For as long as people have been putting effort into anything, there’s been a push to get the most “bang” for your “buck.” More simply, it’s to get the greatest amount out by putting the least amount in. And if that’s what you’re after — that type of optimization — you might have heard of the term BrainMaxxing: the evolution of the mental part of what was once called lifehacking. Unfortunately for those of you who are truly seeing to grow your minds, that arena is full of what can only be rightfully called grift:
detoxing your body from activities that give you the “hit” of a mental reward,
giving your brain a regular schedule of structured activities that stimulate your cognitive efforts,
supplements to “wake your brain up” optimally and “give your brain rest” at the appropriate time,
and using digital tools to, as one dedicated website calls it, maximize your brain potential.
While the BrainMaxxing movement does have a large amount of extraneous, profiteering aspects surrounding it, the idea at the core of it is sound: you can, in fact, through sustained hard ... Continue Reading »
A man awakes in some kind of lab, his body riddled with tubes and wires. Nearby, a robot asks him what two plus two is. He can’t remember his name, where he is, or how he got here. At least he knows two plus two is four.
Actually, he knows a lot more than that. Walking around the lab, he finds a test tube and a stopwatch. Using the stopwatch to time how long it takes for the test tube to fall to the floor, he calculates that the gravity is stronger than on Earth. He reasons he must be in outer space. Some more tests reveal he’s not just in space but another solar system — one several light-years away from Earth, further than any human or space probe has ever ventured.
Gradually, his returning memories fill in the gaps. He is Ryland Grace. He’s an expert on speculative astrobiology, turned junior high school science teacher. He’s on a spaceship headed for the star Tau Ceti, and he’s part of a last-ditch, one-chance mission to save humanity from an extinction event.
This ... Continue Reading »
Damage isn’t always the cause of pain, and it’s never the only culprit. Pain, it turns out, is much more interesting than that.
Here’s what we do know: Science reveals that pain is biopsychosocial, produced by a combination of biological, psychological (emotional, cognitive, behavioral), and sociological (social, environmental, contextual) factors that work together to create the pain we feel. Pain lives in the glorious, messy middle of all the things that make you, you.
While holistic healthcare and mind-body medicine have tried to change the narrative for decades, even they miss the big picture when it comes to pain. Because understanding pain isn’t just about connecting mind and body. The things going on around us — not just inside of us — change pain, too.
In order to treat pain, therefore, we can’t just fixate on the part that hurts; we must instead treat all of you.
Pain is biological
The first pillar, the biological domain of pain, includes the ingredients we’ve heard the most about: genetics, tissue damage, system dysfunction, inflammation, the wear and tear of an aging body, neurotransmitters, hormones, diet, sleep, exercise. ... Continue Reading »
No matter what you may have heard, make no mistake: physics is not “over” in any sense of the word. As far as we’ve come in our attempts to make sense of the world and Universe around us — and we have come impressively far — it’s absolutely disingenuous to pretend that we’ve solved and understood the natural world around us in any sort of satisfactory sense. We have two theories that work incredibly well: in all the years we’ve been testing them, we’ve never found a single observation or made a single experimental measurement that’s conflicted with either Einstein’s general relativity or with the Standard Model’s predictions from quantum field theory.
If you want to know how gravitation works or what its effects on any object in the Universe will be, general relativity has yet to let us down. From tabletop experiments to atomic clocks to celestial mechanics to gravitational lensing to the formation of the great cosmic web, its success rate is 100%. Similarly, for any particle physics experiment or interaction conceivable, whether mediated via the strong, weak, or ... Continue Reading »
Self-help tells us that we can fix anything with the right mindset, the right habits, the right 5-step plan. But what if that belief is doing more harm than good?
Historian Kate Bowler traces the deep roots of America’s obsession with self-making — from prosperity gospel theology to the endless productivity hacks of optimization culture. She explains how self-help promises control over things that are fundamentally fragile: our health, our time, our relationships, our lives.
The trouble is, we’re not machines to be upgraded. We’re human: breakable, dependent, and mortal. And any belief system that denies that will ultimately fail us.
This video The case against self-help is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
The night sky, accessible to each of us, holds a sense of wonder unlike anything else.
Although extended objects, like the plane of the Milky Way and a few distant galaxies beyond our own, are identifiable with the naked eye, there are only a few thousand stars that can be seen and resolved with the naked eye. Depending on your eyesight and the darkness conditions, most humans can see between 6000 and 9000 stars if you could see the entire sky at once.
Credit: ESO/Håkon Dahle
For countless generations, humanity’s skyward gaze has revealed a heavenly abyss.
The effects of light pollution on what a naked-eye observer can see in the night sky. The artificial light produced by objects on the ground can wash out the naturally occurring objects in the night sky, rendering many objects unable to be seen. Light pollution can wash out all but the brightest meteors during a meteor shower.
Credit: Stellarium Labs
Today, light pollution and satellite contamination steal those pristine views from many of us.
This image of Venus and the Pleiades shows the tracks of Starlink satellites. The reflective surfaces ... Continue Reading »
Reshma Saujani says she was “always” moved by social justice. As a young girl, she witnessed her parents’ experience as immigrants in the U.S., and after working as a corporate attorney to help pay off her law school debt, she moved into activism.
Saujani founded Girls Who Code in 2011 — an organization that has trained nearly 600,000 young women in computer science — and now runs Moms First, which campaigns for better paid leave and child care provision. Along the way, she’s written several books, including the bestselling Brave, Not Perfect, and her podcast, My So-Called Midlife, aims to answer her daily question: “Is this it?”
In this interview with Big Think, she explores the “generic” culture she says we’ve gotten into, what workers need to be in the age of AI, and why she’s inspired by Bad Bunny.
Big Think: When you were 33, you left your job as a corporate attorney and decided to run for Congress. You were the first Indian-American woman to do so. What was that experience like, and what did you learn from it?
Saujani: I was ... Continue Reading »
Most weeks, I’m in a different American city. I fly in, catch an Uber, check into a hotel, and head to a convention center or a sequence of numbers posted on a nondescript high-rise. By Tuesday afternoon, it becomes difficult to remember where I am. The streets feel familiar. The buildings repeat the same glass, steel, and neutral palettes. Restaurants, retail strips, and conference centers blur together. Everything works. Almost nothing distinguishes one place from another.
These cities are not failing. They are functioning exactly as designed.
Week after week, I see the physical expression of a deeper logic, one that has reshaped not only our cities but our organizations. It is the work of a growing class of professionals I’ve come to think of as the Architects of Banality: leaders, planners, and managers who design systems to perform better and, in the process, make them increasingly indistinguishable.
They do not intend to drain the world of character. They optimize it away.
Once a year, that logic is interrupted when I travel to Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The contrast is immediate. Yogyakarta is inefficient by modern ... Continue Reading »
Throughout the entire Universe, no matter where or when we look, we see an endless variety of structures that have formed throughout all different stages of cosmic evolution. With a tremendous number of planets, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and components of the great cosmic web, no two objects that we find are ever identical, although many features exhibit clear similarities. Underlying them all, the fundamental laws that they obey — from the quantum to the cosmic — never appear to change. From our cosmic backyard to galaxies found across the Universe:
gravity works the same way,
atoms exhibit the same quantum transitions,
and the fundamental constants all remain unchanged
throughout space and time.
But why is the Universe this way? Is there anything forbidding different regions from having different properties, laws, and constants? Or anything forbidding them from changing over time? That’s this week’s inquiry from our Patreon supporter Jeff Bonwick, who wants to know:
“Why does nature obey laws? It’s a relatively recent concept because most of what was observable to our ancestors was macroscopic — thunderstorms, earthquakes, volcanoes — and seemed entirely capricious, ... Continue Reading »
You haven’t been home in 10 long years. You’re exhausted, battle-scarred, and desperate to see your family. At last, a fair wind is at your back, and you stand on the deck of a bounding longship, sails set for home. For days you have strained your eyes against the horizon and now your native land appears. Closer and closer it comes. You can see the familiar flames of the harvest stubble fires. You recognize the cries of the shore birds and the scent of the pine trees. Finally you can relax. You haven’t slept for a week. You allow yourself to close your eyes … and you awake to a howling storm with no land in sight. You’ve been blown hundreds of miles away.
This, of course, is what happens to Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. After 10 years of fighting at Troy, Odysseus gets within touching distance of Ithaca, only for his men to open the Aeolian bag and release its unfavorable winds. Thrown disastrously off course, it takes him another 10 years to get back to his wife and son. ... Continue Reading »
For as long as people have been putting effort into anything, there’s been a push to get the most “bang” for your “buck.” More simply, it’s to get the greatest amount out by putting the least amount in. And if that’s what you’re after — that type of optimization — you might have heard of the term BrainMaxxing: the evolution of the mental part of what was once called lifehacking. Unfortunately for those of you who are truly seeing to grow your minds, that arena is full of what can only be rightfully called grift:
detoxing your body from activities that give you the “hit” of a mental reward,
giving your brain a regular schedule of structured activities that stimulate your cognitive efforts,
supplements to “wake your brain up” optimally and “give your brain rest” at the appropriate time,
and using digital tools to, as one dedicated website calls it, maximize your brain potential.
While the BrainMaxxing movement does have a large amount of extraneous, profiteering aspects surrounding it, the idea at the core of it is sound: you can, in fact, through sustained hard ... 
A man awakes in some kind of lab, his body riddled with tubes and wires. Nearby, a robot asks him what two plus two is. He can’t remember his name, where he is, or how he got here. At least he knows two plus two is four.
Actually, he knows a lot more than that. Walking around the lab, he finds a test tube and a stopwatch. Using the stopwatch to time how long it takes for the test tube to fall to the floor, he calculates that the gravity is stronger than on Earth. He reasons he must be in outer space. Some more tests reveal he’s not just in space but another solar system — one several light-years away from Earth, further than any human or space probe has ever ventured.
Gradually, his returning memories fill in the gaps. He is Ryland Grace. He’s an expert on speculative astrobiology, turned junior high school science teacher. He’s on a spaceship headed for the star Tau Ceti, and he’s part of a last-ditch, one-chance mission to save humanity from an extinction event.
This ... 
Damage isn’t always the cause of pain, and it’s never the only culprit. Pain, it turns out, is much more interesting than that.
Here’s what we do know: Science reveals that pain is biopsychosocial, produced by a combination of biological, psychological (emotional, cognitive, behavioral), and sociological (social, environmental, contextual) factors that work together to create the pain we feel. Pain lives in the glorious, messy middle of all the things that make you, you.
While holistic healthcare and mind-body medicine have tried to change the narrative for decades, even they miss the big picture when it comes to pain. Because understanding pain isn’t just about connecting mind and body. The things going on around us — not just inside of us — change pain, too.
In order to treat pain, therefore, we can’t just fixate on the part that hurts; we must instead treat all of you.
Pain is biological
The first pillar, the biological domain of pain, includes the ingredients we’ve heard the most about: genetics, tissue damage, system dysfunction, inflammation, the wear and tear of an aging body, neurotransmitters, hormones, diet, sleep, exercise. ... 
No matter what you may have heard, make no mistake: physics is not “over” in any sense of the word. As far as we’ve come in our attempts to make sense of the world and Universe around us — and we have come impressively far — it’s absolutely disingenuous to pretend that we’ve solved and understood the natural world around us in any sort of satisfactory sense. We have two theories that work incredibly well: in all the years we’ve been testing them, we’ve never found a single observation or made a single experimental measurement that’s conflicted with either Einstein’s general relativity or with the Standard Model’s predictions from quantum field theory.
If you want to know how gravitation works or what its effects on any object in the Universe will be, general relativity has yet to let us down. From tabletop experiments to atomic clocks to celestial mechanics to gravitational lensing to the formation of the great cosmic web, its success rate is 100%. Similarly, for any particle physics experiment or interaction conceivable, whether mediated via the strong, weak, or ... 
The night sky, accessible to each of us, holds a sense of wonder unlike anything else.
Although extended objects, like the plane of the Milky Way and a few distant galaxies beyond our own, are identifiable with the naked eye, there are only a few thousand stars that can be seen and resolved with the naked eye. Depending on your eyesight and the darkness conditions, most humans can see between 6000 and 9000 stars if you could see the entire sky at once.
Credit: ESO/Håkon Dahle
For countless generations, humanity’s skyward gaze has revealed a heavenly abyss.
The effects of light pollution on what a naked-eye observer can see in the night sky. The artificial light produced by objects on the ground can wash out the naturally occurring objects in the night sky, rendering many objects unable to be seen. Light pollution can wash out all but the brightest meteors during a meteor shower.
Credit: Stellarium Labs
Today, light pollution and satellite contamination steal those pristine views from many of us.
This image of Venus and the Pleiades shows the tracks of Starlink satellites. The reflective surfaces ... 
Reshma Saujani says she was “always” moved by social justice. As a young girl, she witnessed her parents’ experience as immigrants in the U.S., and after working as a corporate attorney to help pay off her law school debt, she moved into activism.
Saujani founded Girls Who Code in 2011 — an organization that has trained nearly 600,000 young women in computer science — and now runs Moms First, which campaigns for better paid leave and child care provision. Along the way, she’s written several books, including the bestselling Brave, Not Perfect, and her podcast, My So-Called Midlife, aims to answer her daily question: “Is this it?”
In this interview with Big Think, she explores the “generic” culture she says we’ve gotten into, what workers need to be in the age of AI, and why she’s inspired by Bad Bunny.
Big Think: When you were 33, you left your job as a corporate attorney and decided to run for Congress. You were the first Indian-American woman to do so. What was that experience like, and what did you learn from it?
Saujani: I was ... 
Most weeks, I’m in a different American city. I fly in, catch an Uber, check into a hotel, and head to a convention center or a sequence of numbers posted on a nondescript high-rise. By Tuesday afternoon, it becomes difficult to remember where I am. The streets feel familiar. The buildings repeat the same glass, steel, and neutral palettes. Restaurants, retail strips, and conference centers blur together. Everything works. Almost nothing distinguishes one place from another.
These cities are not failing. They are functioning exactly as designed.
Week after week, I see the physical expression of a deeper logic, one that has reshaped not only our cities but our organizations. It is the work of a growing class of professionals I’ve come to think of as the Architects of Banality: leaders, planners, and managers who design systems to perform better and, in the process, make them increasingly indistinguishable.
They do not intend to drain the world of character. They optimize it away.
Once a year, that logic is interrupted when I travel to Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The contrast is immediate. Yogyakarta is inefficient by modern ... 
Throughout the entire Universe, no matter where or when we look, we see an endless variety of structures that have formed throughout all different stages of cosmic evolution. With a tremendous number of planets, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and components of the great cosmic web, no two objects that we find are ever identical, although many features exhibit clear similarities. Underlying them all, the fundamental laws that they obey — from the quantum to the cosmic — never appear to change. From our cosmic backyard to galaxies found across the Universe:
gravity works the same way,
atoms exhibit the same quantum transitions,
and the fundamental constants all remain unchanged
throughout space and time.
But why is the Universe this way? Is there anything forbidding different regions from having different properties, laws, and constants? Or anything forbidding them from changing over time? That’s this week’s inquiry from our Patreon supporter Jeff Bonwick, who wants to know:
“Why does nature obey laws? It’s a relatively recent concept because most of what was observable to our ancestors was macroscopic — thunderstorms, earthquakes, volcanoes — and seemed entirely capricious, ... 
You haven’t been home in 10 long years. You’re exhausted, battle-scarred, and desperate to see your family. At last, a fair wind is at your back, and you stand on the deck of a bounding longship, sails set for home. For days you have strained your eyes against the horizon and now your native land appears. Closer and closer it comes. You can see the familiar flames of the harvest stubble fires. You recognize the cries of the shore birds and the scent of the pine trees. Finally you can relax. You haven’t slept for a week. You allow yourself to close your eyes … and you awake to a howling storm with no land in sight. You’ve been blown hundreds of miles away.
This, of course, is what happens to Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. After 10 years of fighting at Troy, Odysseus gets within touching distance of Ithaca, only for his men to open the Aeolian bag and release its unfavorable winds. Thrown disastrously off course, it takes him another 10 years to get back to his wife and son. ...