We began to think with things.

our information technologies all derive from the single insight that matter records the history of the universe because it is a slow, cold form of information. The universe writes its own autobiography in atoms.

What we call creativity is the use of mental content in contexts wildly unrelated to its source.

He came to see life as a state of becoming, not being.

Like poetry, mathematics, and music, good memory relies on patterns that simultaneously constrain content and suggest meaning.

In the meantime, there was a scramble among publishing entrepreneurs to gain market share for their books, not unlike the jostling we see today for control of search, social media, and apps for mobile devices. Printers pioneered consumer-friendly features such as the small-format volumes (octavo size, the equivalent of today’s paperback books), new

The eerie certainty we have of existing as separate creatures in a world full of things that are not us, our ability to create abstract symbolic representations of our mental states and use language to communicate these interior states of mind—all

Creativity flows from the suspended state of mind in which knowledge is nothing and attention is everything.

William James pointed out that “the God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale business, not a retail business.