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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
On May 11, 1997, the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov sat down in a Manhattan office tower to play the final game of his rematch against an IBM computer called Deep Blue — and resigned in under an hour, in what may be the cleanest moment in modern history when a domain of human cognition quietly crossed over to a machine
Early emotional states become physically embedded in the architecture of the developing brain — and laughter, according to recent research, is one of the experiences doing that work
At twenty, the brain processes information faster than it ever will again. In middle age, the same brain may read other people’s emotions more accurately than it ever has. By the late sixties, its vocabulary can still be climbing. The human mind does not peak once — it rotates.
On 12 April 1961, a 27-year-old Russian fighter pilot named Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in history to leave the Earth — sealed inside a metal sphere just over two metres wide, with the spacecraft's controls locked because nobody knew what the human brain would do in weightlessness, and instructions to open a sealed envelope only if he lost his mind during the 108 minutes he spent orbiting the planet alone
Most people don't realize that men now entering their 70s are often being asked to discuss feelings they were raised to keep out of view
In the summer of 1858, a lesser-known 35-year-old naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace mailed Charles Darwin a 20-page letter from the Indonesian jungle outlining the theory of evolution by natural selection — a theory Darwin had been quietly developing for 20 years without publishing — forcing Darwin to hastily share the credit with a man he had never met
In June 1971, the New York Times began publishing excerpts from a 7,000-page classified Defense Department history that demonstrated four successive American presidents had systematically lied about the Vietnam War — leaked by a former military analyst named Daniel Ellsberg, who had spent 18 months secretly photocopying the documents in his office at night
The person who stays calm in every crisis often isn't fearless — many of them learned in childhood that someone had to hold it together
For 24 years, the Soviet Union had used the world chess championship as proof of its intellectual superiority over the West — and the American Bobby Fischer's defeat of Soviet champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 ended that argument, in front of the entire world, in a single match
In 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei pointed a small telescope at Jupiter and saw four small objects circling it — becoming the first human being in history to look at the night sky and see, with his own eyes, that the Earth was not the center of everything
