Mind: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 4

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StillnessMind

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

From Man's Search for Meaning, first published in German in 1946. Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), a Viennese psychiatrist, survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and two subcamps of Dachau; his parents, brother and wife died in the camps. In the book's second part he explains logotherapy, his approach built on the idea that people are moved above all by a search for meaning. He tells of an elderly doctor broken by his wife's death: asked what would have happened had he died first, the man saw that his grief had spared her.

Viktor FranklRead card

StillnessMind

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Frankl wrote this in the first part of Man's Search for Meaning, which describes daily life in the Nazi camps. He remembers men who went from hut to hut consoling others and handing over their last bread. They were few, he writes, but they showed that one freedom could not be taken away: the choice of how to meet one's circumstances. His claim is narrow. He does not say suffering is good, only that even when outward freedom is gone, a person's response can still be their own.

Viktor FranklRead card

WonderMind

Imagination is the discovering faculty; it is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us.

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), the English mathematician remembered as one of the first to see what computers could do, wrote this in a letter in January 1841, later published with her correspondence. She described imagination in two ways: first as a combining faculty that joins facts and ideas with no obvious connection, and above all as a discovering faculty that reaches the 'unseen worlds' of science. Her mother, Annabella Milbanke, had schooled her hard in mathematics, partly to steer her away from the temperament of her father, Lord Byron, whom she never knew. Two years later she wrote her famous notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a mechanical computer that was designed but never built.

Ada LovelaceRead card

DriveMind

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

The line circulates widely under Stephen Hawking's name, but no one has found it in his books, papers, lectures or interviews, and quote researchers treat it as a modern saying that borrowed his fame. A similar line, 'It is not the strongest of the species that survives', is often credited to Charles Darwin; it actually comes from a 1963 paraphrase of Darwin by the management professor Leon Megginson. Hawking's real record fits the spirit better: he publicly admitted scientific bets he had lost, such as his 1997 wager with the physicist John Preskill over whether black holes destroy information, which he conceded in 2004.

Attributed to Stephen Hawking; no source locatedRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Weil wrote this in a letter of 13 April 1942 to the poet Joë Bousquet, whom she had recently met in Carcassonne. Wounded in the spine as a soldier in 1918, Bousquet spent the rest of his life in bed in a shuttered room, writing and receiving writers and friends. Attention was central to Weil's thought: the French philosopher, who had worked in factories to understand manual labour, believed that truly noticing another person is a rare gift. She died in England in 1943, aged 34.

Simone Weil, letter to Joë Bousquet (1942)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion.

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022) was a Vietnamese Zen monk who worked for peace during the Vietnam War and was barred from returning home in 1966, an exile that lasted almost forty years. He wrote The Miracle of Mindfulness in 1974 as a long letter to Brother Quang, a colleague at the School of Youth for Social Service, which sent young volunteers to help war-damaged villages. The line comes from the book's last chapter, where he retells Leo Tolstoy's story 'Three Questions', whose answer is that the most important time is now.

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)Read card

DriveLiterature

For every dark night, there's a brighter day.

The line is widely credited to Tupac Shakur (1971–1996), the American rapper, actor and poet who remains one of hip-hop's most influential voices. It circulates on posters and in speeches under his name, but nobody has tied it to a particular song, interview or poem. The idea does fit his work: The Rose That Grew from Concrete, a collection of his poems published in 1999, three years after his death, keeps returning to hope that survives hard beginnings.

Widely attributed to Tupac ShakurRead card

WonderLiterature

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

The saying is often credited to Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), the New York writer famous for her sharp wit, but it appears nowhere in her work. Its earliest known printing is in the 'Quotable Quotes' column of Reader's Digest in December 1980, credited to Ellen Parr, about whom almost nothing is known. Quote Investigator, a researcher who traces sayings to their first appearance, thinks the mix-up began around 1996, when the two names sat side by side in an alphabetical list of quotations.

Often attributed to Dorothy Parker (unverified)Read card

WonderMind

In 2011 experiments, anxious students who spent ten minutes writing about their worries just before an important exam did better than similar students who did not.

The psychologists Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock reported the results in the journal Science. In the laboratory, college students took a maths test under pressure, told they would be filmed and their work reviewed by teachers. Those who sat quietly beforehand did worse than on an earlier test, while those who first wrote about their feelings for ten minutes did better. In a school, ninth-graders facing their first high-school biology final exam did the same. Among the most anxious pupils, writers averaged a B+ and non-writers a B−. The likely reason is that worry uses up working memory, the small mental space for holding and handling information; writing seems to clear some of it.

Psychology (Ramirez & Beilock, 2011)Read card

StillnessMind

Money spent on experiences, such as a trip or a concert, tends to bring more lasting satisfaction than money spent on things, though the effect varies from person to person.

The idea is most linked to the psychologists Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich. In a 2003 study they asked people to compare a recent experience they had paid for, such as a trip, with a recent object of similar cost; on average, the experience made them happier. Later work suggested three reasons: experiences become part of who we are, they invite fewer comparisons with what other people have, and we share and talk about them with others. Anticipation helps too, since looking forward to a trip is itself pleasant. It is an average tendency, not a rule that every holiday beats every useful purchase.

Psychology of happinessRead card

StillnessMind

Patients recovering from surgery in rooms that looked out on trees went home slightly sooner and needed fewer strong painkillers than those facing a brick wall, a 1984 study by Roger Ulrich found.

Ulrich, a researcher in healthcare design, studied the records of 46 patients who had gallbladder surgery at a Pennsylvania hospital between 1972 and 1981. He paired them by age, sex, weight and other factors, so that the main difference within each pair was the view. Patients who saw trees stayed 7.96 days on average against 8.70, took fewer doses of strong painkillers and drew fewer negative notes from nurses. The study, published in Science, was small and looked back at records rather than assigning rooms, but it is often credited with starting evidence-based healthcare design, which tests how buildings affect patients.

Environmental psychology (Ulrich, 1984)Read card

StillnessMind

Helping other people or spending money on them tends to lift the giver's own mood a little, many studies find; psychologists call such acts prosocial.

In a well-known 2008 study published in Science, Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton gave people $5 or $20 and asked some to spend it on themselves and others to spend it on someone else or on charity by the end of the day. That evening, those who had spent on others reported feeling happier. Later work by Aknin and colleagues found similar links between generosity and well-being in survey data from more than 130 countries. The lift is usually small and short-lived rather than life-changing, but it has appeared across very different places and income levels.

Psychology of well-beingRead card

StillnessHealth

Breathing slowly can calm the body's stress response, and many techniques make each breath out a little longer than the breath in, which tends to slow the heart.

Heart rate rises slightly with each breath in and falls with each breath out, a normal pattern called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. The link runs partly through the vagus nerve, the main nerve of the parasympathetic system, the 'rest and digest' side of the nervous system that slows the heart after stress. Slowing the whole breathing cycle, often to around six breaths a minute, and lengthening the out-breath seem to strengthen that calming signal. Slow breathing from the diaphragm is used alongside other treatments for stress and anxiety; it can help, but it does not replace medical care.

Physiology of breathingRead card

StillnessLanguage

The Turkish word gönül is usually translated as 'heart', but it also covers affection, desire, goodwill and remembrance: much of a person's inner life of feeling.

Gönül goes back to Old Turkic köŋül, which already meant heart, mind and inner feeling. Its reach shows in everyday Turkish: gönül almak means to soothe someone's hurt feelings, gönül kırmak to hurt them, and gönülden to do something wholeheartedly. A volunteer is a gönüllü, literally 'one with gönül', someone who acts from the heart rather than from duty. A well-known saying, gönül ferman dinlemez, means 'the heart obeys no decree': feelings do not take orders. When Turkish poems and songs are translated, gönül is usually rendered simply as 'heart', and much of its meaning is lost on the way.

Turkish languageRead card

StillnessMind

We often judge a past experience by two moments, its most intense point and its ending, rather than by the average of every minute. Psychologists call this the peak-end rule.

Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Fredrickson described the effect, and a 1993 experiment showed it clearly. Volunteers held one hand in painfully cold water at 14°C for 60 seconds. With the other hand they did the same, then kept it in for 30 seconds more while the water warmed slightly, to 15°C. Asked which trial to repeat, most chose the longer one, even though it held more pain, because it ended less badly. In a later trial, colonoscopy patients whose procedure ended with three extra minutes of milder discomfort remembered the whole thing as less unpleasant. Kahneman described this as a gap between the 'experiencing self', which lives each moment, and the 'remembering self', which keeps the story and makes the choices.

Ikigai DailyRead card

StillnessMind

Awe, the feeling we get before something vast such as a mountain range or a starry sky, often makes people feel briefly smaller and, in some studies, more humble and more helpful.

In 2003 the psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt described awe as having two parts: a sense of vastness, and a need to rethink how we see the world in order to take it in. Later studies measured the 'small self' feeling it brings. In a 2015 experiment led by Paul Piff, students who spent one minute looking up into a grove of very tall eucalyptus trees then picked up more pens for a stranger who had dropped them than students who had looked up at a tall building. Other work has linked people who often feel awe with lower levels of a marker of inflammation in the blood. The effects are usually modest, and results vary between studies and cultures.

Ikigai DailyRead card

DriveMind

When jazz pianists improvised inside a brain scanner, an area at the front of the brain linked to self-monitoring grew quieter, while a nearby area linked to self-expression became more active.

Charles Limb, an ear surgeon and jazz saxophonist, and the neuroscientist Allen Braun ran the study at the US National Institutes of Health and published it in PLOS ONE in 2008. Six professional jazz pianists lay in an fMRI scanner, which maps brain activity by tracking changes in blood flow, and played a small keyboard built to work inside it. Each played memorised music, then improvised over the same backing. While they improvised, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, tied to planning and checking one's own actions, quietened, and the medial prefrontal cortex, tied to expressing oneself, became busier. With only six players it is a small study, and each brain region has many roles.

PLOS ONERead card

StillnessHealth

When people sing together in a choir, their breathing falls into step with the music, and their heart rates can begin to rise and fall together too.

In a 2013 study in Frontiers in Psychology, Björn Vickhoff and colleagues at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden recorded the heartbeats of fifteen 18-year-olds as they sang together. The heart naturally speeds up a little on each in-breath and slows on each out-breath, a rhythm called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Because a song decides when everyone breathes, the singers' heart rates began to rise and fall together. The effect was strongest for a slow chant with breaths only between phrases and clear for a hymn. When the group simply hummed one note and breathed freely, their hearts did not fall into step. It was a small study, but a 2011 study of a choir in Berlin found a similar link.

Frontiers in Psychology / University of PotsdamRead card

DriveTechnology

In Toyota's car factories, any worker who spots a fault can pull a cord to call for help and, if it cannot be fixed quickly, stop the whole production line.

The idea comes from Toyota's roots in weaving. In 1924 Sakichi Toyoda built an automatic loom that stopped itself the moment a thread broke, so no faulty cloth was made and one person could look after many machines. His son Kiichiro turned the family loom company towards cars in the 1930s, and engineers led by Taiichi Ohno later made the principle a pillar of the Toyota Production System. It is called jidoka, usually translated as automation with a human touch. The cord is known as an andon, after the Japanese word for a paper lantern, because pulling it lights up a signal board. The reasoning is simple: fixing a fault at once costs less than finding it later in finished cars.

ToyotaRead card

DriveMind

When Google studied what made its most effective teams work, the strongest factor was psychological safety: people felt they could ask questions, admit mistakes or disagree without being punished or embarrassed.

The study, called Project Aristotle, began in 2012 and compared more than 180 of Google's own teams. Who was on a team, from seniority to personality, mattered less than how its members worked together. Five dynamics stood out: psychological safety, dependability, clear structure and roles, work that felt meaningful, and a sense that the work made an impact. Psychological safety came first by a wide margin. The term had been defined in 1999 by the Harvard Business School researcher Amy Edmondson as a shared belief that a team is safe for personal risks, such as admitting an error. The findings became widely known through a 2016 New York Times Magazine article; Google did not publish its data as a peer-reviewed study.

Google re:WorkRead card

DriveHistory

Grameen Bank, founded by economist Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh, helped spread microcredit: very small loans, given without collateral, to poor people whom ordinary banks would not serve.

During the Bangladesh famine of 1974, Yunus, then an economics professor at Chittagong University, saw how people in the nearby village of Jobra were trapped by moneylenders over tiny debts. In 1976 he lent a total of US$27 from his own pocket to 42 villagers, many of them makers of bamboo stools. The project became Grameen Bank by government order in 1983. Instead of offering collateral, borrowers join small groups whose members support one another, and about 97% of them are women. Yunus and the bank shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Later research was more cautious: six randomised studies in different countries, published together in 2015, found modest benefits but no large fall in poverty.

Nobel PrizeRead card

DriveTechnology

Kerb cuts, the small ramps where a pavement meets the road, were won by disabled campaigners for wheelchair users. They now help anyone pushing a pram, pulling a suitcase or wheeling a trolley.

Kalamazoo, Michigan, installed some of the first kerb cuts in the 1940s, in a pilot scheme proposed by the lawyer and war veteran Jack H. Fischer to help disabled veterans get to work. In the 1970s the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, California, a group run by disabled people and co-founded by Ed Roberts, pushed for cuts along Telegraph and Shattuck Avenues, creating one of the first continuous step-free routes through an American city. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 later made kerb ramps a legal requirement on new and altered streets across the United States. In 2017 the policy advocate Angela Glover Blackwell named the wider pattern the 'curb-cut effect': a change made for one group often ends up helping almost everyone.

Smithsonian / Stanford Social Innovation ReviewRead card

WonderScience

Male zebra finches, small Australian songbirds, are not born knowing their song. They learn it from an adult, usually their father, and practise for weeks until they get it right.

The zebra finch is one of the most studied birds in neuroscience because the way it learns to sing resembles the way a baby learns to talk. While still young, a male listens to an adult 'tutor', usually its father, and memorises his song. Soon it starts making quiet, jumbled sounds called subsong, a little like a baby's babbling, and over the next two months it shapes them until they match the memorised model. By about three months old the song is fixed and stays the same for life. Females do not sing. Because this learning is so regular and easy to record, laboratories such as those at Duke University use the birds to study how the brain learns sequences of sounds and movements.

Current Biology / Duke UniversityRead card

DriveLanguage

Braille is a writing system read with the fingertips: each letter is a pattern of raised dots within a small cell of six.

The system takes its name from Louis Braille, a blind French student who published it in 1829. Each cell has two columns of three dot positions, which gives 63 possible patterns in a space small enough to be felt with one touch of a fingertip. Besides letters, braille has contractions, short patterns for common words that make reading faster, and separate codes for mathematics, science and music. Today there are braille codes for more than 133 languages, including Turkish, which has its own signs for letters such as ç, ğ and ş. Many blind readers also use refreshable braille displays, devices whose small pins rise and fall to show text from a computer or phone. Since 2019 the United Nations has marked 4 January, Louis Braille's birthday, as World Braille Day.

Perkins School for the BlindRead card