2026 physical reads

Touch is our most highly developed sense when we are born, and it remains a fundamental mode of communication throughout a baby’s first year and an important influence throughout a person’s life.

— Subliminal, Leonard Mlodinow

“To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness

If you are a job applicant, the quality of your handshake can affect the outcome of your employment interview. If you are a salesperson, your degree of eye contact can influence your rating of customer satisfaction. If you are a doctor, the tone of your voice can have an impact on not only your patients’ assessment of their visit but their

Categorization is one of the most important mental acts we perform, and we do it all the time…

One of the principal ways we categorize is by maximising the importance of certain differences, and minimising the relevance of others…

Merely placing objects in groups can affect our judgment of those objects. So while categorization is a natural and

“The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous. Infinite play resounds throughout with a kind of laughter.

It is not a laughter at others who have come to an unexpected end, having thought they were going somewhere else.

It is laughter with others with whom we have discovered that the end we thought we were coming to has

“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”

— Finite and Infinite Games, James P Carse

American journalist and intellectual Walter Lippmann wrote, “For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a

Social psychologists sometimes categorize our non-verbal communication into 3 basic types:

1. body movements: facial expression, gestures, posture, eye movements

2. paralanguage: quality and pitch of your voice, the number and duration of pauses, and nonverbal sounds e.g. filler words, and clearing one’s throat

3. proxemics: the use of personal space

— Sublim