat in early 2012, I laughed it off. It seemed like a fun, novel idea but not a potential staple in our digital lives. As […]
It’s only natural that people are only going to give interesting and important high-stakes work to people they know and people they trust.
When Pablo Picasso and other early modernists appropriated elements of so-called “primitive” African art for Cubist and proto-Cubist works such as 1907’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon they perpetrated a kind of […]
Ram Charan: Like a coach, you need to show a player how to do it.
It’s safe to say that long before our ancient ancestors developed language, our moon has been a source of fascination. Closing out the turbulent 1960s with humankind landing on the […]
The genomes of tumors can be analyzed, providing “a much better way of deciding what types of treatments to pursue.”
For the first time in world history, more than half the world will be in the middle class. There will be lots of discretionary income for people to buy entertainment that stimulates the brain.
Emerging economies may have a bigger impact on the American economy and in particular they are powerful enough to take away the lower value added jobs in the tradable sector to an extent that may have an impact on work opportunities for a subset of our fellow citizens.
In order to venture further and further out we’re going to have to have crews that can withstand the rigors of space for years at a time.
Malcolm Gladwell: It drives me crazy when people in the technological sphere inflate the importance of the kind of tinkering they do with these sort of software gadgets that they come up with.
There’s a new area called predictive maintenance where companies look at vibration patterns and other patterns admitted by machines days or hours before the breakdown before a part falls apart.
Listening to voices who may be outside the mainstream, actually is a crucial way to succeed in business in the 21st Century.