guilds help to offset this problem. If it is costly and time-consuming to join one, the only people who enter are those with a serious commitment to a craft.

Monkfish was originally called goosefish, orange roughy was once called slimehead, and sea urchins were once whore’s eggs.

Yet policy and business decisions are overwhelmingly based on a ‘reason first, discovery later’ methodology, which seems wasteful in the extreme.

The models that dominate all human decision-making today are duly heavy on simplistic logic, and light on magic – a spreadsheet leaves no room for miracles.

In reality, almost everything is more evolutionary than we care to admit.

cognitive psychology as ‘social psychology with all the interesting variables set to zero’.

‘A label directs a person’s attention towards a feature in a dish, and hence helps bring out certain flavours and textures.’

To solve logic-proof problems requires intelligent, logical people to admit the possibility that they might be wrong about something, but these people’s minds are often most resistant to change

the single worst thing that can happen in a criminal investigation is for everyone involved to become fixated on the same theory, because one false assumption shared by everyone can undermine the entire investigation.