Mind: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 8

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StillnessPhilosophy

All of humanity's misfortune comes from one thing: not knowing how to remain at rest in a room.

The line comes from the Pensées, the notes the French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal was gathering for a defence of Christianity when he died in 1662; they were published in 1670. It belongs to his discussion of divertissement, or diversion: hunting, gambling, court business and every other occupation that keeps people from thinking about their own condition. Even a king, he wrote, becomes miserable once nothing distracts him. The popular English version often adds 'alone', but Pascal's French says only that people cannot stay quietly 'in a room'. In a 2014 study published in Science, many volunteers left alone with their thoughts for fifteen minutes chose to give themselves a mild electric shock rather than do nothing.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

Iris Murdoch, the Irish-born writer who taught philosophy at Oxford, published twenty-six novels alongside her philosophy and thought the two jobs were closer than her colleagues allowed. The line comes from her 1959 essay 'The Sublime and the Good', and the next sentence continues: love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. Her claim is that we default to a soft version of the world in which other people are supporting characters. Noticing, properly and repeatedly, that they are not is both what good art trains and what goodness consists of.

Iris Murdoch, 'The Sublime and the Good' (1959)Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.

Hume published A Treatise of Human Nature in 1739, when he was twenty-seven. It sold so poorly that he later wrote, in a short autobiography, that it 'fell dead-born from the press'. In it he argues that reason can discover facts and relations and can work out the means to a given end, but it cannot by itself supply the ends we care about or tell us what to want. Calling reason the 'slave of the passions' is therefore a claim about what moves us to act, not a dismissal of reasoning. It belongs to his wider view that moral judgements come from feeling rather than from reason alone.

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)Read card

DrivePhilosophy

The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression.

bell hooks was an American writer and teacher, born Gloria Jean Watkins in Kentucky in 1952. She wrote under her great-grandmother's name, kept deliberately in lower case so that readers would look at the argument rather than the author. The line comes from 'Love as the Practice of Freedom', an essay in Outlaw Culture, and the next sentence says that choosing love also means moving towards freedom. Love, in her books, is not a feeling that happens to you but something you do. She treated it as political work rather than private consolation, which is why the sentence puts choosing and resisting in the same breath.

bell hooks, Outlaw Culture (1994)Read card

DriveTechnology

Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.'

Grace Hopper was a US Navy rear admiral and computer pioneer. She wrote one of the first programs that translated English-like instructions into machine code and helped shape COBOL, one of the first widely used programming languages. The OCLC Newsletter printed this line in its March/April 1987 issue, in a feature on her wit and wisdom, and she went on to say that she tried to fight the habit, which was why the clock on her wall ran anticlockwise. The sharper version that circulates under her name, 'The most dangerous phrase in the language is...', has an older root: in 1976 Computerworld reported her saying the most dangerous phrase a data-processing manager can use is 'We've always done it that way.'

Grace Hopper, OCLC Newsletter (March/April 1987)Read card

StillnessScience

I start with the seedling, and I don't want to leave it. I don't feel I really know the story if I don't watch the plant all the way along.

At Cold Spring Harbor in the late 1940s, McClintock found what she called controlling elements, now known as transposable elements or 'jumping genes': pieces of DNA in maize that can move from one place on a chromosome to another and switch nearby genes on or off. She presented the work in 1951 and later recalled that the audience met it with puzzlement, even hostility. It stayed outside mainstream genetics for decades, until mobile DNA was found in bacteria and fruit flies too. In 1983 she won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine unshared, and she remains the only woman to have done so. The line comes from Evelyn Fox Keller's 1983 biography, A Feeling for the Organism.

Barbara McClintock, quoted in Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism (1983)Read card

WonderScience

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it.

Carson wrote this about her grand-nephew Roger, whom she carried down to the Maine shore one stormy night to watch the breaking waves, and later took out with a torch to look for ghost crabs. She was a marine biologist whose books had already changed how the public saw the ocean, and she went on to write 'Silent Spring' (1962). The text first appeared as a magazine article in 1956. She hoped to expand it into a book but died of breast cancer in 1964, and it was published the following year as 'The Sense of Wonder'.

Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (1965)Read card

DriveArt

There is safety in the midst of danger. What would life be if we didn't dare to take things in hand?

Van Gogh wrote these sentences to his brother Theo on 29 December 1881, days after a bitter quarrel with his father, a Protestant minister, on Christmas Day. He had left the family home in Etten and settled in The Hague to work as an artist, taking lessons from the painter Anton Mauve, who was married to Van Gogh's cousin. He was twenty-eight, had been drawing seriously for barely a year, and lived on money Theo sent him each month. This wording follows the scholarly edition of the letters; the familiar 'if we had no courage to attempt anything' is an older, looser translation of the same passage.

Vincent van Gogh, letter to his brother Theo (1881)Read card

DriveArt

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.

Martha Graham, the American dancer and choreographer who helped create modern dance, said this in 1943 to her fellow choreographer Agnes de Mille. De Mille had just had the biggest success of her life with the dances for the musical 'Oklahoma!' and was miserable about it: she thought the work only fairly good and no longer trusted her own judgement. Graham's reply was that an artist does not get to grade the work. The job is to keep the channel open, and no artist is ever satisfied; that restlessness, Graham said, is what keeps us marching. De Mille recorded the conversation in her 1991 biography of Graham.

Martha Graham, quoted in Agnes de Mille, Martha (1991)Read card

DriveLiterature

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.

Ray Bradbury, the American author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, said this in a 1995 interview with Brown University's student newspaper. In 2010 he told CNN that he did not think about his work, he simply did it, and used the same image of building wings on the way down. He had worked that way from the start. Around 1950, with no money for an office, he wrote the first version of Fahrenheit 451 in the basement of a UCLA library on a rented typewriter that ran on coins: ten cents bought half an hour. The clock made him write fast, and the first draft cost him nine dollars and eighty cents.

Ray Bradbury, interview in The Brown Daily Herald (24 March 1995)Read card

DriveMind

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, the Princeton University Press collection of his sayings, lists this line among those wrongly credited to him. Its earliest known uses date from 1981, twenty-six years after his death: in October a Knoxville newspaper quoted it from a meeting of Al-Anon, a support group for families of alcoholics, and in November it appeared in a Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet. It grew up in recovery groups, where it describes the loop of addiction; Einstein's name was attached later.

Widely attributed to Albert Einstein; first traced to 1981Read card

StillnessPhilosophy

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and mathematician, wrote this in 'The Triumph of Stupidity', a newspaper essay of 1933, months after Hitler came to power in Germany. He was asking why movements driven by certainty and energy were winning while thoughtful people hesitated. The essay was later collected in Mortals and Others. A snappier version, about fools and fanatics being so certain and wiser people so full of doubts, circulates widely, but it is a paraphrase, not his wording.

Bertrand Russell, 'The Triumph of Stupidity' (1933)Read card

StillnessLiterature

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

The line comes from The Little Prince, the illustrated tale that the French pilot and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry published in New York in 1943, while in exile during the Second World War. A fox teaches it to the prince while explaining what it means to 'tame' someone: to build a bond through time, attention and care. The prince then understands that his rose matters to him not because she is unlike other roses, but because of the time he has given her.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943)Read card

WonderLanguage

In Aymara, a language of the Andes, the word for the past, nayra, also means 'eye' and 'front', and speakers point ahead of themselves for the past and behind them for the future: the reverse of most languages studied.

The Aymara live around Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, Peru and Chile. In 2006 the cognitive scientists Rafael Núñez and Eve Sweetser analysed hours of video-recorded interviews and found that speakers' hand gestures matched their words: they pointed forward when talking about the past and back over the shoulder for the future. The pattern was strongest among older people who spoke little Spanish. The usual explanation is that Aymara ties time to sight: what is known has been seen and lies in front of you, while the unknown future is out of sight, behind you.

Rafael Núñez & Eve Sweetser, Cognitive Science (2006)Read card

WonderLanguage

Russian has two basic words for blue: goluboy for light blue and siniy for dark blue. In a 2007 experiment, Russian speakers told two blues apart faster when the shades had different names, and the advantage vanished when their verbal memory was kept busy.

The study, led by Jonathan Winawer and published in PNAS, showed volunteers three blue squares and asked which of the lower two matched the top one. Russian speakers were faster when the two blues fell on opposite sides of the goluboy/siniy line; English speakers, who call both 'blue', showed no such effect. When the Russians silently rehearsed a string of digits, which ties up verbal memory, the advantage disappeared, but a spatial memory task left it intact. This supports a modest form of linguistic relativity, the idea that language can influence thought: words can speed up a judgement, but they do not change what the eyes can see.

Winawer et al., PNAS (2007)Read card

WonderLanguage

The Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon speak a language that linguist Daniel Everett, who lived among them for years, argues lacks recursion: the ability to nest one clause inside another, as in 'the man who bought the boat left.' His claim is hotly disputed, since recursion had been proposed as a universal feature of human language.

Everett, who first went to the Pirahã as a missionary in 1977, makes other disputed claims too: that the language has no exact number words, only terms for 'a small amount' and 'a larger amount', and no colour words beyond 'light' and 'dark'. He links these gaps to what he calls the immediacy of experience principle, a cultural habit of talking only about what the speaker, or someone they know, has witnessed. Pirahã has one of the smallest sound systems known, and it can be whistled or hummed. In 2009 the linguists Andrew Nevins, David Pesetsky and Cilene Rodrigues argued, using Everett's own earlier descriptions, that the language does nest clauses after all. Everett told his story, including losing his Christian faith, in 'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes' (2008).

Daniel Everett, Pirahã fieldwork and subsequent linguistics debateRead card

WonderMind

In a 2002 study, people rated how well they understood everyday devices such as zips and bicycle gears, then tried to write a step-by-step explanation of how they work. Once they tried, their ratings dropped sharply: they knew far less about how the parts worked than they had believed.

Psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil of Yale called this the illusion of explanatory depth: people mistake being familiar with something for understanding how it works, and notice the gap only when they have to explain each step. Their first experiment used 16 Yale undergraduates. In later experiments the illusion was strong for devices and natural processes, but did not appear for plain facts such as capital cities, for procedures, or for the plots of stories, where people judged their knowledge more accurately. In 2013 Philip Fernbach and colleagues found the same with politics: after trying to explain how policies such as a cap-and-trade scheme for carbon emissions would work, people rated their understanding lower and held more moderate views.

Leonid Rozenblit & Frank Keil, 2002 study (Cognitive Science)Read card

WonderMind

In 1954, psychologist Leon Festinger and colleagues secretly joined a small Chicago group who believed a great flood would end the world and a flying saucer would rescue them. When nothing happened, some of the most committed members decided their faith had saved the world, and began spreading their beliefs more eagerly than before.

The group was led by Dorothy Martin, called Marian Keech in the book, who said she received messages from beings on another planet warning of a flood before dawn on 21 December 1954. Some members had left jobs and given away possessions before the date. Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter described what happened in 'When Prophecy Fails' (1956). It became a founding case for Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance: the discomfort of holding two ideas, or an idea and an action, that clash. He argued that people often ease that discomfort not by dropping the belief but by reinterpreting the evidence, especially when they have given up a lot for it and others around them share it.

Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken & Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails (1956)Read card

WonderMind

Psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson found that people consistently overestimate how intensely, and for how long, a future event such as a win, a job loss or a breakup will affect their mood. Both good and bad feelings tend to fade faster than we expect.

Researchers call this overestimate the impact bias. One cause is focalism, also called the focusing illusion: when we picture a future event, we think about it alone and forget the ordinary things, work, friends, meals, that will keep pulling our mood back towards its usual level. In a 1998 study, David Schkade and Daniel Kahneman found that students in California and the Midwest were equally satisfied with their lives, yet both groups expected Californians to be happier, because they focused on the weather. Gilbert and Wilson also describe 'immune neglect': people underrate how well they cope with bad news, making sense of it and finding reasons to feel better, so they expect setbacks to hurt for longer than they do.

Daniel Gilbert & Timothy Wilson, affective forecasting researchRead card

WonderMind

In the early 1880s, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus memorised lists of made-up syllables such as 'wid' and 'zof', then timed how long it took to relearn each list after different delays. He found that forgetting is fastest just after learning and then slows: most of what is lost goes within the first day.

He published the results in 1885 in 'Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology', and his graph became known as the forgetting curve. It was one of the first times a mental process had been measured with numbers rather than described in words. He used meaningless syllables so that no list would be easier because of what it meant, and he was his own only subject. Ebbinghaus also noticed that spreading repetitions over several days works better than cramming them into one sitting, now called the spacing effect; flashcard apps that schedule a review just before you would forget are built on it. In 2015 Jaap Murre and Joeri Dros repeated his method and obtained a very similar curve.

Hermann Ebbinghaus, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885)Read card

WonderMind

In a 1998 experiment, people watched a rubber hand being stroked with a brush while their own hand, hidden from view, was stroked at the same moment. Many soon felt the touch on the rubber hand, as if it had become part of their body.

Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen reported the finding in a one-page paper in Nature titled 'Rubber hands "feel" touch that eyes see'. The illusion works because the brain decides what belongs to the body partly by matching what the eyes see with what the skin feels. Later studies showed that people's skin starts to sweat, a sign of alarm, when the rubber hand is suddenly threatened, and in 2008 Valeria Petkova and Henrik Ehrsson used cameras and head-mounted displays to make people feel a whole mannequin's body as their own. Researchers now use such illusions to study phantom limb pain, body image and how people might come to feel a prosthetic limb as part of themselves.

Botvinick & Cohen, Nature (1998)Read card

WonderMind

After surgery removed part of his visual cortex, the brain's main area for sight, a patient known as D.B. said he was completely blind in part of his visual field. Yet when researchers asked him to guess the position or orientation of objects there, he was right far more often than chance.

D.B.'s operation, in 1973, removed a tangle of abnormal blood vessels from the back of the right side of his brain. Lawrence Weiskrantz and colleagues described his case in the journal Brain in 1974 and coined the word blindsight for it: responding correctly to things one cannot consciously see. One explanation is that the eyes do not send signals only to the visual cortex; some fibres go to older structures such as the superior colliculus in the midbrain, which helps steer the eyes and head and is found in some form in all vertebrates. Blindsight matters in debates about consciousness because it shows the brain can use what the eyes take in without the person having any experience of seeing.

Lawrence Weiskrantz, patient D.B. researchRead card

WonderMind

In a 1966 study of the tip-of-the-tongue feeling, Roger Brown and David McNeill read people definitions of rare words, such as a small boat used in East Asian harbours. Those who got stuck often still knew the word's first letter and number of syllables, though the word itself would not come.

The boat was a sampan, and people who could not find the word came up with near misses such as 'Saipan', 'Siam' and 'sarong'. Psychologists think a word's meaning and its sound are stored in linked but separate parts of memory: in a tip-of-the-tongue state the meaning is active, but the signal does not fully reach the sound, so only fragments such as the first letter get through. The feeling becomes more common with age, and names are especially prone to it, since a name carries little meaning that could lead back to it. It seems to be universal: one survey found that 45 of 51 languages have an expression for it, like the Turkish 'dilimin ucunda'.

Roger Brown & David McNeill, 1966 studyRead card

WonderMind

People differ in how finely they tell their feelings apart: one person separates anxiety, irritation, disappointment and loneliness, while another simply feels 'bad'. Psychologists call this emotional granularity, and people with more of it tend to handle difficult feelings more flexibly.

Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett first reported these differences in 1995 under the name emotion differentiation, and coined 'emotional granularity' in 2004. It is usually measured with experience sampling: people rate their feelings several times a day for weeks, and researchers check whether they use words like 'angry', 'sad' and 'nervous' for distinct states or for one general bad mood. Studies have linked higher granularity to using more ways of calming strong negative feelings, and some have found less heavy drinking and aggression under stress. A precise label helps because 'this is disappointment, not anger' points to a different response. Barrett's wider theory, that the brain constructs emotions from bodily signals and past experience, is influential but debated.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, emotional granularity researchRead card