David G. Myers Quotes

Although history may therefore seem like a series of inevitable events, the actual future is seldom foreseen.

As morning approaches, body temperature rises, then peaks during the day, dips for a time in early afternoon (when many people take siestas), and begins to drop again in the evening. Thinking is sharpest and memory most accurate when we are at our daily peak in circadian arousal. Try pulling an all - nighter or working an occasional night shift. You'll feel groggiest in the middle of the night but may gain new energy when your normal wake - up time arrives.

Experiments show that when you move your wrist at will, you consciously experience the decision to move it about 0.2 seconds before the actual movement (Libet, 1985, 2004).But your brain waves jump about 0.35 seconds before you consciously perceive your decision to move (FIGURE 3.4)! The startling conclusion: Consciousness sometimes arrives late to the decision-making party.

By one estimate, your five senses take in 11,000,000 bits of information per second, of which you consciously process about 40 (Wilson, 2002).

No matter how sensible-seeming or wild an idea, the smart thinker asks: Does it work? When put to the test, can its predictions be confirmed? Subjected to such scrutiny, crazy-sounding ideas sometimes find support.

We look for wonders and the unseen reality-the hand of God- in things extrordinary, when more often his presence is to be found in the unheralded, familiar, everyday events of which life is woven.

Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich (2006) reported that there are more than 100 billion galaxies. One of these, our own relative speck of a galaxy, has a few hundred billion stars, many of which, like our Sun-star, are circled by planets. On the scale of outer space, we are less than a single grain of sand on all the oceans' beaches, and our lifetime but a relative nanosecond.