Mary Martin

Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions — by their very existence as ideas — function causally to bring about their own reality.

When people suppressed their fearful thoughts, as opposed to vividly imagining them, they were markedly less anxious about those thoughts later. They also rated their fears as less vivid and remembered them less.

I want to defend and buoy hope – it’s a fragile, quirky thing, but it has the power to help us act in the face of finitude

Hope is vitalising. When it pulses, we aspire toward better futures and conspire with what we have and have been. In its absence, we often grow listless, even court despair. I thus want to defend hope, underscore what we gain... See more

If we can learn about human cognition, behaviour and pathology by studying insects, how does this blur the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’?

Power is making one description seem more real or natural than others.

Csikszentmihalyi’s research suggests that flow is conducive to optimal experience . But it doesn’t tell us anything about whether it is conducive to optimal performance . So look for flow when you want to feel better, but not necessarily when you want to do better.

The results showed that people with a higher desire to so-cially connect were more likely to anthropomorphize the chatbot, ascribing humanlike mental properties to it; and people who anthropomorphized the chatbot more were also more likely to report that it had an impact on their social interactions and relationships with family and friends.