Why Can’t The World’s Greatest Minds Solve The Mystery Of Consciousness?
Philosophers and scientists have been at war for decades over the question of what makes human beings more than complex robots. Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life?
Adidas Futurecraft Loop: A Running Shoe That Is Recyclable
The Futurecraft.Loop project ushered in a running shoe that has been designed from scratch to be recycled. Adidas’ thinking is not to take pre-existing products and make them more sustainable, but rather to create sustainable products from square one.
The 10/10/10 Rule For Tough Decisions
It’s good to sleep on it when there are tough choices to make, but you also need a strategy once you wake up–which is why you should employ the 10/10/10 rule. How will we feel about it 10 minutes from now? How about 10 months from now? How about 10 years from now?
Psychology Still Skews Western And Affluent. Can It Be Fixed?
For decades, the overwhelming majority of psychology research has examined people who live in the United States and other affluent Western countries. By focusing on such a narrow population, psychology researchers have — mostly unwittingly — presented a skewed view of the human mind.
The Real Reason The Sound Of Your Own Voice Makes You Cringe
A common explanation is that because we normally hear our own voice while talking, we receive both sound transferred to our ears externally by air conduction and sound transferred internally through our bones. This bone conduction of sound delivers rich low frequencies that are not included in air-conducted vocal sound.
Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes
The high speed of society has jammed your internal clock. Not long ago I diagnosed myself with the recently identified condition of sidewalk rage. It’s most pronounced when it comes to a certain friend who is a slow walker.
Why You Shouldn’t Exercise To Lose Weight, Explained With 60+ Studies
We’ve been taught for years that as long as you hit the gym you can hit the buffet line and still lose weight. But there’s plenty of science out there to prove this statement false.
What Separates Champions From ‘Almost Champions’?
For a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, talent development researchers Dave Collins, Áine MacNamara, and Neil McCarthy examined the differences between athletes who overcame adversity and went on to become world-class and those who struggled in the face of hardship.
Is Sunscreen The New Margarine?
A rogue band of researchers argues that what made the people with high vitamin D levels so healthy was not the vitamin itself. Their vitamin D levels were high because they were getting plenty of exposure to the thing that was really responsible for their good health—that big orange ball shining down from above.
What’s Creating Thousands Of Craters Off The California Coast?
Just off the coast of California, thousands of craterlike depressions, some as big as buses, dot the seafloor. These “micro depressions” are roughly 10 meters across and 1 meter deep—and nearly one-third of them contain garbage.
How Political Opinions Change
A powerful shaping factor about our social and political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities. For instance, researchers have found that moral and emotion messages on contentious political topics, such as gun-control and climate change, spread more rapidly within rather than between ideologically like-minded networks.
How We’ll Forget John Lennon
The report, “The universal decay of collective memory and attention,” concludes that people and things are kept alive through “oral communication” from about five to 30 years. They then pass into written and online records, where they experience a slower, longer decline.
Learn Anything In Four Steps With The Feynman Technique
With the Feynman Technique, you learn by teaching someone else a topic in simple terms so you can quickly pinpoint the holes in your knowledge. After four steps, you’re able to understand concepts more deeply and better retain the information.
How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind
I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people’s minds from getting hijacked. When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want to show you where it might do the opposite.
“AlphaGo”, Artificial Intelligence Taking On The Chinese Game Go
With more board configurations than there are atoms in the universe, the ancient Chinese game of Go has long been considered a grand challenge for artificial intelligence. On March 9, 2016, the worlds of Go and artificial intelligence collided in South Korea for an extraordinary best-of-five-game competition, coined The DeepMind Challenge Match.
The Hypersane Are Among Us, If Only We Are Prepared to Look
Hypersane people are calm, contained and constructive. It is not just that the ‘sane’ are irrational but that they lack scope and range, as though they’ve grown into the prisoners of their arbitrary lives, locked up in their own dark and narrow subjectivity.
Emotional Intelligence: The Social Skills You Weren’t Taught in School
How much of what you learned in school do you still remember? Even more importantly, how much of it do you actually use on a daily basis? Most of us aren’t taught how to identify or deal with our own emotions, or the emotions of others. These skills can be valuable, but you’ll never get them in a classroom.
Inside The Race To Build The Best Quantum Computer On Earth
Given their size and wealth, both Google and IBM have a shot at becoming serious players in the quantum computing business. Companies will rent their machines to tackle problems the way they currently rent cloud-based data storage and processing power from Amazon, Google, IBM, or Microsoft.
The Doomsday Invention: Will Artificial Intelligence Bring Us Utopia Or Destruction?
Philosopher Nick Bostrom argues that true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology—even nuclear weapons—and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction.
The Problem With Being A Long-Term Expat
People on long-term foreign assignments often find it hard to adjust once they return home. Many leave their company within a few years, and some leave the country entirely. Long absences can play havoc with a person’s sense of identity, a feeling that is intensified by the length of time away and how often they visit home.
Are Rich People Heartless?
According to Chris Ryan, the author of ‘Civilized to Death: the price of progress’, rich people have the tendency to distance themselves from people because of their wealth differential.