When it comes to the distant galaxies in the Universe, one of the most profound discoveries in all of history is also one of the most puzzling: the fact that they’re almost all mutually receding from one another. It was only in 1923 that we firmly established that extragalactic objects — objects beyond our own Milky Way — even existed, with Hubble’s detailed measurements of Andromeda placing its distance far beyond the Milky Way itself. Just a few years later, from 1927-1929, enough evidence had accumulated for scientists to establish the redshift-distance relation, also known as Hubble’s Law: where a distant galaxy’s observed recession speed is proportional to its distance from us.
If you think about that in detail, however, something puzzling emerges. If you look to great enough distances, that observed recession speed can get very fast indeed. Potentially, those speeds could approach, reach, or even exceed the speed of light! Is that a problem for physics? That’s what Jon Covey wants to know, writing in to inquire:
“I’m trying to understand how galaxies like MoM-z14 could be moving so fast. ... Continue Reading »
Music is at least a million years older than language, yet we still see it solely through the lens of entertainment. Professor Michael Spitzer argues it’s something closer to a biological system, one that was shaping the human body long before we had words for what we were feeling.
Why does a chord you’ve never heard before make you want to cry? Why do babies respond to rhythm before they’ve heard a single song? Why does the same part of your brain that processes mortal danger also process musical beauty? The answers reach back 4 million years, and forward into a future where music may be prescribed like medicine.
This video How music rewires the human body, in 59 minutes is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Neuroscientists Wendy Suzuki, PhD, Samuel Wang, PhD, and Gary Small, MD explain how movement increases blood flow, boosts growth factors like BDNF, and floods the brain with mood-lifting neurochemicals. The brain and body are in constant conversation, and plasticity means your wiring is never fixed. According to Suzuki, even ten minutes of walking can shift your brain’s chemistry immediately, flooding it in a ‘bubble bath’ of positive neurochemicals.
We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series.
This video The most transformative thing you can do for your brain isn’t mental is featured on Big Think.
... Continue Reading »
From 1929 until 2006, Pluto lived in the imagination of children and adults alike as the ninth and outermost planet in our solar system. Until 1978, with the discovery of its giant moon, Charon, it was the only known large object in our solar system that orbited beyond the reach of Neptune. But the story began to change shortly after that. In the 1990s and 2000s, a tremendous number of new objects were discovered — including planets orbiting stars other than our Sun (exoplanets) and a wide variety of Kuiper belt objects (trans-Neptunian objects) both large and small — that compelled us to rethink just what it meant for an object to be considered a planet.
In 2006, with only a small fraction of the general assembly in attendance, the International Astronomical Union put forth three criteria that an object needed to meet in order to be officially defined as a planet:
It must be massive enough to pull itself into hydrostatic equilibrium, where gravitation and rotation determine its overall shape.
It must orbit the Sun and the Sun alone, eliminating any satellite ... Continue Reading »
Three years into a consulting career that looked successful on paper, I was staring out a plane window at nothing in particular, asking, What is this actually for?
Alabama on Tuesday. Ohio on Thursday. Good firm with good people to work with, meaningful and intellectually stimulating work, satisfied and not-overly-obnoxious clients. By all measures, things were going well. And yet, I was profoundly unsatisfied.
It wasn’t the only time I’ve felt that. Whether it was securing a fully funded scholarship for my PhD or landing my dream job, I just could not find sustained satisfaction. The signs pointed back to me and what I was valuing in those situations. I knew what the next step for my career was, but none of it felt meaningful. As a behavioral scientist, I started asking questions and running experiments to see if I could change it. I eventually found that I could.
That’s what this newsletter is about: understanding what’s happening beneath the surface in moments like that, and practical things you can try the next time you’re in one.
In my day job, I design leadership programs, facilitate leadership development with ... Continue Reading »
Many of world literature’s most unlikable protagonists start unlikeable and end unlikeable. From the very beginning of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is clear that the titular Gray is a narcissist who’ll do anything to inflate his already monstrous ego. The same goes for Humbert Humbert from Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita, a pedophile with a silver tongue who conjures up excuses for his inexcusable actions.
But these characters form only the tip of the iceberg. A different yet equally interesting species of unlikable protagonist is the protagonist who starts off sympathetic but becomes more and more unsympathetic as the story develops. Though they appear similar, this type of character is not to be confused with other archetypes such as the tragic hero or antihero. The former (Oedipus, Hamlet) are good people who make bad decisions due to fate or circumstance, while antiheroes (Jack Sparrow, Batman) are morally ambiguous individuals who, in spite of their flaws, possess notable heroic qualities.
Each of these archetypes serves a distinct narrative purpose. Tragic heroes demonstrate that even the best of us can ... Continue Reading »
Europeans and North Americans are WEIRD. No, I’m not trying to start a culture war. I’m just quoting behavioural scientists. A little over a decade ago, they began to realize that most psychological studies did not paint an accurate picture of the global population. More often than not, participants lived in countries that were Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The acronym WEIRD was born.
WEIRD is not a one-off. Scientific papers are filled with acronyms — some little more than strings of letters, others carefully constructed to form recognizable words, like GANDALF (Gas AND Absorption Line Fitting) and MIAOW (Minimum Inertia Adaptive Optics Widget). Acronyms can save space and occasionally inject humor into otherwise technical writing. But when left undefined, as often happens, they can render research opaque, sowing confusion even among specialists and further distancing the public from scientific work.
“There is an enormous number of acronyms in science and technology — around a million,” said Helge Kragh, a historian of science who recently published a paper on the rise of acronym use in physics and astronomy. Science is not ... Continue Reading »
What you actually care about shows up in your calendar and your bank statement, not your intentions. Mark Manson walks through the Stoic practice of Memento Mori, his own “law of avoidance,” explaining why people sabotage good relationships as readily as bad ones, and why generations with the most options are often the most adrift.
This video The real reason you’re always thinking about what other people think is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
At any given moment, individuals around the world are working in every conceivable context. For some, it’s energizing–a place where people work to make the world a better place. For others, it’s just a job, and while it pays the bills, it’s a benign experience they could take or leave.
The difference often comes down to one significant factor: The Middle Manager.
Middle managers are the multiplier (or detractor)
It may sound obvious that direct supervisors shape employee experience. But what’s less obvious is just how much they matter. Gallup estimates that managers account for roughly 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement; McKinsey research shows that relationships with immediate managers are among the top determinants of employee satisfaction and performance; and Aon Hewitt reports that when leaders are engaged, their teams are about 40 percent more likely to be engaged.
The data does all the talking: middle management will make or break employee experience, and your organization’s bottom line.
Here’s the thing: managers are no different from your children’s teachers and coaches. A great teacher can make a subject come alive. A poor ... Continue Reading »
20 years ago, the story of our Universe took an unexpected turn, when dark matter’s existence was confirmed empirically within the natural lab of the Universe: through the science of colliding galaxy clusters. Previously, we could only look at physical systems — individual galaxies, large clusters of galaxies, or the grand cosmic web on large-scales — and infer that something was missing. There were two plausible explanations: either the law of gravity was wrong and needed modifying on large cosmic scales, or there was a missing ingredient that was present and gravitated, but that defied direct detection.
That second explanation, known as dark matter, was initially favored because the addition of that one ingredient could explain all of the observed physical phenomena on a variety of scales, while modifying gravity required different modifications to align with different scales. However, the arrival of a direct comparative test changed the story dramatically. When two galaxy clusters collide, the normal matter inside — mostly in the form of gas — would interact, experience friction, heat up, and emit X-rays. However, if dark matter was ... Continue Reading »
When it comes to the distant galaxies in the Universe, one of the most profound discoveries in all of history is also one of the most puzzling: the fact that they’re almost all mutually receding from one another. It was only in 1923 that we firmly established that extragalactic objects — objects beyond our own Milky Way — even existed, with Hubble’s detailed measurements of Andromeda placing its distance far beyond the Milky Way itself. Just a few years later, from 1927-1929, enough evidence had accumulated for scientists to establish the redshift-distance relation, also known as Hubble’s Law: where a distant galaxy’s observed recession speed is proportional to its distance from us.
If you think about that in detail, however, something puzzling emerges. If you look to great enough distances, that observed recession speed can get very fast indeed. Potentially, those speeds could approach, reach, or even exceed the speed of light! Is that a problem for physics? That’s what Jon Covey wants to know, writing in to inquire:
“I’m trying to understand how galaxies like MoM-z14 could be moving so fast. ... 
From 1929 until 2006, Pluto lived in the imagination of children and adults alike as the ninth and outermost planet in our solar system. Until 1978, with the discovery of its giant moon, Charon, it was the only known large object in our solar system that orbited beyond the reach of Neptune. But the story began to change shortly after that. In the 1990s and 2000s, a tremendous number of new objects were discovered — including planets orbiting stars other than our Sun (exoplanets) and a wide variety of Kuiper belt objects (trans-Neptunian objects) both large and small — that compelled us to rethink just what it meant for an object to be considered a planet.
In 2006, with only a small fraction of the general assembly in attendance, the International Astronomical Union put forth three criteria that an object needed to meet in order to be officially defined as a planet:
It must be massive enough to pull itself into hydrostatic equilibrium, where gravitation and rotation determine its overall shape.
It must orbit the Sun and the Sun alone, eliminating any satellite ... 
Three years into a consulting career that looked successful on paper, I was staring out a plane window at nothing in particular, asking, What is this actually for?
Alabama on Tuesday. Ohio on Thursday. Good firm with good people to work with, meaningful and intellectually stimulating work, satisfied and not-overly-obnoxious clients. By all measures, things were going well. And yet, I was profoundly unsatisfied.
It wasn’t the only time I’ve felt that. Whether it was securing a fully funded scholarship for my PhD or landing my dream job, I just could not find sustained satisfaction. The signs pointed back to me and what I was valuing in those situations. I knew what the next step for my career was, but none of it felt meaningful. As a behavioral scientist, I started asking questions and running experiments to see if I could change it. I eventually found that I could.
That’s what this newsletter is about: understanding what’s happening beneath the surface in moments like that, and practical things you can try the next time you’re in one.
In my day job, I design leadership programs, facilitate leadership development with ... 
Many of world literature’s most unlikable protagonists start unlikeable and end unlikeable. From the very beginning of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is clear that the titular Gray is a narcissist who’ll do anything to inflate his already monstrous ego. The same goes for Humbert Humbert from Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita, a pedophile with a silver tongue who conjures up excuses for his inexcusable actions.
But these characters form only the tip of the iceberg. A different yet equally interesting species of unlikable protagonist is the protagonist who starts off sympathetic but becomes more and more unsympathetic as the story develops. Though they appear similar, this type of character is not to be confused with other archetypes such as the tragic hero or antihero. The former (Oedipus, Hamlet) are good people who make bad decisions due to fate or circumstance, while antiheroes (Jack Sparrow, Batman) are morally ambiguous individuals who, in spite of their flaws, possess notable heroic qualities.
Each of these archetypes serves a distinct narrative purpose. Tragic heroes demonstrate that even the best of us can ... 
Europeans and North Americans are WEIRD. No, I’m not trying to start a culture war. I’m just quoting behavioural scientists. A little over a decade ago, they began to realize that most psychological studies did not paint an accurate picture of the global population. More often than not, participants lived in countries that were Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The acronym WEIRD was born.
WEIRD is not a one-off. Scientific papers are filled with acronyms — some little more than strings of letters, others carefully constructed to form recognizable words, like GANDALF (Gas AND Absorption Line Fitting) and MIAOW (Minimum Inertia Adaptive Optics Widget). Acronyms can save space and occasionally inject humor into otherwise technical writing. But when left undefined, as often happens, they can render research opaque, sowing confusion even among specialists and further distancing the public from scientific work.
“There is an enormous number of acronyms in science and technology — around a million,” said Helge Kragh, a historian of science who recently published a paper on the rise of acronym use in physics and astronomy. Science is not ... 
At any given moment, individuals around the world are working in every conceivable context. For some, it’s energizing–a place where people work to make the world a better place. For others, it’s just a job, and while it pays the bills, it’s a benign experience they could take or leave.
The difference often comes down to one significant factor: The Middle Manager.
Middle managers are the multiplier (or detractor)
It may sound obvious that direct supervisors shape employee experience. But what’s less obvious is just how much they matter. Gallup estimates that managers account for roughly 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement; McKinsey research shows that relationships with immediate managers are among the top determinants of employee satisfaction and performance; and Aon Hewitt reports that when leaders are engaged, their teams are about 40 percent more likely to be engaged.
The data does all the talking: middle management will make or break employee experience, and your organization’s bottom line.
Here’s the thing: managers are no different from your children’s teachers and coaches. A great teacher can make a subject come alive. A poor ... 
20 years ago, the story of our Universe took an unexpected turn, when dark matter’s existence was confirmed empirically within the natural lab of the Universe: through the science of colliding galaxy clusters. Previously, we could only look at physical systems — individual galaxies, large clusters of galaxies, or the grand cosmic web on large-scales — and infer that something was missing. There were two plausible explanations: either the law of gravity was wrong and needed modifying on large cosmic scales, or there was a missing ingredient that was present and gravitated, but that defied direct detection.
That second explanation, known as dark matter, was initially favored because the addition of that one ingredient could explain all of the observed physical phenomena on a variety of scales, while modifying gravity required different modifications to align with different scales. However, the arrival of a direct comparative test changed the story dramatically. When two galaxy clusters collide, the normal matter inside — mostly in the form of gas — would interact, experience friction, heat up, and emit X-rays. However, if dark matter was ...