Quotes About Adaptation

The amount of data in the world is doubling every few years, but our attention system, like the rest of the brain, was built to make sense of the surrounding environment as it existed ten thousand years ago.

Far from being hardwired, as scientists once envisioned it, the brain is constantly being rewired. I'm here to teach you how to be your own electrician.

This pattern of balancing between comfort and exploration of the unknown is how we build our brains

Dealing with a lion every now and again makes you better at dealing with lions. Allowing your life to surmount occasional challenges is inoculation—almost literally—against future stress. This brings us back to a central point in this book: variety. Remember, we argued from

A newer model, "allostasis," proposes that efficient regulation requires anticipating needs and preparing to satisfy them before they arise.

Go Wild reveals the depth of our current evolutionary discordance, awakening us to how our lifestyle choices foster maladaptive gene expression and thus pave the way for disease.

In fact, through deep history, through tens of thousands of years, everyone was a wild human. The very same forces that tamed wolves and made them dogs tamed humans. Call these forces civilization, and yes, obvious and abundant benefits came with the deal. We're not here to dispute those blessings. Our bedrock point has more to do with genes

our short guts mean we can't eat grass, and this is no small thing, especially if you consider that two million years of evolutionary history occurred in savannas and grasslands. Grasslands are enormously productive in biological terms; that is, they efficiently convert solar energy into carbohydrates. But that energy is wrapped in the building block of all grasses, cellulose, and humans cannot digest it, not at all. Our primary method for overcoming our

The paradox is that our wonderful ability to adapt and grow doesn't happen without stress—we can't have the good without a bit of the bad.

In order to cope with anxiousness, for instance, you need to let certain well-worn paths grow over while you blaze alternate trails.

From an evolutionary perspective, exercise tricks the brain into trying to maintain itself for survival despite the hormonal cues that it is aging.

Things that seem permanent, a given, have a way of changing quickly, to something you don't recognize. And not all change is for the better.

The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.

After the Wall

La gente que pretendía que las cosas volvieran a ser como antes solía ser tremendamente ingenua.

Un hombre sin pasado puede forjar cualquier futuro»

What I was, isn´t what I am. And what I am, isn´t yet what I can be.

Vivimos en una sociedad que ha cambiado el concepto de la negación. La negación va acompañada ahora de la suposición de que es sólo una mentira de conveniencia para ser adaptada en algún momento posterior, cuando se ha negociado una verdad aceptable.

con la variedad compensó la incertidumbre.

psicológicamente, somos resultado de nuestro entorno.

Los ejércitos se preparan para la última guerra que libraron, no para la que está por venir».

What I was, isn't what I am. And what I am, isn't yet what I can be.

becomes a competitive advantage when it

Histories themselves become history before they reach the shelves.