Sublime

One groundbreaking experiment was conducted by Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

In 2014, Roediger and his collaborators sent a team, equipped with a battery of cognitive tests, to the Extreme Memory Tournament held in San Diego. They wanted to understand what differentiated these elite memorizers from the population at large. “We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us is in a cogni

As Swiss wrote the series of essays that were eventually collected in his book Shattering Illusions, he arrived at the idea that magic was, in his words, “an experiment in empathy”—a contest of minds, in which the magician dominates by a superior grasp of the way minds work. The spectator is not a dupe who gets fooled but a rational actor who gets

The best games are the ones that challenge our misperceptions, rather than pandering to them in order to hook players.

“Will this be reported to the Hendon Mob?” I ask the man who’s counting out my payout. The Hendon Mob is the website that tracks all poker players’ tournament winnings, and I’m excited at the thought that I will be Hendon-official. It’s a certain badge of honor, in my mind. It means I’ve actually progressed.

our storytelling proclivity in another guise: we imagine stories based on the ones we’ve experienced, not the ones we haven’t.

There is a difference between active and passive knowledge, those boxes that you need to access regularly and as a matter of course and those that you may need to reach one day but don’t necessarily look to on a regular basis. Holmes isn’t asking that we stop being curious, that we stop acquiring those jellyfish. No. He asks that we keep the active