John Brockman Quotes

I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?

Some places in the world, such as Ramsar, Iran, have a tenfold higher background radiation,

Bad behavior is seen as something to be noticed, reported on, and analyzed, whereas people who do not lie and cheat are taken for granted.

Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don't know, not a weakness to avoid.

Creativity is a fragile flower, but perhaps it can be fertilized with systematic doses of serendipity.

If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research.

Filters fail when they know us too well and when they don't know us well enough.

The story emerging from these studies is not yet complete, but it has already led to fascinating insights. Thanks to its microbes, a baby can better digest its mother's milk. And your ability to digest carbohydrates relies to a significant extent on enzymes that can be made only by genes present not in you but in your microbiome.

Every aspect of life is an experiment that can be better understood if it is perceived in that way.

Psychological well-being is not determined by the presence of one type of emotion but by a diversity of emotions, both positive and negative. Whether or not an emotion is "good" or "bad" seems to have surprisingly little to do with the emotion itself but rather with how mindfully we ride the ebbing and flowing tides of our rich emotional life.

Computers are fine, but it's time to return to the mind itself and stop pretending we have computers for brains.

The universe has been around for 13.8 billion years and

Mischel refers to this skill as the "strategic allocation of attention," and he argues that it's the skill underlying self-control. Too often, we assume that willpower is about having strong moral fiber. But that's wrong. Willpower is really about properly directing the spotlight of attention, learning how to control that short list of thoughts in working memory. It's about realizing that if we're thinking about the marshmallow, we're going to eat it, which is why we need to look away.

We'd be unfeeling, unconscious zombies if we did.

Economics graduate students are far more likely to free-ride than other students.

I believe that consciousness is, essentially, the way information feels when being processed.

It's an illusion to believe that you can be happy when no one else is. Or that other people will not be affected by your unhappiness.

it is difficult to discern where "you" end and the remainder of the world begins.

Happy brains are all alike; every unhappy brain is unhappy in its own way.

What is the universe, anyway? To test your knowledge of the universe, please complete the following sentence. The universe (a) consists of all things visible and invisible - what is, has been, and will be. (b) began 13.8 billion years ago in a giant explosion called the Big Bang and encompasses all planets, stars, galaxies, space, and time. (c) was licked out of the salty rim of the primordial fiery pit by the tongue of a giant cow. (d) All of the above. (Correct answer below.)

After several decades of empirical study, Jaques concluded that just as humans differ in intelligence, we differ in our ability to handle time-dependent complexity. We all have a natural time horizon we are comfortable with: what Jaques called "time span of discretion," or the length of the longest task an individual can successfully undertake.

The universe consists primarily of dark matter. We can't see it, but it has an enormous gravitational force. The conscious mind - much like the visible aspect of the universe - is only a small fraction of the mental world. The dark matter of the mind, the unconscious, has the greatest psychic gravity. Disregard the dark matter of the universe and anomalies appear. Ignore the dark matter of the mind and our irrationality is inexplicable.

By undercutting fundamentalism and intolerance, education would curtail violence and war. By empowering women, it would curb poverty and the population explosion.

Civilizations do fail. We have never seen one that hasn't. The difference is that the torch of progress has, in the past, always passed to another region of the world. But we now for the first time have a single, global civilization. If it fails, we all fail together.

After all, there have never been loonies carrying signs saying, "The End is Not Near.

They fight against popular creationism, but at the same time they fight fanatically for their own creationism," he

Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time.

That's the way of all good explanations. The better they are, the more questions they raise.

But there is another case for curating as a vanguard activity for the twenty-first century. As the artist Tino Sehgal has pointed out, modern societies find themselves today in an unprecedented situation: The problem of lack, or scarcity, which has been the primary factor motivating scientific and technological innovation, is now joined and even superseded by the problem of the global effects of overproduction and resource use. Thus, moving beyond the object as the locus of meaning has a further relevance. Selection, presentation, and conversation are ways for human beings to create and exchange real value, without dependence on older, unsustainable processes. Curating can take the lead in pointing us toward this crucial importance of choosing.

Twice as many people in India have access to cell phones as to latrines.