Charlie Gedeon

I think it is more helpful to talk about the underlying processes: spontaneous thought, or the decoupling of attention from perception, which is what happens when our thoughts separate from our perception of the environment. Both these processes take place during mind-wandering and daydreaming.

Psychology was focused on measurable, outward behavior then. I thought to myself: That’s not what I want to understand about my thoughts. What I want to know is: Why do they come, where do they come from, and why do they persist even if they interfere with attention to the here and now?

From reading over 100 business books and running a startup for over a year, here's a 2-word summary of communication that might save you years of reading: Contrast, Potential.

If you’ve ever felt that you can’t focus on a task when you’re hungry — or that all you can think about is food — the neural evidence backs you up. Work from a few years ago confirmed that short-term hunger can change neural processing and bias our attention in ways that may help us find food faster.

If you go too far off the beaten path of algorithmic consistency, you risk never being heard. You may never get enough cultural momentum to exist in any meaningful way. That is a real problem. But if you're too good at algorithmic optimization, you risk building a large audience without saying anything particularly original or important. Not to... See more

There is a lot of evidence suggesting that students learn best and more quickly through asset-based approaches. Meyer’s expertise is in math, but the same is true in writing and I am a dedicated practitioner of working from a base of what students already know and can do, the most notable skill being thinking . Everyone can think, but a huge... See more

I used to value myself based on how fast I was learning and the breadth of the ground I was covering. This was a way to escape my own perfectionism — which caught up to me as soon as I started focusing on only one thing. I’m learning it’s a skill to sit with your mistakes, ask for help, and move slower and more deliberately.

"If we turn this wonderful technology we have for knowledge into a weapon for disinformation," he told me, "we are in deep trouble." Why? "Because we won't know what we know, and we won't know who to trust, and we won't know whether we're informed or misinformed. We may become either paranoid and hyper-sceptical, or just apathetic and unmoved. Both... See more