Quotes from John Brockman

Herbert Simon said it best: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.")

Being a heretic can be fun, but being a successful heretic is mostly hard work.

We can speak, think, refer to ourselves as agents, and so build up the false idea of a persisting self that has consciousness and free will.

Economics graduate students are far more likely to free-ride than other students.

The universe has been around for 13.8 billion years and

is likely to survive for another 100 billion years or more.

On average, individuals with high income are in a better mood than people with lower income, but the difference is about a third as large as most people expect.

Plus, where would the universe retire to? Florida isn't big enough.

The first is that fourteen major mental illnesses are now treatable. Two of them are curable, either by specific forms of psychotherapy or specific drugs. The two curable ones—people always ask—are probably panic disorder and blood and injury phobia. So the first great thing that psychology and psychiatry did in our lifetime was to be able to relieve an enormous amount of suffering.

Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain, because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better evidence or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use but is also in fact damaging, if we value reliability.

I believe that consciousness is, essentially, the way information feels when being processed.

Our brains trick us into thinking that we have Moral Truth on our side when in fact we don't, and blind us to important truths that our brains were not designed to appreciate.

Third, we are able to look at the causal skein of mental illness and unravel it, either by longitudinal studies—the same people over time—or experimental studies, which would get rid of third variables.

Bad behavior is seen as something to be noticed, reported on, and analyzed, whereas people who do not lie and cheat are taken for granted.

Fourth, we're able to create treatments—drugs, psychotherapy—and do random-assignment placebo-control studies to find out which ones really worked and which ones were inert.

Our present biosphere is the outcome of about 4 billion years of evolution, and we can trace cosmic history right back to a Big Bang that happened about 13.7 billion years ago.

Income is an important determinant of people's satisfaction with their lives, but it is far less important than most people think. If everyone had the same income, the differences among people in life satisfaction would be reduced by less than 5 percent.

Narcissistic leaders. The ultimate weapon of mass destruction is a state. When a state is taken over by a leader with the classic triad of narcissistic symptoms—grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy—the result can be imperial adventures with enormous human costs.

that's the way of all good explanations. The better they are, the more questions they raise.

They fight against popular creationism, but at the same time they fight fanatically for their own creationism," he

Computers are fine, but it's time to return to the mind itself and stop pretending we have computers for brains.

The human microbiome in our gut, mouth, skin, and elsewhere, harbors three thousand kinds of bacteria with 3 million distinct genes. (Our own cells struggle by on only eighteen thousand genes or so.)

We'd be unfeeling, unconscious zombies if we did.

drowning in two inches of water