Drive: Ideas for sustained work. - Page 5

Editor’s note

Drive

For days when you want encouragement to start, practise or keep going.

WonderTechnology

CRISPR started out as a defence system in bacteria, which store snippets of virus DNA and cut up any virus that matches them. In 2012 Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier showed it could be programmed to cut DNA at almost any chosen spot, which made editing genes far easier.

The name stands for ‘clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats’: short DNA sequences repeated at regular intervals, with the virus snippets stored between them. Japanese researchers first noticed the pattern in 1987, and the Spanish microbiologist Francisco Mojica later worked out that it serves as an immune memory. The editing tool pairs a cutting protein, Cas9, with a short guide made of RNA, DNA's chemical cousin, that leads it to the matching DNA. When the cell repairs the cut, a gene can be switched off, or scientists can slip in a corrected version. Doudna and Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In November 2023 the UK became the first country to approve a CRISPR treatment: Casgevy, for the inherited blood disorders sickle cell disease and beta thalassaemia. The method also raises ethical questions: in 2018 the Chinese scientist He Jiankui edited human embryos and was later jailed.

Nobel Prize / CRISPR researchRead card

DriveLiterature

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.

'If—' is written as a father's advice to his son: a long chain of conditions that ends, 'you'll be a Man, my son!' Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), the author of The Jungle Book, published it in 1910 in Rewards and Fairies and said it was inspired by Leander Starr Jameson, leader of a failed raid in southern Africa in 1895–96. These two lines are written on the wall of the players' entrance to Centre Court at Wimbledon, and in a BBC poll in the 1990s the poem was voted Britain's favourite.

Rudyard Kipling, "If—" (1910)Read card

DriveLiterature

I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.

These are the last two lines of 'Invictus'. William Ernest Henley (1849–1903), an English poet and editor, lost his left leg below the knee to tuberculosis as a young man. From 1873 he was treated at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh by the surgeon Joseph Lister, who saved his other leg, and he wrote the poem there in 1875. It was published without a title in 1888; the Latin title, meaning 'unconquered', was added by an anthology editor in 1900. Nelson Mandela recited it to fellow prisoners on Robben Island.

W.E. Henley, "Invictus" (1875)Read card

DriveLiterature

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), the Philadelphia printer, scientist and statesman, published Poor Richard's Almanack every year from 1732 to 1758 under the pen name Richard Saunders. Among its calendars and weather forecasts were short sayings, many of them older proverbs he sharpened. In the 1734 edition this one is a rhyming couplet: 'Take this remark from Richard poor and lame, / Whate'er's begun in anger ends in shame.' In 1753 he added that anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack (1734)Read card

DriveLiterature

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

No one has found this line in Franklin's writings. It was being printed as his by 1909, more than a century after his death, usually after another unverified line about a man who 'empties his purse into his head'. In 1989 the Library of Congress's dictionary of quotations, Respectfully Quoted, listed it as unverified. It suits him, though: Franklin left school at ten, taught himself by reading, and in 1731 helped found the Library Company of Philadelphia so that its members could share books.

Benjamin Franklin (attributed, 18th century)Read card

DriveLiterature

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.

This maxim opens Chapter 12 of Mark Twain's novel Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). Each chapter begins with a saying from ‘Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar’, the joke almanac kept by David Wilson, a clever lawyer whom his Missouri town dismisses as a fool, or ‘pudd'nhead’. The entry goes on to say that calling a creature brave only makes sense if it is partly a coward: otherwise the flea, which attacks people asleep or awake whatever their size, would be the bravest animal alive. Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens (1835–1910).

Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)Read card

DrivePhilosophy

The darkest hour is just before the dawn.

The earliest known version is by the English clergyman Thomas Fuller, in A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (1650), a book on the Holy Land: ‘it is always darkest just before the day dawneth’. His example was David, whose own men were ready to stone him shortly before he was proclaimed king. The worst trouble, Fuller meant, often comes just before relief. As astronomy it is not quite right: the night is darkest around its middle, and the sky begins to pale an hour or more before sunrise.

English proverb, recorded by Thomas Fuller (1650)Read card

DrivePhilosophy

A problem shared is a problem halved.

The idea is old. The Roman statesman Cicero wrote that friendship makes hard times lighter by dividing and sharing them, and in his essay ‘Of Friendship’ (1625) Francis Bacon said that it doubles joys and cuts griefs in half. German has a twin, ‘geteiltes Leid ist halbes Leid’: shared sorrow is half sorrow. Turkish says that whoever keeps their trouble to themselves will find no cure for it. In a 2008 study led by the psychologist Simone Schnall, people judged a hill less steep when a friend stood beside them.

English proverbRead card

DrivePhilosophy

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Frederick Douglass said this in August 1857 at Canandaigua, New York, at a celebration of the end of slavery in Britain's Caribbean colonies; in the American South, slavery was still legal. He goes on: those who want freedom without protest want crops without ploughing and rain without thunder, and power concedes nothing without a demand. The struggle, he said, may be moral or physical, but it must be a struggle. Douglass (c. 1818–1895) was born into slavery in Maryland, escaped in 1838 and became a leading voice against slavery.

Frederick Douglass, "West India Emancipation" speech (1857)Read card

DriveTechnology

In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at CERN, proposed a way to link the lab's scattered documents so that anyone could jump from one to another. His boss, Mike Sendall, wrote 'Vague but exciting...' on the cover and let him carry on. The idea became the World Wide Web.

The proposal, 'Information Management: A Proposal', described a real problem. Most scientists stayed at CERN for about two years and then left, so knowledge was constantly being lost, and even written records were hard to find among the lab's many incompatible computers. His answer was hypertext: documents containing links that lead straight to other documents, spread across a network. He had tried a small version of the idea for himself in 1980, a program called ENQUIRE. The proposal drew little interest at first. He sent it round again in May 1990 and, with the Belgian engineer Robert Cailliau, turned it into a formal project plan that November. Sendall let him build the system on a newly bought NeXT computer, and after considering names such as 'Information Mesh', Berners-Lee settled on World Wide Web.

CERNRead card

DriveScience

In 1905, while working as a technical expert at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, Albert Einstein, then 26, published four papers that changed physics: on the photoelectric effect, on Brownian motion, on special relativity and on the link between mass and energy, E = mc². Physicists call it his miracle year.

Einstein had failed to find a university post after graduating, and in 1902 he joined the patent office in Bern, helped by the father of his friend Marcel Grossmann. His job was to assess patent applications, many of them for electrical and mechanical devices. In his spare time he debated physics and philosophy with friends in a small reading group they jokingly called the Olympia Academy, and he talked his ideas through with a colleague, Michele Besso, the only person thanked in the relativity paper. Alongside the four papers he completed a doctoral thesis on measuring the size of molecules. His paper on Brownian motion, the jittery movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid, gave strong evidence that atoms really exist. He stayed at the patent office until 1909, when he became an associate professor at the University of Zurich.

Nobel PrizeRead card

DriveHealth

Protein helps with satiety, the feeling of fullness that lasts after a meal. Meals that include beans and lentils, eggs, fish, dairy or other protein sources can help people feel full for longer, although appetite and digestion vary from person to person.

In studies that compare meals with the same number of calories, the higher-protein version usually keeps people satisfied for longer, although the effect is modest. One reason is that protein prompts the gut to release more of the hormone PYY, which tells the brain that food has arrived; a 2006 study led by Rachel Batterham at University College London found the strongest PYY response after high-protein meals. Another is that the body works harder to process protein: a 2004 review by the Maastricht University physiologist Klaas Westerterp reports that digesting and using it burns 20 to 30% of its calories, against 5 to 10% for carbohydrate and up to 3% for fat. UK guidance puts adults' needs at about 0.75 g of protein per kilogram of body weight a day, around 45 g for women and 56 g for men, and average intakes are well above that.

NHSRead card

StillnessHealth

While you sleep, the brain strengthens what you learned during the day. This process, called memory consolidation, works both on facts, such as names and dates, and on skills, such as playing a piece of music. After a short or broken night, the brain holds on to new learning less well.

Memory consolidation is the slow process that turns a fresh, fragile memory into a lasting one, and much of it happens during sleep. In 1997 the German researchers Werner Plihal and Jan Born showed that different parts of the night help different kinds of memory. Twenty healthy men learned lists of word pairs and practised mirror tracing, drawing a shape while watching only its reflection. Recall of the word pairs improved most over the first half of the night, when deep, slow-wave sleep dominates, while the drawing skill improved most over the second half, when REM sleep, the stage of vivid dreams, lasts longer. Researchers think that during sleep the brain replays the day's experiences and moves new memories from temporary storage in the hippocampus, deep in the brain, into longer-lasting networks in its outer layer, the cortex.

Harvard Medical SchoolRead card

DriveHealth

Some benefits of exercise begin on the day you do it, according to US guidance promoted by the CDC. After a single session of moderate or vigorous activity, such as a brisk walk, blood pressure can fall, anxiety can ease, and sleep that night and some kinds of thinking can improve.

The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is the United States' national public health agency, founded in Atlanta in 1946. Its advice on exercise follows the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, whose second edition, published in 2018, drew on a review of the previous decade's research. Earlier advice had focused on preventing disease over the years; the new edition also listed benefits people can feel at once. Besides easing anxiety and lowering blood pressure, a single session helps the body respond to insulin, the hormone that moves sugar from the blood into cells. Most of these effects grow with regular activity, while others, such as fitness, strength and a lasting fall in blood pressure, take weeks or months. The guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week.

CDCRead card

DriveHealth

Regular physical activity protects the heart, lifts mood, eases anxiety and improves sleep, according to the World Health Organization. These benefits do not depend on losing weight: people of every shape and size gain them, even when nothing changes on the scales or in the mirror.

The World Health Organization counts any movement that uses energy as physical activity: walking, cycling, sport, active play, housework and physical work. Its 2020 guidelines advise adults to do 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week, such as brisk walking, or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity, such as running, plus muscle-strengthening exercise on at least two days. In 2022 about 31% of adults worldwide, some 1.8 billion people, fell short of that. Weight is a poor guide to these benefits. The US Physical Activity Guidelines state that they are generally independent of body weight, and a 2014 analysis of ten studies found that fit people who were overweight or obese had death rates similar to fit people of normal weight, while unfit people had about twice the risk, whatever their weight.

WHORead card

DriveMind

Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to change its connections, and even its structure, in response to experience. It is strongest in childhood but continues through adult life, which is why adults can still learn a language, an instrument or a new skill, even if it often takes them longer.

For much of the 20th century scientists believed the adult brain was more or less fixed. Brain scans changed that view. In 2004 researchers in Germany taught adults to juggle three balls over three months; scans showed extra grey matter, the tissue packed with nerve cells, in areas that track moving objects, and it shrank back once they stopped practising. A follow-up in 2008 found the same kind of change in volunteers around 60 years old, although they learned less well than 20-year-olds. The best-known example comes from London, where Katherine Woollett and Eleanor Maguire followed trainee taxi drivers for four years as they memorised the city's 25,000 streets. Those who passed the exam gained grey matter at the back of the hippocampus, a region involved in finding our way; those who failed, and people who never trained, showed no such change.

NCBI BookshelfRead card

DriveMind

When you practise a skill, the same groups of nerve cells become active together again and again, and the connections between them grow stronger. This strengthening, part of what scientists call neuroplasticity, is how practice slowly turns effort into ability.

The Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb proposed the idea in his 1949 book The Organization of Behavior: when one nerve cell repeatedly helps to fire another, the link between them becomes more efficient. It is often summed up as “cells that fire together wire together”. In 1973 Timothy Bliss and Terje Lømo found such strengthening in the brains of rabbits in Oslo: after bursts of electrical stimulation, connections in the hippocampus, a region vital for memory, stayed stronger for hours. The effect is called long-term potentiation. Practice can reshape the brain within days. In 1995 Alvaro Pascual-Leone and colleagues at the US National Institutes of Health had volunteers practise a one-handed, five-finger piano exercise for two hours a day. After five days, the area of the motor cortex that controls the finger muscles had grown larger.

NCBI BookshelfRead card

DriveHealth

According to US health guidance promoted by the CDC, adults who sit less and do any amount of moderate or vigorous activity gain some health benefits. Since 2018 even a few minutes count, such as climbing a few flights of stairs; earlier advice counted only sessions of 10 minutes or more.

The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans are issued by the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the CDC, the country's national public health agency, turns them into everyday advice. The first edition, in 2008, said activity had to last at least 10 minutes at a time to count, because there was too little evidence about shorter bouts. For the 2018 edition an advisory committee reviewed the newer research and concluded that activity of any length adds to the benefits. It also found that, for the risk of dying early, the biggest gain comes when an inactive person starts doing just 60 minutes a week: in the guidelines' words, some physical activity is better than none. The full target for adults remains 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week, plus muscle-strengthening on two days.

CDCRead card

DriveMind

Habits are easier to repeat when the cue is obvious. Put the book, the trainers or the water bottle where you will see it, so you can start before your mood has time to argue.

Psychologists describe habits as a loop: a cue, such as a place, a time of day or the sight of an object, sets off a routine, and a reward makes it likelier to happen again. In diary studies from 2002, Wendy Wood's team found that about 43% of what people did each day was habitual, repeated almost daily in the same setting, often while their minds were elsewhere. A visible cue works because the action no longer depends on remembering it, or feeling like it, at the right moment.

Practical behavioural design noteRead card

DriveMind

An “if-then” plan links a goal to a specific cue: “If X happens, I will do Y.” Across studies, people who make plans like this follow through more often, on average, than people who only set the goal.

Psychologists call these plans implementation intentions. The idea was developed in the 1990s by the German psychologist Peter Gollwitzer, who works at New York University and the University of Konstanz. In 2006 he and Paschal Sheeran pooled 94 separate tests involving more than 8,000 people and found that such plans had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals. A well-known field test followed in 2011. Katherine Milkman and colleagues sent flu-jab reminders to employees of a large US company. Among those who were also asked to write down the date and time they planned to go, 37.3% got vaccinated, compared with 33.1% of those who received only the clinic details. Deciding when and where in advance lets the situation itself prompt the action, instead of relying on willpower in the moment.

Peter Gollwitzer's implementation-intention researchRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

The Enchiridion, a handbook of the teachings of the Greek Stoic Epictetus, opens by dividing life in two. Our judgements, intentions, desires and dislikes are up to us. Our body, possessions, reputation and position are not, and treating them as if they were leads to frustration.

Epictetus was born into slavery around AD 50 in Hierapolis, the ancient city beside today's Pamukkale in western Turkey. He spent his youth in Rome as the slave of Epaphroditus, a wealthy former slave who had been secretary to the emperor Nero, studied Stoic philosophy and began to teach after he was freed. When the emperor Domitian banished philosophers from Rome around AD 93, he moved to Nicopolis in north-western Greece and opened a school. He wrote nothing himself. His student Arrian recorded his lectures as the Discourses and gathered the key points into the Enchiridion, Greek for “handbook”, something kept ready to hand. Marcus Aurelius thanks his teacher Rusticus for lending him Epictetus's lectures, and the handbook was later adapted for Greek-speaking monasteries and translated into Latin in the 15th century.

EpictetusRead card

DrivePhilosophy

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180, wrote the Meditations in Greek as private notes to himself, some while on campaign by the Danube. In this passage he is thinking about people who get in his way: they can block an action, he says, but not his intentions, because the mind turns the obstacle into something to work with, such as a chance to practise patience. The card follows Gregory Hays's 2002 translation, and Ryan Holiday's 2014 book The Obstacle Is the Way made the line famous.

Marcus AureliusRead card

DrivePhilosophy

Men at some time are masters of their fates: / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Cassius speaks these lines in Act 1 of Julius Caesar, written by Shakespeare in 1599. He tells Brutus that nothing in the heavens made Caesar great and them his underlings: they allowed it. Many people then believed the stars shaped a person's fate. Today the line is quoted as a call to take charge of your life, and it gave John Green's novel The Fault in Our Stars its title. In the play it is flattery with a purpose: Cassius is drawing Brutus into the plot to kill Caesar.

William ShakespeareRead card

DriveArt

Between June 1724 and March 1725, Bach wrote about 40 cantatas in a row for the churches of Leipzig, one for almost every Sunday and holiday. A cantata is a piece for choir, soloists and orchestra sung during the service, and each of these was built on a well-known Lutheran hymn, using its words and its tune.

Bach became Thomaskantor, the director of church music in Leipzig, in 1723, and in his first year he supplied a cantata almost every week, some adapted from earlier works. For his second year he set himself a plan: each cantata would be built on one Lutheran hymn, or chorale. The opening chorus sets the first verse with the hymn tune in the sopranos, the middle verses are reworded for solo singers, and a plain four-part setting of the last verse closes the piece. The idea may have been inspired by the 200th anniversary of the first Lutheran hymn books, printed in 1524. The series stopped after Palm Sunday 1725, possibly because the writer who reworded the hymns for him, probably Andreas Stübel, had died that January. The Bach scholar Klaus Hofmann has called it the largest musical project Bach ever undertook.

BritannicaRead card

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