"Their strategy for staying alive is to be barely alive at all."

"Dissanayake posed that question boldly in her first book: "Since all human societies, past and present, so far as we know, make and respond to art, it must contribute something essential to human life. But what?" A biologist, she proposed, would consider art a set of behaviors rather than a class of objects. Dissanayake was more interested in sculpting than in marble statues and even more intrigued by dynamic arts like singing and dancing. She reasoned that if natural selection had shaped these behaviors—as it had shaped every other functional aspect of human design—then the behaviors must result from predispositions that gave hominids an advantage over their competitors as they evolved. What was that advantage? Dissanayake has looked for it in children's play, premodern ritual, and mother-infant attachment. There is no consensus among evolutionary psychologists that she has discovered the definitive answer. But there is a widespread belief that she has found the right way to ask the question."

"Late in his life, Claude Monet developed cataracts. As his lenses degraded, they blocked parts of the visible spectrum, and the colors he perceived grew muddy. Monet's cataracts left him struggling to paint; he complained to friends that he felt as if he saw everything in a fog. After years of failed treatments, he agreed at age 82 to have the lens of his left eye completely removed. Light could now stream through the opening unimpeded. Monet could now see familiar colors again. And he could also see colors he had never seen before. Monet began to see--and to paint--in ultraviolet."

"In a world first, zookeeper Rohan Cleave captured the amazing hatching process of a critically endangered Lord Howe Island Stick Insect at Melbourne Zoo. The eggs incubate for over 6 months and until now the hatching process has never been witnessed. If you didn't see it you wouldn't believe it could fit in that egg!"

"This was a staggeringly strange way to create a piece of pop music. At the time, there were two basic ways to write a song. The first was to be like the Bob Dylan that Dylan was trying to escape: compose serious lyrics on a serious topic. The second way was to compose an irresistible jingle full of major chords. Such predictability is precisely what Dylan wanted to avoid; he couldn't stand the clichéd constraints of pop music. And this is why that "vomitific" writing was so important: Dylan suddenly realised that it was possible to celebrate vagueness, to write lines that didn't insist on making sense. He would later say that Like A Rolling Stone was his first "completely free song... the one that opened it up for me".

"In retrospect, we can see that the composition allowed Dylan to fully express, for the first time, the diversity of his influences – Arthur Rimbaud, Fellini, Bertolt Brecht and Robert Johnson. There's some Delta blues and "La Bamba", but also plenty of Beat poetry, Ledbetter, and the Beatles. What Dylan did was find the strange thread connecting those disparate voices. During those frantic first minutes of writing, his right hemisphere found a way to make something new out of this incongruous list of influences, drawing them together into a catchy song. He didn't yet know what he was doing – the ghost was still in control – but he felt the excitement of an insight, the subliminal thrill of something new. ("I don't think a song like Rolling Stone could have been done any other way," Dylan insisted. "You can't sit down and write that consciously... What are you gonna do, chart it out?")"

Oncologist Brian Druker developed a new treatment for a deadly cancer, leading to a breakthrough that has transformed medicine

“At its core, fear is an emotional mechanism that increases survival chances by motivating fight, flight, or freezing responses to threatening situations,” they write. “Fear seizes one’s attention, halts current plans, and increases vigilance.”
As they point out, this dynamic is echoed in Burke’s description of the experience of the sublime, which the philosopher called “that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended.”

This new model of memory isn’t just a theory—neuroscientists actually have a molecular explanation of how and why memories change. In fact, their definition of memory has broadened to encompass not only the cliché cinematic scenes from childhood but also the persisting mental loops of illnesses like PTSD and addiction—and even pain disorders like neuropathy. Unlike most brain research, the field of memory has actually developed simpler explanations. Whenever the brain wants to retain something, it relies on just a handful of chemicals. Even more startling, an equally small family of compounds could turn out to be a universal eraser of history, a pill that we could take whenever we wanted to forget anything.

Violence is a complex problem, which no simple biological approach can diagnose or remedy. Factors such as political instability, population density, and income inequality are associated with massive differences in violence across cultures, and these differences are observed while gender ratios remain constant. Of course, men still hold most of the power in the world, and it is no surprise, then, that they perpetrate most of the violence.  But that too is a historical fact, not a biological given.  If we focus on biology instead of economic and historical variables, we will miss out on opportunities for progress.

Behaviorism as a philosophy of science began with an article by John B. Watson in 1913, and its several varieties inform different behavior-related disciplines. During the past 100 years, disciplinary developments have led to a clarified version of behaviorism informing a basic, separate natural science of behavior. This recently emerged independent discipline not only complements other natural sciences, but also shares in solving local and global problems by showing how to discover and effectively control the variables that unlock solutions to the common behavior-related components of these problems.

mind wandering is ubiquitous – we spend nearly half our waking life in a daydream – but it’s also a talent we need to develop

The core function of memory is to imagine the future. Memory is not designed to perfectly replay past events; it is to flexibly construct future scenarios.