This Will Make You Smarter Quotes

“Every aspect of life is an experiment that can be better understood if it is perceived in that way.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“By undercutting fundamentalism and intolerance, education would curtail violence and war. By empowering women, it would curb poverty and the population explosion.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Creativity is a fragile flower, but perhaps it can be fertilized with systematic doses of serendipity.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“In science the credit goes to the man who convinced the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“it is difficult to discern where “you” end and the remainder of the world begins.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“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.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“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.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Change is the law. Stability and consistency are illusions, temporary in any case, a heroic achievement of human will and persistence at best. When we want things to stay the same, we'll always wind up playing catch-up.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don’t know, not a weakness to avoid.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Sometimes science fiction does become scientific discovery.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“The joint realization that we live in a remarkable cosmic cocoon and can create languages and rocket ships in an otherwise apparently dumb universe ought to be transformative. Until we find other self-aware intelligences, we are how the universe thinks. We might as well start enjoying one another’s company.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Our sun is less than halfway through its life. It formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got 6 billion more years before the fuel runs out. It”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“What the mediocrity principle tells us is that our state is not the product of intent, that the universe lacks both malice and benevolence, but that everything does follow rules—and that grasping those rules should be the goal of science.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Consider the world we could live in if all of our local and global leaders, if all of our personal and professional friends and foes, recognized the defeasibility of their beliefs and acted accordingly. That sure sounds like progress to me. But of course I could be wrong.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Defeasible beliefs provide the provisional certainty necessary to navigate an uncertain world.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Science itself is learning how to better exploit negative results.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Krebs cycle, discovered in 1937 by Hans Krebs but invented over millions of years of evolution at the dawn of life. It is the eight-stroke chemical reaction that turns fuel into energy in the process of metabolism that is essential to all life, from bacteria to redwoods.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“William James speculated that subjective time was measured in novel experiences, which become rarer as you get older.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“From my informal surveys, it is very uncommon knowledge that the part of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to us is less than a ten-trillionth of it.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Imagine the typical emotional reaction to seeing a spider: fear, ranging from minor trepidation to terror. But what is the likelihood of dying from a spider bite? Fewer than four people a year (on average) die from spider bites, establishing the expected risk of death by spider at lower than 1 in 100 million. This risk is so minuscule that it is actually counterproductive to worry about it: Millions of people die each year from stress-related illnesses. The startling implication is that the risk of being bitten and killed by a spider is less than the risk that being afraid of spiders will kill you because of the increased stress.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“In biology especially, we have labels for everything—molecules, anatomical parts, physiological functions, organisms, ideas, hypotheses. The nominal fallacy is the error of believing that the label carries explanatory information.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10 percent.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“The literary critic Harry Levin put this nicely: “The habit of equating one’s age with the apogee of civilization, one’s town with the hub of the universe, one’s horizons with the limits of human awareness, is paradoxically widespread.” At best, we nurture the fantasy that knowledge is always cumulative and therefore concede that future eras will know more than we do. But we ignore or resist the fact that knowledge collapses as often as it accretes, that our own most cherished beliefs might appear patently false to posterity.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“In the United States, recent polls show that 39 percent consider astrology scientific and 40 percent believe that our human species is less than ten thousand years old.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Microbes make up 80 percent of all biomass, says microbiologist Carl Woese. In one-fifth of a teaspoon of seawater, there are a million bacteria (and 10 million viruses), Craig Venter says, adding, “If you don’t like bacteria, you’re on the wrong planet. This is the planet of the bacteria”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“We all start from radical ignorance in a world that is endlessly strange, vast, complex, intricate, and surprising. Deliverance from ignorance lies in good concepts—inference fountains that geyser out insights that organize and increase the scope of our understanding.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter

“When we want things to stay the same, we’ll always wind up playing catch-up. Better to go with the flow.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“There is a widely held notion that does plenty of damage: the notion of “scientifically proved.” Nearly an oxymoron. The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. Precisely because we keep questioning everything, especially our own premises, we are always ready to improve our knowledge. Therefore a good scientist is never “certain.” Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain, because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better evidence or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use but is also in fact damaging, if we value reliability.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“the threat to good collective outcomes doesn’t come only from free riders and predators, as mainstream social sciences teach us, but also from well-organized norms of kakonomics, which regulate exchanges for the worse.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking