We have a model of the world in our mind. It guides us and helps to plan ahead. But it tends to grow beyond what we need for the task at hand and takes the resources that might be needed for the survival. Does it weaken us as a species? Professor Hoffman thinks so.
Articles related to : Perception
We perceive the same events differently and build slightly different world models, which in turn influence our perception.
In each joke…
Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Peter Principle: In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. In time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out […]
Cleopatra’s nose and butterfly
When I traveled to the western Europe the first few times, I had the bitter feeling of not being able to answer this question: why they lived so much better than we did? I could not accept the simple “because they are smarter” or “because they work better” or “because their government less corrupt”. I […]
Anna Karenina principle
Ecologist Dwayne Moore wrote in his article “The Principle Applied to Ecological Risk Assessments of Multiple Stressors”, published in 2001: “Successful ecological risk assessments are all alike; every unsuccessful ecological risk assessment fails in its own way. Tolstoy posited a similar analogy in his novel Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family […]
Incident in a concert hall
When I was a student in Moscow, with my friends, we often listen music in the Grand Hall of Moscow Conservatory or in the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. The advantage of the first one was an occasional chance to slip past the ticket booth, pretending to be a student of the conservatory (all student IDs looked […]
Americans are most similar to Russians
My uncle Eugeni, when served in the army, was stationed in Chukotka - less than 60 miles from the United States - across Bering Strait. That’s where he heard jazz on the radio a lot. The movie “Sun Valley Serenade” impressed his generation too. So, he mastered playing several jazz instruments. That’s why probably I […]
Myth and triumph of white marble
We associate the art of classical antiquity with white marble. The word “classical” itself implies it. “Classical” means harmony of human body, profound meaning, respectful time distance and grand echo in the unbreakable silence of the museum, doesn’t it? A glimpse of white tunic in the midst of the colorful Mediterranean crowd or a white […]
Better than others
I have visited and stayed for some time in several European countries, lived in Russia, Ukraine and now in the US. And in every of the countries, I observed that people there felt special as a nation. Which is quite understandable - each of us feels somewhat special and unique. We have privileged access to […]
Nobel lecture of Svetlana Alexievich
“I lived in a country where dying was taught to us from childhood. We were taught death. We were told that human beings exist in order to give everything they have, to burn out, to sacrifice themselves. We were taught to love people with weapons. Had I grown up in a different country, I couldn’t […]
Do you like contradictions?
What “contradictions” is associated with in your mind? Something negative, correct? Oxford Thesaurus lists the following synonyms for contradiction: conflict, clash, disagreement, opposition, inconsistency, mismatch, and variance. It used to have negative connotation for me too. But it somehow evolved due to my activity as a scientist. In the science, as you know, a contradiction […]
