Mary Martin

The more you build your self-conception

on memory, which is notoriously unreliable, and the more you try to give yourself an identity

by constructing a narrative of your life, the less likely you are to understand who and what

you really are.

we’d argue that if you produce something iconic, you can create a cultural moment that ripples through people’s crowded psyches and impacts them deeply. And if you’re culturally and commercially successful, it paves the way for future experiments: it becomes easier to both sell tickets and sell ideas to potential clients.

A new study reveals that regardless of task difficulty, people’s minds increasingly wander with time, reaching a 50% distraction rate towards the end of activities. Analyzing over 10,000 participants in 68 studies, the research found no significant difference in distraction levels across various tasks. This phenomenon persists even without external... See more

A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of... See more