Mind: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 7

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StillnessLanguage

Toki Pona is a language invented by the Canadian linguist Sonja Lang and first shared online in 2001, and it gets by with only about 120 to 140 core words. Speakers build everything else by combining them: a friend, for example, is a 'good person'.

Lang created Toki Pona partly to simplify her own thinking during a hard period in her life, drawing on Taoist ideas of simplicity. The name means 'good language' or 'simple language'. Most words carry several related meanings: 'moku' covers food, eating and drinking. The word count varies because Lang's 2014 book, Toki Pona: The Language of Good, listed about 120 words, and a 2021 dictionary based on how speakers actually use the language added more. Toki Pona has a small but lively community online, and in 2022 it received its own code, 'tok', in the international ISO list of languages.

Toki PonaRead card

WonderArt

Edvard Munch's The Scream is not one painting: the Norwegian artist made two painted versions, in 1893 and 1910, two in pastel and a lithograph print, all showing the same figure under a blood-red sky.

Munch described the moment behind it in a diary entry headed Nice, 22 January 1892: walking at sunset near Oslo, he felt a great scream pass through nature. So the scream belongs to the landscape; the figure is hearing it and covering its ears, not making it. The 1893 painting hangs in Norway's National Museum, and the Munch Museum in Oslo holds the 1910 painting and a pastel. A faint pencil note on the 1893 picture says it could only have been painted by a madman; in 2021 the National Museum confirmed the handwriting is Munch's own, probably added after critics attacked the work. The 1895 pastel, the one version in private hands, sold in 2012 for about 120 million dollars, then an auction record.

Edvard MunchRead card

StillnessMusic

John Cage's 4′33″, first performed in 1952, asks the performers to play nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The coughs, rustling and rain the audience hears instead become the music.

The pianist David Tudor gave the premiere on 29 August 1952 at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York, a wooden hall open to the woods. He marked the three sections by closing the keyboard lid at the start of each and opening it at the end, without playing a note. Cage later recalled hearing wind in the first part, rain on the roof in the second and people talking or walking out in the third. The idea grew partly from a visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard, a room built to absorb all sound, where he still heard two sounds: his own nervous system and his blood circulating. True silence, he concluded, does not exist; there is only sound we did not intend.

John CageRead card

DriveMind

Brazilian psychiatrist Nise da Silveira refused to treat her patients in Rio de Janeiro with lobotomy or electroshock. From 1946 she gave them studios for painting and modelling instead, and their work became the core of the Museum of Images of the Unconscious, founded in 1952.

Da Silveira qualified in medicine in Bahia in 1926, the only woman among 157 graduates. At a public psychiatric hospital in Rio she ran the occupational therapy section, where patients were treated through practical and creative activities. She saw painting not as a pastime but as a way to understand patients who could not easily put their experiences into words. In 1956 she opened Casa das Palmeiras, an outpatient centre where former patients could keep making art as they adjusted to life outside hospital. She corresponded with Carl Jung and led Rio's C. G. Jung Study Group until 1968. In 2022 Brazil entered her name in its official Book of Heroes and Heroines of the Homeland.

Nise da SilveiraRead card

StillnessHistory

Many people in pre-industrial Europe slept in two stretches, a 'first sleep' and a 'second sleep', with an hour or more awake in between. Historian A. Roger Ekirch found more than 500 references to the pattern, though how widespread it was is still debated.

Ekirch found the references in diaries, court records, medical books and literature: people woke after a first sleep to pray, talk, work or simply rest, then went back to bed. He argues that artificial lighting and changing daily routines pushed the pattern out. In 1992 the psychiatrist Thomas Wehr kept volunteers in 14 hours of darkness each night for a month; they settled into two blocks of about four hours' sleep with a wakeful gap between. But a 2015 study of three societies without electricity, in Tanzania, Namibia and Bolivia, found that people there slept in one stretch, a finding Ekirch disputes.

Segmented sleepRead card

StillnessLanguage

The Japanese saying ichi-go ichi-e, roughly 'one time, one meeting', comes from the tea ceremony: every gathering is unique and can never be repeated exactly, even when the same people meet again.

The idea goes back to the sixteenth-century tea master Sen no Rikyū. His student Yamanoue Sōji wrote that guests should treat their host as if the meeting could happen only once in a lifetime. In 1858 Ii Naosuke, a tea master who was also the shogun's chief minister, fixed the four-character phrase in a book on tea, noting that even the same host and guests could never recreate a past gathering. Today it is used far beyond the tea room, as a reminder to value each encounter.

Ichi-go ichi-eRead card

StillnessMind

Older adults who took a weekly 15-minute walk looking out for things that filled them with awe felt more joy and less daily distress over eight weeks, a 2020 study of 60 people found. In the selfies they took on the walks, they gradually gave themselves less of the frame.

Awe is the feeling of standing before something vast that you cannot take in at once, such as a mountain view or a sky full of stars. Neuroscientist Virginia Sturm and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, randomly divided healthy older volunteers into two groups: one was asked to seek out awe on its walks, the other simply walked. Both took photos of themselves on every walk. Over time the awe group's selfies showed more scenery and less of the walker, and their smiles grew broader. Scores for anxiety and depression did not change in either group, so the study points to a small daily lift in mood, not a treatment.

Awe walk studyRead card

StillnessMind

Seeing or hearing birds is linked to a better mood that lasts for hours, according to a 2022 smartphone study of 1,292 people. Participants who noticed birds at one check-in also rated their mental wellbeing higher at the next one, hours later.

The study used Urban Mind, an app developed at King's College London that prompts people several times a day to say what they can see and hear at that moment and how they feel. Asking in the moment avoids the distortions of remembering one's mood later. Between April 2018 and October 2021, the 1,292 participants answered 26,856 of these prompts. The link with birdlife showed up both in healthy people and in those with a diagnosis of depression, the most common mental illness in the world. Because the study only observed people rather than testing an intervention, it cannot prove that the birds caused the lift: places with birds may be pleasanter in other ways too.

Urban Mind studyRead card

StillnessMind

Walking helps people come up with new ideas: in Stanford experiments published in 2014, participants produced on average about 60 per cent more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. The gain was clearest on tasks with many possible answers, such as finding unusual uses for an everyday object.

Psychologists Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz ran four experiments with 176 people. Their main test asked for as many uses as possible for an everyday object, a measure of 'divergent thinking': the kind that produces many options rather than one right answer. Walking raised the scores of 81 per cent of participants, whether they walked outdoors or on a treadmill facing a blank wall, so the scenery was not the explanation. The boost even lingered for a while after people sat down again. Walking helped much less with puzzles that have a single correct answer, which psychologists call convergent thinking: only 23 per cent improved on those.

Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014Read card

StillnessMind

Silence between pieces of music can relax the body more than the music itself. In a 2006 study of 24 people, fast music raised heart rate, blood pressure and breathing; during a two-minute pause all three fell, even below the levels measured before the music began.

Physician Luciano Bernardi of the University of Pavia in Italy, with Cesare Porta and Peter Sleight, tested 12 practising musicians and 12 people of the same age without musical training. Each listened to six styles in random order, including rap, techno, Indian raga and classical music, with a two-minute pause inserted at a random point. Tempo mattered more than style: faster music and simpler rhythms were the most stimulating, while slow or meditative music had a calming effect. The musicians' breathing followed the tempo more closely than the others'. The authors suggested that alternating music and pauses might help with stress, but a single small laboratory study is only a starting point.

Bernardi study, 2006Read card

StillnessCulture

Inemuri, often translated as 'sleeping while present', is the Japanese custom of dozing in a meeting or other social or work setting while still counting as part of it. It is not simply any sleep in public: the sleeper is expected to stay ready to rejoin the situation.

The word is written 居眠り, from 'i', to be present, and 'nemuri', sleep. Brigitte Steger, a Cambridge scholar of Japanese society who has written widely about sleep in Japan, describes it as governed by unwritten rules. The higher someone's status, the more acceptable it is: a senior manager or a member of parliament nodding off in a long session can even be read as a sign of dedication, of someone who has worked to exhaustion, while a junior employee has far less licence. The sleeper should keep a proper posture and stay socially 'present', ready to respond if addressed. It is common on crowded commuter trains, but it is a tolerated custom, not an official workplace virtue.

InemuriRead card

StillnessMind

Forest kindergartens are early-years programmes, usually for children aged three to six, that use woodland or other natural settings as the main classroom. The children often spend most of the day outside, in almost any weather.

The idea is usually traced to Ella Flatau in Denmark, who in the early 1950s began spending her days with children in the woods near her home; neighbours' interest turned it into a regular kindergarten. Germany had informal nature kindergartens from 1968, but it officially recognised forest kindergartens as a form of daycare only in 1993, which opened the way to state funding. Their number grew from about 450 in 2005 to more than 1,500 by 2017. The model has since spread to Sweden, the UK, the US and beyond, sometimes under the name 'forest school'. Most keep a hut or shelter for the worst weather, but the day is built around outdoor play, with adults supporting it rather than directing it.

Forest kindergartenRead card

StillnessMind

Japanese railway staff point at signals, gauges and doors and call out what they see, a checking routine called shisa kanko, or 'pointing and calling'. In a 1994 test by Japan's Railway Technical Research Institute, it cut mistakes on a simple task by almost 85 per cent.

The habit began on Japanese steam locomotives in the early 1900s, when drivers and firemen called out signals to each other; pointing was added a few decades later. The idea is that a routine check done by eye alone can slip past unnoticed, while pointing and speaking make the brain register it. The often quoted figure comes from a controlled task run by Japan's Railway Technical Research Institute, not from accident statistics across the network. The practice has spread beyond Japan: the New York City Subway adopted a version in 1996 after incidents in which train doors were opened too early, and Toronto's transit systems use it too. Pilots rely on a related habit, reading instructions back aloud.

Shisa kankoRead card

WonderMind

The widely repeated claim that the human attention span has fallen to eight seconds, supposedly less than a goldfish's, traces to a 2015 marketing report. The figure it quoted has never been traced to any study.

The figure appeared in a 2015 report by Microsoft Canada's advertising team, which credited it to a statistics website, Statistic Brain, that named no traceable study behind it. In 2017 the BBC journalist Simon Maybin followed the trail and found neither research measuring an eight-second human attention span nor any study showing that goldfish manage only nine seconds. Psychologists do not treat attention as a single number. Staying focused on a task, noticing something new and keeping information in mind are measured in different ways, and each depends heavily on the task, the setting and how interesting the material is. Attention can fade in minutes on a dull task and last for hours on an absorbing one.

Attention span mythRead card

WonderMind

The 'Mozart effect', the popular idea that listening to Mozart makes you cleverer, grew from a 1993 study of just 36 college students. After hearing a Mozart sonata, their scores on a spatial-reasoning task rose for only 10 to 15 minutes; later reviews found no lasting boost to intelligence.

Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Catherine Ky published the study in the journal Nature. Students listened to ten minutes of Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, a relaxation recording or silence, then did paper-folding-and-cutting puzzles from the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. The Mozart group did better, but only briefly, and the study involved no babies, no children and no measure of general intelligence. Publicity turned it into a promise that classical music makes children smarter: in 1998 the governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, proposed $105,000 a year to give every newborn in the state a classical recording. Later analyses found at most small, short-lived effects, most likely because lively music lifts mood and alertness.

The Mozart effectRead card

WonderScience

In 2025, five people saw a colour called 'olo', a blue-green more saturated than anything in nature. Berkeley researchers produced it by aiming lasers at single cells in the retina so that only the eye's 'green' cone cells responded, something natural light cannot do.

The eye sees colour with three kinds of cone cell, sensitive to short, medium and long wavelengths and loosely called blue, green and red. Their sensitivities overlap, so any natural light that reaches the medium, or 'M', cones also stimulates their neighbours. The team, led by Ren Ng and Austin Roorda at the University of California, Berkeley, mapped individual cones in a small patch of each participant's retina, tracked the eye as it moved and sent tiny laser pulses to M cones alone. Their paper appeared in Science Advances in April 2025. The name comes from 0-1-0: only the middle cone type switched on. The closest a screen can show is a strong teal, but participants described olo as far more saturated.

The 'Oz' experimentRead card

DriveLiterature

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

James Baldwin (1924–1987), the American novelist and essayist, wrote this in 'As Much Truth As One Can Bear', an essay in The New York Times Book Review in January 1962. His subject was novelists: he argued that the American writers of his day avoided looking honestly at their own country. The sentence turns on itself, 'everything' becoming 'nothing', and its promise is modest: facing a problem does not guarantee change, but nothing changes without it. Today it is quoted far beyond literature, often in debates about race and justice.

James Baldwin, 'As Much Truth As One Can Bear' (1962)Read card

StillnessLiterature

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) was an American novelist and anthropologist of the Harlem Renaissance who collected Black folklore in the American South. This sentence opens chapter 3 of her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Its heroine, Janie, is a teenager whose grandmother has arranged her marriage to an older farmer, Logan Killicks, believing it will keep her safe. Janie hopes love will follow the wedding; it does not. The novel follows the years that answer her, through two more marriages and her own hard-won voice.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)Read card

StillnessLiterature

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) wrote this in The Captive, the fifth volume of his novel In Search of Lost Time, published in 1923, after his death. The narrator is listening to music by Vinteuil, an imaginary composer, and reflects that great artists let us see the world through another person's eyes, then through a hundred others, each showing a different universe. Art, not travel, is the voyage he means. The popular line 'the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes' is a later paraphrase, often shared as travel advice.

Marcel Proust, The Captive (1923)Read card

DriveLiterature

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver (1935–2019), an American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984, closes 'The Summer Day', from House of Light (1990), with this question. The poem begins by asking who made the world, then looks closely at one grasshopper eating sugar from the poet's hand. Oliver admits she does not know exactly what prayer is, but she knows how to pay attention and how to spend a day wandering the fields. Only then does she ask. Read that way, the question is less a call to achieve than an invitation to notice.

Mary Oliver, 'The Summer Day', House of Light (1990)Read card

StillnessLiterature

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Joan Didion (1934–2021), the American essayist and novelist, opens her essay 'The White Album' with this sentence, and the essay gave its title to her 1979 collection. It covers Los Angeles in the late 1960s, from the Manson murders to the Doors and the Black Panthers, and describes a time when she could no longer make events fit any story. She even includes her own psychiatric report from the summer of 1968. The line is often quoted as comfort; in the essay it is closer to a warning that the stories we live by may not hold.

Joan Didion, The White Album (1979)Read card

DriveLiterature

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Annie Dillard (born 1945), the American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, wrote this in The Writing Life (1989), a short book about the daily work of writing. The next sentence, rarely quoted, says that what we do with this hour and the next is what we are doing. Her point is practical: a schedule protects a day from chaos and whim, like a net for catching days. She also advised writers to work in a plain room with no view.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989)Read card

StillnessLiterature

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'

Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007), the American novelist best known for Slaughterhouse-Five, took the habit from his uncle Alex, who thought people too seldom noticed when they were happy. On summer days, drinking lemonade under an apple tree, Alex would break off the conversation to say how nice it was. Vonnegut passed the advice on in graduation speeches for decades and repeated it in A Man Without a Country (2005), the last book published in his lifetime. It carries weight coming from him: as a young prisoner of war, he had survived the firebombing of Dresden in 1945.

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country (2005)Read card

StillnessLiterature

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to tell it.

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014), the Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, placed this sentence at the start of his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale (2002). It warns the reader that what follows is memory, shaped for telling. The book opens in 1950, when his mother asked him, then 22, to go with her to Aracataca, the town of his childhood, to sell the family house. He later saw that journey as the moment he found what he would write about.

Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale (2002)Read card