I want to tell you two stories.
The first began in 1921, when a traveling salesman named William Barnard, nicknamed “Papa,” walked door to door in Ohio selling a 25-cent can opener. He called it the Polly. He believed, earnestly, that a better can opener could improve the health of the American family — that safer access to canned fruits and vegetables, year-round, would help people eat better.
Sixteen years later, in 1937, he met an engineer named Al Bersted.
By then, Barnard and his wife had turned vegetarian, cut sugar and caffeine, and watched a sick family member recover on whole foods. Barnard had become a health-food evangelist, selling vitamins out of the back of his car. Bersted introduced him to a new invention: the blender. Barnard realized here was a machine that could make whole-food eating actually taste good.
His son Bill named it by splicing the Latin word for “life” onto the word “mix.”
That became Vitamix.
Now the other story. You may remember it.
In 2016, a San Francisco company called Juicero launched a $700 countertop juicer, designed by Yves Béhar, that could ... Continue Reading »
Our spaces broadcast who we are and what we care about — whether we realize it or not. A warm kitchen built around a big table signals a family that values shared meals. An elementary school with an elaborate playground tells parents that outdoor exploration matters here. A walkable city suggests residents who care about health and environmental impact.
We can’t always control what our physical surroundings say about us. We may not be able to force the school board to build a bigger playground or make the mayor close streets to cars. But our voice matters more than we realize.
Exercising that influence doesn’t necessarily require chiming in at city council meetings or lobbying the parks department, though that’s time well spent. We can do a lot just by getting our own house in order. Because our spaces don’t just show our values — they spread them. When we take down the fences between our house and our neighbors’, other homeowners notice. And the more people see fences coming down, the more people tear down their own.
What spaces say about us
Every ... 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. ... Continue Reading »
Dr. Nicole LePera, The Holistic Psychologist and NYT bestselling author behind Reparenting the Inner Child, breaks down the 6 archetypes of childhood trauma.
LePera explains why insight alone never produces lasting change and walks through the science of reparenting: The practice of stepping in as the adult presence you may never have had.
This video How to recognize when you’re reacting from childhood wounds is featured on Big Think.
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 »
I want to tell you two stories.
The first began in 1921, when a traveling salesman named William Barnard, nicknamed “Papa,” walked door to door in Ohio selling a 25-cent can opener. He called it the Polly. He believed, earnestly, that a better can opener could improve the health of the American family — that safer access to canned fruits and vegetables, year-round, would help people eat better.
Sixteen years later, in 1937, he met an engineer named Al Bersted.
By then, Barnard and his wife had turned vegetarian, cut sugar and caffeine, and watched a sick family member recover on whole foods. Barnard had become a health-food evangelist, selling vitamins out of the back of his car. Bersted introduced him to a new invention: the blender. Barnard realized here was a machine that could make whole-food eating actually taste good.
His son Bill named it by splicing the Latin word for “life” onto the word “mix.”
That became Vitamix.
Now the other story. You may remember it.
In 2016, a San Francisco company called Juicero launched a $700 countertop juicer, designed by Yves Béhar, that could ... 
Our spaces broadcast who we are and what we care about — whether we realize it or not. A warm kitchen built around a big table signals a family that values shared meals. An elementary school with an elaborate playground tells parents that outdoor exploration matters here. A walkable city suggests residents who care about health and environmental impact.
We can’t always control what our physical surroundings say about us. We may not be able to force the school board to build a bigger playground or make the mayor close streets to cars. But our voice matters more than we realize.
Exercising that influence doesn’t necessarily require chiming in at city council meetings or lobbying the parks department, though that’s time well spent. We can do a lot just by getting our own house in order. Because our spaces don’t just show our values — they spread them. When we take down the fences between our house and our neighbors’, other homeowners notice. And the more people see fences coming down, the more people tear down their own.
What spaces say about us
Every ... 
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 ...