Quotes About Adaptation

The blame lies with our brains. While they are really good at building circuits, they are awful at unbuilding them.

One of the best measures of any group's culture is its learning velocity—how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill.

You will become clever through your mistakes.

Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they'll find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they'll find a way to make it better.

He who stands with his face to the East in the morning will have the sun before him. If he does not change his posture, the Earth in the meantime having changed its, he will have the sun no longer before him, but behind.

Expect nothing and you'll always be surprised

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it!

Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'

You don't have to do a bunch of crazy stuff to make your life complete. You just have to deal with life.

I am currently learning how to work the blasted technology of this infuriating dominant culture. If this was the neolithic i'd still be all boss!

Lie #1: Having more and more of something (love, sex, fame, drugs, etc.) will make you happy. Unfortunately, if you are not careful, the more pleasure you get, the more you will need in the future to continue making you happy, something called hedonic adaptation.

Evolve the Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind

In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. ERIC HOFFER

Arthritic toothless people who love orgasms are more likely to reproduce than are limber, toothy people who do not.

Your emotions are meant to fluctuate, just like your blood pressure is meant to fluctuate. It's a system that's supposed to move back and forth, between happy and unhappy. That's how the system guides you through the world.

within a couple of weeks even earthquake survivors return to their normal level of unfounded optimism.

When we have an experience—hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room—on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.

How deeply did American Jews internalize the notion that America was their new national home? A fascinating indication is a 1904 stained-glass window of Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco, which depicts a classic biblical scene: Moses descending from a mountain holding the Ten Commandments. What is remarkable about this artwork, however, is that it shows Moses descending, not from Mount Sinai, as in the Bible's account, but from Yosemite's El Capitan.

As the waters of life wash over us, we lose our sharp corners, and that can be good or bad...trust your instincts, remember your 'secret pacts' and reclaim the wisdom you have always had

And then I realized that whatever we did, it wouldn't feel like it did before.

I think we are born square and we die round. As waters of life wash over us, we lose our sharp corners, and that can be good; we take on surprising, satisfying new shapes.

Educators are still spending way too much time trying to control what kids learn, bending the content to their own purposes, hoping beyond hope to change - by using technology - but not change too much.

Technology will eventually destroy the way schools are run now.

Jackson went from the professor's chair to the officer's saddle. He carried with him the very elements of character which made him odious as a teacher but I never saw him in an arbitrary mood.