My all-time favorite description of what time is comes not from a scientist but from a writer of pulp science fiction, the late Ray Cumming. In 1922, he observed that time is “what keeps everything from happening at once.”
This is more than a not-half-way-bad way of describing time. It’s such a doggone-good way that even [...]
I took a look the past couple of days to see if I could find any evidence of a breakthrough in the area of breakthrough thinking, and I didn’t find one.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t some interesting things going on.
For example, the guys and gals at Idea Champions are still touting the benefits [...]
Let me share a few quick reasons why I’m not really a beach person.
Most visits to the beach quickly turn hot and sweaty. I’m more the 72-degree thermostat variety. Moreover, it is infernally difficult to leave the beach behind once you’ve been there; it adheres to your flesh and picnic utensils, invades your sandals, sticks [...]
I’ve probably shared this universal “rule of thumb” with my readers more than once: The world is divided into people who divide the world into twos and those who don’t.
And now there’s this one: The world is divided into people who know what a “black swan event” is and those who are clueless. Judged by [...]
The healthy human brain is no dummy. By the time it reaches adulthood, it knows a lot about what works and what doesn’t work. Where it gets in trouble is when things that it thought worked no longer do so, at least not well enough.
When that brain was much younger and in the body of [...]
The physicist-turned-healer (G*d rest his soul—he’s no longer with us) fulminated against eating too much garlic. He said gorging on “the stinking rose” is a very bad thing for the brain.
He reasoned this way:
Garlic contains a poison called sulfone hydroxyl. The sulfone hydroxyl ion, he alleged, can penetrate the brain’s blood barrier. Heavy garlic eaters, [...]
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. That means every blogger and her bird dog are thinking about sex. But then, who needs Valentine’s Day as an excuse to think about sex?
The brain—as every psychobabble and (as you are seeing) thinking-skills aficionado is sure to remind you eventually—is arguably our major sex organ. So it [...]
In the early fall of 2008, my colleague, Dr. Paul Kordis, and I promoted a new book idea to some of Madison Avenue’s top literary agents. Soon, we were being greeted every few days by a sound familiar to writers: a Bronx cheer.
In the book business, that translates to “Get lost, dullard!”
Reading our rejection [...]
Friends of ours told us the other night about their grandson, now 7, who lives just down the street from them. That means he spends a lot of nights at their place, school nights included. And that means either his grandmother or his granddad (but usually his grandmother) is freighted with the task of rousting [...]
I don’t often experience writer’s block. Sleeping on a topic overnight is nearly always enough to return a free flow of ideas and images. But it was not working that way with this thing called The Singularity. For days, I tried without success to tie a literary bow around a supposition that had fast become [...]
Dudley Lynch stepped off the curb of normal expectations some years ago and has never managed to get back on the sidewalk. He observes, opines, writes and sometimes lectures (usually the dog) on the serious consequences of being alive in the 21st Century from Gainesville, Florida, where he is president of Brain Me Up.
