Maria Konnikova
Not only is the past of a person with no memory inaccessible; his ability to think about the future is imperilled. Time travel, then, is ultimately - and paradoxically - an exercise in remembering. And without that capacity it simply cannot exist.Collection: Future
Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.Collection: Good
Bullying is the result of an unequal power dynamic - the strong attacking the weak.Collection: Power
Once the notion of time travel starts to come naturally to the human mind, it is supremely easy to assimilate it into our mode of thinking.Collection: Travel
If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won't know how resilient you are. It's only when you're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?Collection: Experience
The goals of literature are multifold, but creating nice, positive protagonists that you'd want to grab drinks with or invite home to mom can hardly be considered one of them.Collection: Positive
Where anger can be seen as a relative positive in a man, it is hardly ever perceived as anything other than a negative in a woman.Collection: Anger
Thinking about time travel may seem like something humans have been doing since the first caveman dropped the first rock on his foot. But, even to begin to imagine the possibility of time travel, your mind must be able to wrap itself around the notion of a past and a future.Collection: Travel
But when we observe, we are forced to pay attention. We have to move from passive absorption to active awareness. We have to engage.Collection: Moving
All too often, when it comes to our own minds, we are surprisingly mindless. We sail on, blithely unaware of how much we are missing, of how little we grasp of our own thought process - and how much better we could be if only we'd taken the time to understand and to reflect.Collection: Taken
the most powerful mind is the quiet mind. It is the mind that is present, reflective, mindful of its thoughts and its state. It doesn't often multitask, and when it does, it does so with a purpose.Collection: Powerful
How many thoughts float in and out of your head without your stopping to identify them? How many ideas and insights have escaped because you forgot to pay attention?Collection: Ideas
Imagination is all about new possibilities, eventualities that don't exist, counterfactuals, a recombination of elements in new ways. It is about the untested. And the untested is uncertain. It is frightening-evenCollection: Imagination
Holmes serves as an ideal model of how we can learn to see and think better.Collection: Thinking
Looking at scenes of nature, for even a short while, can help us become more insightful, more creative, and more productive.Collection: Nature
As children, we are remarkably aware. We absorb and process information at a speed that we'll never again come close to achieving... we are learning about our world and its possibilities.Collection: Children
When we are forced to do multiple things at once, not only do we perform worse on all of them but our memory decreases and our general well-being suffers a palpable hit.Collection: Memories