The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

Research done at the BMJ itself indicates that having the value of a paper judged by the editor, or at least a small group of editorial staff, would be likely to produce just as good results, while obviously being much quicker, much less expensive, completely transparent, less open to malpractice, no more prone to bias, and no longer wasteful of th

Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is ‘firmed up’ – and brought into being.

Though truth is always my personal judgment, it is not just possible, but necessary, that my judgment should take into account yours and many others. It is far from random, but is, rather, informed by experiment, perception, reason, intuition and imagination. That doesn’t make it less reliable than being informed by a single source, such as reason,

In the face of such overwhelming evidence of the inadequacy of the machine model to the study of living organisms, why, then, does this product of the mid-Victorian mindset persist? One reason is its simplicity. We are familiar with machines, and because they are what we are used to making, taking apart and putting together, it is perhaps a natural

It is quite impossible for genes to ‘programme’ the making of an embryo. For a start, there is nowhere near enough information contained in genes. Consider the human brain, never mind the whole human body. With an estimated 100 billion neurones, a quarter of a million of them are created on average during every minute of the nine months of gestatio

Pragmatism is a form of open-mindedness that judges ideas not by their roots but by their fruits.

Alfred Kazin wrote that we should trust to the contradictions and see them out. Never annul one force to give supremacy to another. The contradiction itself is the reality in all its manifoldness … the more faithful [man] is to his perception of the contradiction, the more he is open to what there is for him to know … a contradiction that is faced

In one way, the hemisphere hypothesis is deceptively simple: the bi-hemispheric structure of the brain makes possible attending to the world simultaneously in two otherwise incompatible ways. It is the implications of this that are manifold. Immediately it gives rise to a number of further hypotheses: that this is a requirement of survival; that th

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things … A lot of people in our industry haven’t