Mind: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 5

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DriveHistory

Mondragon, founded in the Basque Country of Spain in 1956, is one of the world's largest groups of worker cooperatives: many of its workers are also its owners.

It began with José María Arizmendiarrieta, a young Catholic priest who arrived in the town of Mondragón in 1941, when it was still poor after the Spanish Civil War. In 1943 he opened a technical school, and in 1956 five of its former students set up a small workshop called Ulgor, making paraffin heaters, as a cooperative. The group now works in industry, retail, finance and education, and in 2024 it had more than 70,000 workers, about 30,000 of them in the Basque Country. In its cooperatives each worker-member has one vote in the general assembly, which elects the governing council, and members share in profits and losses. Not everyone is a member, though: many staff, especially in companies abroad, are ordinary employees.

MONDRAGON Corporation / International Cooperative AllianceRead card

DriveMind

When you switch tasks before the first one feels closed, part of your attention can remain with the work you just left.

The organisational psychologist Sophie Leroy called this 'attention residue' in a 2009 study. People who left a task unfinished before starting another kept thinking about the first one and did worse on the second; those who had finished the first task, especially under a deadline, carried less of it with them. In later work with Theresa Glomb, published in 2018, Leroy found a simple remedy: before switching, jot down where you stopped and what you will do next. This 'ready-to-resume plan' helped people let go of the unfinished task and focus on the new one. It also helps explain why a day of constant switching can feel tiring even when no single task is hard.

Sophie LeroyRead card

StillnessLanguage

Code-switching is the movement between languages, dialects or registers as people read audience, place, safety and belonging.

The term first appeared in print in 1953, in work by the linguist Roman Jakobson and colleagues, who credited the idea to William Freeman Twaddell. For years many scholars treated mixing languages as a sign that a speaker had not fully mastered either. Research since the 1980s has reversed that view. In a 1980 study of Puerto Rican bilinguals in New York, the linguist Shana Poplack found that switches follow grammatical rules, and that the speakers most fluent in both languages were the ones who switched most often inside a single sentence. Other researchers showed that people switch for social reasons: to signal closeness or authority, to make a joke, to quote someone, or simply because a word fits better in the other language.

Linguistic anthropologyRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Care ethics is a school of moral philosophy that starts from the fact that everyone depends on others, as children, when ill and in old age, and asks what we owe to those who give and need care.

The American psychologist Carol Gilligan is usually seen as its founder. In her 1982 book In a Different Voice she challenged her mentor Lawrence Kohlberg, whose scale of moral development, built from interviews with boys, ranked reasoning about rules and rights above reasoning about relationships and responsibility, and so tended to rate women as less morally mature. The philosopher Nel Noddings developed the idea in her 1984 book Caring, arguing that responding to a particular person in need is a serious moral act, not a lesser one than applying a rule. The approach has shaped thinking in nursing, social work and disability rights, fields where much care work is unpaid or poorly paid.

Care ethicsRead card

StillnessHealth

Living for years with loud road, rail or aircraft noise can harm health. It is linked to broken sleep, poorer learning in children and a higher risk of heart disease, and the body keeps reacting even after people stop noticing the sound.

In 2020 the European Environment Agency estimated that at least 113 million people in Europe live with long-term road traffic noise of 55 decibels or more, averaged over day and night; that is the level the European Union uses to report harmful noise, and the World Health Organization recommends keeping road noise below 53. Studies link such exposure to disturbed sleep, raised stress hormones, poorer reading and memory in children near airports and busy roads, and more high blood pressure and heart disease. People do get used to a sound in the sense that they notice it less, but sleep studies show that heart rate still jumps when a lorry or plane passes at night.

WHO / European Environment AgencyRead card

WonderMind

A desire path is the unofficial track people wear into grass or soil by taking the same shortcut again and again. It often shows where planners put a path in the wrong place.

A worn path is evidence that the official route is too long, too roundabout or pointing the wrong way. Some planners use that on purpose. In Finland, park planners are said to visit parks just after the first snowfall, when the existing paths are hidden, to see where people's footprints go. Some desire paths have become major streets: part of Broadway in New York is thought to follow a trail used by the Wecquaesgeek, a Native American people, long before European colonists arrived. Universities and parks sometimes wait to see which tracks appear before deciding where to pave.

Urban design researchRead card

DrivePhilosophy

The capability approach, developed by the economist Amartya Sen, judges how well people live by what they are actually able to do and be, not only by how much money or resources they have.

The same income can mean very different lives depending on health, safety, education, disability, gender, transport and social freedom: a wheelchair user needs more resources than others to get around the same city. Sen set out the idea in a 1979 lecture, 'Equality of What?', and developed it through the 1980s. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum extended it in 2000 into a list of ten central capabilities, such as health, play and a say in political decisions, that she argued every government should secure. The approach also shaped the United Nations Human Development Index, created in 1990 by the economist Mahbub ul Haq with Sen, which ranks countries by health and education as well as income.

Amartya Sen / Martha NussbaumRead card

WonderScience

A returning honeybee tells the hive where food is by dancing: the angle of its 'waggle' encodes the direction relative to the sun, and its duration encodes the distance.

The dance takes place on the vertical honeycomb inside the dark hive. A run straight up the comb means 'fly towards the sun'; a run angled 40 degrees to the right of vertical means 'fly 40 degrees to the right of the sun'. The longer the waggle run lasts, the farther away the food: roughly one second stands for about a kilometre. The Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch worked this out over decades of experiments, publishing the direction and distance code in the 1940s, and shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen. In 2005 researchers tracked recruited bees by radar and confirmed that they fly where the dance points.

Karl von Frisch (Nobel Prize, 1973)Read card

WonderArt

Wassily Kandinsky, one of the pioneers of abstract painting, linked every colour to a sound. In his 1911 book he likened light blue to a flute, darker blue to a cello and the deepest blue to an organ.

The book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, argued that colour and form can move a viewer directly, the way music does, without showing anything recognisable. Kandinsky wrote that the sound of colours is so definite that nobody would try to express bright yellow in the bass notes. He also recalled that hearing Wagner's opera Lohengrin in Moscow had made him 'see' colours. Whether this was true synaesthesia, a condition in which one sense triggers another, is still debated. In 1911 he also co-founded the Munich artists' group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) with Franz Marc, and he gave his paintings musical titles such as Improvisation and Composition.

Art history (Wassily Kandinsky)Read card

StillnessLiterature

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

Kafka wrote this on 27 January 1904, aged twenty, to his schoolfriend Oskar Pollak, who became an art historian and was killed in 1915 on the Italian front in the First World War. Kafka was then a law student in Prague; his first book would not appear for another eight years. The letter sets out an early, uncompromising view of what literature should do: not comfort a reader, but shake one, the way a real loss would.

Franz KafkaRead card

StillnessProverbs

Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow.

In Swedish: 'Delad glädje är dubbel glädje, delad sorg är halv sorg.' The idea is old: in his dialogue On Friendship (44 BC), the Roman statesman Cicero wrote that friendship makes good fortune brighter and lightens misfortune by dividing and sharing it. German has the same pair, 'Geteilte Freude ist doppelte Freude, geteiltes Leid ist halbes Leid', and many other languages have their own version.

Swedish ProverbRead card

DriveProverbs

Practice makes the master.

In German: 'Übung macht den Meister.' The word Meister comes from the old craft guilds, in which an apprentice (Lehrling) became a journeyman (Geselle) and, after years of work, could qualify as a master. The proverb packs that path into four words: skill is built by repetition, not handed out as a gift. English says 'practice makes perfect'.

German ProverbRead card

DriveProverbs

Patience and work wear down every obstacle.

In Russian: 'Терпение и труд всё перетрут' (terpeniye i trud vsyo peretrut), literally 'patience and labour will grind through everything'. The rhyme of trud and peretrut makes it easy to remember, and it is one of the best-known Russian proverbs. Russian has a companion saying about water, 'a drop wears away stone', and the same image appears in the Latin 'gutta cavat lapidem'.

Russian ProverbRead card

WonderMind

A Western Australian study found no schizophrenia or other psychotic illness among 66 people blind from birth or early childhood because of damage to the brain's visual areas, known as cortical blindness. The group was small, and all were still only 14 to 35 when their records were analysed.

The study, published in Schizophrenia Research in 2018 by Vera Morgan and colleagues at the University of Western Australia, followed all 467,945 children born in the state between 1980 and 2001. Of these, 1,870 developed schizophrenia and 9,120 some form of psychotic illness, a condition in which a person loses touch with reality, for example through hallucinations. None of the 66 with cortical blindness did, whereas psychotic illness did occur among people whose blindness came from the eyes themselves. The authors cautioned that the group was small and many members had not yet reached the ages when schizophrenia usually begins. One idea is that a brain adapting to early blindness becomes better at checking its expectations against reality, but this study did not test any explanation.

Schizophrenia Research (2018)Read card

WonderMind

People tend to enjoy music most, and feel the strongest urge to move to it, when its rhythm is moderately syncopated: offbeat enough to surprise, yet still easy to follow.

Syncopation means putting the accent where the listener does not expect the beat, as in funk, jazz or reggae. Musicians call the pleasant pull to move with music 'groove'. In a 2014 study, Maria Witek, Peter Vuust and colleagues played listeners short funk drum breaks with different amounts of syncopation. Ratings of pleasure and of wanting to move formed an inverted U, a curve that rises and then falls: low for very plain rhythms, highest in the middle and low again for very complex ones. Vuust's group, now at Aarhus University's Center for Music in the Brain, explains this as the brain enjoying predictions that are challenged but not defeated. It is an average across listeners, not a rule for everyone.

Music neuroscienceRead card

WonderHistory

In 1983 Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov judged that a satellite warning of incoming US missiles was a false alarm and reported it as one. He was right, and his decision may have prevented a nuclear counter-strike.

On the night of 26 September 1983, Petrov was the duty officer at Serpukhov-15, a bunker near Moscow that monitored the Soviet Oko early-warning satellites. The system reported one American missile launch, then four more. He was expected to pass such a warning up the chain so that leaders could decide on a counter-strike. Petrov reasoned that a real American attack would begin with far more than five missiles, and ground radar showed nothing, so he reported a system fault. The cause turned out to be sunlight reflecting off high clouds, which the satellites mistook for launches. He received no reward from the Soviet military at the time, and the story became public only in 1998; later he received international peace awards.

HistoryRead card

WonderHistory

In 1848 Phineas Gage, an American railway foreman, survived an iron rod more than a metre long being blasted through his skull. Reports that his behaviour changed afterwards made him one of the first cases to link damage to the front of the brain with personality.

Gage was packing blasting powder into a rock with an iron tamping rod, 109 cm long and about 6 kg, when a spark set it off. The rod entered under his left cheekbone, left through the top of his head and landed some 25 metres away. It badly damaged his left frontal lobe, the part of the brain behind the forehead that helps with planning and self-control. His doctor, John Harlow, reported that he had become impulsive and foul-mouthed, and friends said he was 'no longer Gage'. Later retellings exaggerated how complete and lasting the change was: he went on to drive stagecoaches in Chile for several years. He died in 1860, and his skull and the rod are kept at Harvard's Warren Anatomical Museum.

Neuroscience historyRead card

WonderHistory

The dancing plague of 1518 began in July, when a woman started dancing in the streets of Strasbourg and could not stop. Within about a month, by some accounts, some 400 people had joined in, and some danced until they collapsed. Historians still debate the cause.

The first dancer is recorded as Frau Troffea. City records, sermons and chronicles show that the outbreak happened, though the numbers vary between sources. Physicians blamed 'hot blood', and the council, believing the dancers had to dance it out, hired musicians and set aside halls, which only drew more people in. In the end the dancers were taken to a shrine of St Vitus in the hills, a saint believed to be able to curse people with dancing and to cure them. Poisoning by ergot, a mould on rye, has been suggested, but it causes convulsions rather than days of dancing. The historian John Waller argues it was mass psychogenic illness, a stress reaction that spreads through a group, in a city worn down by famine and disease.

Medical historyRead card

WonderScience

After brain surgery in 1953 to stop severe epileptic seizures, Henry Molaison, known in research as patient H.M., could no longer form most new memories of facts and events. Yet he could still learn new physical skills.

Surgeon William Scoville removed the inner parts of both of Molaison's temporal lobes, including about two-thirds of each hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure now known to be central to forming new memories. Afterwards Molaison kept his intelligence, could hold a thought for a short while and remembered much of his earlier life, but new events faded within minutes. In the early 1960s psychologist Brenda Milner asked him to trace a star while seeing his hand only in a mirror. His errors fell day by day, although each day he had no memory of doing the task before. Studies of Molaison, continued for decades by Suzanne Corkin, showed that memory is not one system: learning a skill relies on different parts of the brain from remembering facts.

Neuroscience historyRead card

WonderHistory

In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, US warships dropped signal charges to force the Soviet submarine B-59 to the surface. Cut off from Moscow, its captain considered using the nuclear torpedo on board. Vasili Arkhipov, the submarine brigade's chief of staff, helped calm him, and the order to fire never reached the torpedo crew.

B-59 was one of four Soviet diesel submarines sent towards Cuba, each carrying one torpedo with a nuclear warhead. On 27 October it had been submerged for days: its batteries were running low, its air conditioning had failed and the heat inside was stifling. The US Navy used small practice depth charges as a signal to surface, but the submarine's crew had not been told about this procedure. According to a crew member's later account, captain Valentin Savitsky feared that war had begun and ordered the nuclear torpedo made ready, then calmed down after talking with Arkhipov and the political officer, and brought the submarine up. Historians still debate how close he came to firing, and whether several officers had to agree.

National Security ArchiveRead card

WonderMind

Identical twins Jim Lewis and Jim Springer, adopted by different families as babies, met in 1979 at 39. Both had married a Linda, divorced and married a Betty, named a son James Alan or James Allan, and owned a dog called Toy.

Their meeting led psychologist Thomas Bouchard at the University of Minnesota to begin the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, which went on to test well over a hundred pairs of twins brought up in different homes. Because such twins share their genes but not their upbringing, they help show how much of a trait is inherited. The study reported that roughly half the variation in personality, and more of the variation in measured intelligence, was linked to genes. Bouchard himself stressed that the two Jims were unusually alike: most separated twins differ in many ways, and some matches are less remarkable than they sound, since James, Linda and Betty were common names at the time.

Minnesota Study of Twins Reared ApartRead card

WonderSpace

The overview effect is what many astronauts report on seeing Earth from space: a sudden, powerful sense that the planet is small, fragile and has no visible borders. The writer Frank White named it in 1987.

White, an American writer on space, interviewed astronauts for his book The Overview Effect and heard the same themes again and again: a strong sense of connection with everyone on the planet, impatience with conflict and a wish to protect Earth. The Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, for instance, described a sudden sense of oneness with humanity on his way home from the Moon in 1971. A 2016 paper by the psychologist David Yaden and colleagues described the effect as a form of awe, the feeling of facing something vast that changes how we see ourselves. The evidence still rests mostly on astronauts' own accounts rather than on measurements.

Space psychologyRead card

WonderHistory

Orson Welles's 1938 radio play The War of the Worlds told American listeners, in the form of news bulletins, that Martians were landing in New Jersey. The story that it sent the country into mass panic was largely a newspaper creation; far fewer people panicked than the papers claimed.

The play, adapted from H. G. Wells's 1898 novel, went out on CBS the night before Halloween. A ratings survey that evening found only about 2 per cent of those asked were listening; most people had tuned to a popular comedy show on a rival network. Newspapers, which were losing advertising to radio, printed thousands of stories about mobs and suicides that were never confirmed. Some listeners were frightened and a few called the police, but there was no national stampede. A 1940 Princeton study, which estimated that more than a million people had been frightened, kept the legend alive. In 2013 the media historians Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow argued that the mass panic was largely a myth.

Slate / SmithsonianRead card

DriveLanguage

Sisu is the Finnish word for the reserve you reach after your resolve has already gone: not courage before the ordeal, but the stubbornness that turns up once it should have ended.

Finns describe sisu as something closer to a deep-seated grit than to bravery or perseverance, and specifically as what remains when normal capacity is spent. The word is old, and it became a national self-description during the Winter War of 1939–40, when a small Finnish army held out far longer than anyone expected against a Soviet invasion. The researcher Emilia Lahti has studied sisu as a psychological construct at Aalto University, distinguishing a healthy form, extraordinary action under pressure, from a harmful one that pushes past a limit that should have been respected.

FinnishRead card