<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22669010-a-curious-mind">A Curious Mind </a>is an homage to the power of asking questions, showing you how being curious can change your entire life, from the way you do business, to how you interact with your loved ones, or even shape your country.

A Curious Mind - Book 

"Life isn't about finding the answers, it's about asking the questions."-Brian Grazer

Author Quote

When I say <a href="http://www.grazeriscurious.com/">Brian Grazer </a>, does that ring a bell? It didn’t for me at first, I have to admit. Maybe the title of this book reminds you of something. A Curious Mind. No? A Beautiful Mind maybe? You know, the movie about the brilliance of economics Nobel prize winner John Nash, who invented the field of game theory, but suffered from severe schizophrenia? The one that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and three others?

Yup, Brian Grazer produced that. He also produced movies like 8 Mile, Frost/Nixon, Apollo 13 and the world-famous TV show 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer. In 2015, Brian asked himself what the root of his success was. He determined that the answer was curiosity. To share how it’s shaped his life in ways he’d never imagined, and how it can potentially transform yours, he co-wrote <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22669010-a-curious-mind">A Curious Mind </a> with journalist Charles Fishman.

<ol><li>In business, whoever is the most curious, wins. </li><li>Everyone loves being asked questions and that includes the people closest to you. </li><li>Sometimes you gotta know when to stop asking and start doing. </li> </ol>

Top 3 Lessons From The Book 

Most people will tell you that business is hard. That it’s competitive. That you have to get your elbows out, toughen up, and try to overtake whoever’s in front of you. But that’s not true. You can take a much more cooperative approach, one that’s <a href="http://fourminutebooks.com/first-things-first-summary/">based on collaboration, not competition </a>, and still win. In fact, Brian Grazer would probably say: Whoever’s the most curious, wins . Curiosity not only fosters cooperation, but also connection.

Lesson 1: A rule of business is that whoever’s the most curious

If you’re genuinely curious about your employees’ lives, you’ll ask them questions accordingly. This way, Brian leads mostly by asking questions, instead of giving orders. Vice versa, his employees are supposed to ask him many questions also! When you’re curious, people can explain and reflect on their work themselves. This kind of meaningful conversation leads to bigger and better breakthroughs than a mere “do this now” approach.

The same holds true for your customers. Who would you rather buy a car from? The dealer who just touts his latest offers and how great the cars are, or someone who asks you why you want to buy a car, what you need it for, where you’ll go with it, and what you’re looking for? The only way to satisfy your customer is to find out exactly what they want in each case and then serve them the best way you can – and you can’t do that without being curious.

I recently thought about how much I know about my parents’ childhoods. As it turns out, it’s not too much. Sure, I know where they went to school and a couple big milestones, but teenage life is long – there’s so much I still have to ask them! Think about someone you’ve known most or all of your life. How much do you really know about them? Chances are there’s still tons left to discover. By showing interest, you can improve your relationships even with the best of your friends and loved ones .

Lesson 2: Everyone loves being asked and answering questions

Most couples eventually fall into a rut. “Hey, how was your day?” “Good, good.” …and then TV takes over. Saving a deteriorating relationship from falling apart can be as simple as remembering one specific thing your partner told you and then asking them about it. “Hey, how’d the presentation go today? Were you nervous?” shows you remember and are curious about how their story evolves.

Similarly, questions make you much better at <a href="http://fourminutebooks.com/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people-summary/">connecting with people </a>. Everyone loves being asked questions and to talk about themselves , so instead of rambling about yourself at the next party, start asking new people all about their story. Where did you grow up? What do you do for a living? How do you like it? As in business, so in life: curiosity connects.

Being curious is a great mode to be in 90% of the time. But sometimes, it’s time to flip the switch and become anti-curious for a while. For example, after Brian Grazer had the idea for the TV show 24 from one of his many curiosity conversations (weekly meetings with professionals from all kinds of fields), he had to switch and commit to now bringing the show to life.

Lesson 3: When it’s time to stop asking and start doing

Similarly, his expertise in the film industry now tells him when he’s found a movie that deserves to be made – even if it’s not going to be a mass hit. Frost/Nixon and Rush are great examples of such movies. They were well written, and the stories of the post-Watergate Nixon interviews and Niki Lauda and James Hunt’s Formula One rivalry in the 70s deserved to be told. So Brian went ahead and made them, ignoring what people told him.

He had to tone down his curiosity for a while, but in the end both movies got a lot of critical acclaim, in spite of not being commercial successes. The only way to create something of value is to ignore new ideas every now and then – it’s up to you to know when that is .

<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22669010-a-curious-mind">A Curious Mind </a> is a wonderful angle at business and life, if you ask me. It’s predicated on fun, being open-minded and preserving your sense of childhood curiosity. Seems to me like a much more sustainable approach than “work is hard, life is hard, you gotta be tough.” Never stop answering questions. Great book!

A Curious Mind - Book Review

The 16 year old who has his own Youtube show, but sometimes runs out of new ideas, the 47 year old wife, who feels like her marriage is stuck in a rut, and anyone who loves watching great movies.

Who would I recommend the A Curious Mind to?

This A Curious Mind summary shows why whoever's most curious wins in business, how questions improve your relationships & when it's time to be anti-curious.

Understand yourself and those around you.

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Psychology

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Philosophy

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Marketing & Sales

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Creativity

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Science & Nature

A Curious Mind Summary

Q. What would happen if the Earth and all terrestrial objects suddenly stopped spinning, but the atmosphere retained its velocity?<ul><li>Nearly everyone would die.</li><li>At the equator, the Earth’s surface is moving at about 470 meters per second—relative to its axis. If the Earth stopped and the air didn’t, the result would be a sudden thousand-mile-per-hour wind.</li><li>Day and night would each be six months long.</li></ul>

Global Windstorm


Q. What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light?<ul><li>It would, however, start to eat away at the surface, blasting tiny fragments of the ball in all directions. These fragments would be going so fast that when they hit air molecules, they would trigger two or three more rounds of fusion.And with a great roar, the blast wave would arrive, tearing up trees and shredding houses.</li></ul>

Relativistic Baseball

Q. What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?<ul><li>You could probably survive treading water anywhere from 10 to 40 hours.</li><li>Spent fuel from nuclear reactors is highly radioactive. Water is good for both radiation shielding and cooling, so fuel is stored at the bottom of pools for a couple of decades until it’s inert enough to be moved into dry casks.</li></ul>

Spent Fuel Pool


Q. What would happen if everyone on Earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant?<ul><li>It doesn’t really affect the planet. Earth outweighs us by a factor of over ten trillion. On average, we humans can vertically jump maybe half a meter on a good day. Even if the Earth were rigid and responded instantly, it would be pushed down by less than an atom’s width.</li></ul>

Everybody Jump


Q. Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?<ul><li>The principle here is pretty simple. If you fire a bullet forward, the recoil pushes you back. So if you fire downward, the recoil should push you up.</li><li>With enough machine guns, you could fly.</li></ul>

Machine-Gun Jetpack

Q. If you suddenly began rising steadily at 1 foot per second, how exactly would you die? Would you freeze or suffocate first? Or something else?<ul><li>Above 8000 meters—above the tops of all but the highest mountains—the oxygen content in the air is too low to support human life. Near this zone, you would experience a range of symptoms, possibly including confusion, dizziness, clumsiness, impaired vision, and nausea.</li><li>The result would be a rapid loss of consciousness and death.</li></ul>

Rising Steadily

Q. How much physical space does the Internet take up?<ul><li>The storage industry produces in the neighborhood of 650 million hard drives per year. If most of them are 3.5-inch drives, that’s 8 liters (2 gallons) of hard drive per second.</li><li>This means the last few years of hard-drive production represents the majority of global storage capacity—would just about fill an oil tanker.</li><li>So, by that measure, the Internet is smaller than an oil tanker.</li></ul>

Size Of Internet 

Q. How dangerous is it, really, to be in a pool during a thunderstorm?<ul><li>Pretty dangerous. Water is conductive, but that’s not the biggest problem—the biggest problem is that if you’re swimming, your head is poking up from a large flat surface. But lightning striking the water near you would still be bad. The 20,000 amps spread outward—mostly over the surface.</li></ul>

Lightning

Q. What would happen if lightning struck a bullet in midair?<ul><li>If it were sitting still, the current would quickly heat and melt the metal.</li><li>But since it would be moving along so quickly, it would exit the channel before it could be warmed by more than a few degrees. It would continue on to its target relatively unaffected.</li></ul>

Bullet Vs Lightning 

Q. How much computing power could we could achieve if the entire world population stopped whatever we are doing right now and started doing calculations?How would it compare to a modern-day computer or smartphone?<ul><li>The processor in a mobile phone could do calculations about 70 times faster than the entire world population. A new high-end desktop PC chip would increase that ratio to 1500.</li><li>Under Moore’s law–based projections, and using these simulation figures, computers won’t pull ahead of humans until the year 2036.7</li></ul>

Human Computer


Q. If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince?<ul><li>If the asteroid had a radius of 1.75 meters, then in order to have Earthlike gravity at the surface, it would need to have a mass of about 500 million tons. This is roughly equal to the combined mass of every human on Earth.</li><li>The escape velocity at the surface would be about 5 meters per second. That’s slower than a sprint, but still pretty fast.</li></ul>

Little Planet


Q. From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?<ul><li>No matter how fast it was going when it reached the lower layers of the atmosphere, it would quickly slow down to terminal velocity. No matter the starting height, it always takes six or seven minutes to drop from 25 kilometers to the ground.</li><li>When the steak does finally hit the ground, it will be traveling at terminal velocity—about 30 meters per second. Steak will remain as it is.</li></ul>

Steak Drop


Q. How hard would a puck have to be shot to be able to knock the goalie himself backward into the net?<ul><li>This can’t really happen.</li><li>If you’re like me, when you first saw this question, you might’ve imagined the puck leaving a cartoon-style hockey-puck-shaped hole. But that’s because our intuitions are shaky about how materials react at very high speeds.</li><li>Instead, a different mental picture might be more accurate: Imagine throwing a ripe tomato—as hard as you can—at a cake. That’s about what would happen.</li></ul>

Hockey Puck

Q. This may be a bit gruesome, but . . . if someone’s DNA suddenly vanished, how long would that person last?<ul><li>If you lost your DNA, you would instantly be about a third of a pound lighter.</li><li>Losing your DNA would most likely result in abdominal pain, nausea, dizziness, rapid immune system collapse, and death within days or hours from either rapid systemic infection or systemwide organ failure.</li></ul>

No More DNA


Q. How much Force power can Yoda output?<ul><li>Combining this with the X-wing mass and lift rate gives us our peak power output: That’s enough to power a block of suburban homes. It’s also equal to about 25 horsepower. At current electricity prices, Yoda would be worth about $2/hour.</li><li>So Yoda sounds like our best bet as an energy source. But with world electricity consumption pushing 2 terawatts, it would take a hundred million Yodas to meet our demands.</li></ul>

Yoda


Q. What if I jumped out of an airplane with a couple of tanks of helium and one huge, un-inflated balloon? Then, while falling, I release the helium and fill the balloon. How long of a fall would I need in order for the balloon to slow me enough that I could land safely?<ul><li>If you inflated the balloons quickly, possibly by connecting many canisters to it at once, you’d be able to slow your fall.</li><li>Just don’t use too much helium, or you’ll end up floating at 16,000 feet like Larry Walters.</li></ul>

Falling with Helium


Q. Is there enough energy to move the entire current human population off-planet?<ul><li>An absolute baseline energy requirement: 4 gigajoules per person. No matter how we do it, whether we use rockets or a cannon or a space elevator or a ladder, moving a 65-kilogram person—out of the Earth’s gravity well requires at least this much energy.</li><li>Launching all of humanity (total weight: around 400 million tons) would therefore take tens of trillions of tons of fuel.</li></ul>

Everybody Out


Q. I read about some researchers who were trying to produce sperm from bone marrow stem cells. If a woman were to have sperm cells made from her own stem cells and impregnate herself, what would be her relationship to her daughter?<ul><li>A child from a parent who self-fertilized would be like a clone of the parent. But the child wouldn’t have all the genes of the parent. Half the child’s chromosomes would have their “partner” chromosomes replaced by a copy of themselves.</li><li>It’s what you would expect in a child of three generations of consecutive sibling marriages.</li></ul>

Self-Fertilization


Q. How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation?<ul><li>Neutrinos are ghostly particles that barely interact with the world at all. Look at your hand—there are about a trillion neutrinos from the Sun passing through it every second.</li><li>If you observed a supernova from 1 AU away—and you somehow avoided being incinerated, vaporized—even the flood of ghostly neutrinos would be dense enough to kill you.</li></ul>

Lethal Neutrinos


Q. How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live?<ul><li>The two main things protecting you from bumps in the road are the tires and the suspension.</li><li>Cars generate lift. The air flowing around a car exerts all kinds of forces on it.</li><li>At the range of 150–300 mph, a typical sedan would lift off the ground, tumble, and crash . . . before you even hit the bump.</li></ul>

Speed Bump

Q. How quickly would the oceans drain if a circular portal 10 meters in radius leading into space were created at the bottom of Challenger Deep, the deepest spot in the ocean? How would the Earth change as the water was being drained?<ul><li>It would actually take hundreds of thousands of years for the ocean to drain. Even though the opening is wider than a basketball court, and the water is forced through at incredible speeds, the oceans are huge.</li></ul>

Drain the Oceans


Q. If you call a random phone number and say “God bless you,” what are the chances that the person who answers just sneezed?<ul><li>It’s hard to find good numbers on this, but it’s probably about 1 in 40,000.</li><li>Before you pick up the phone, you should also keep in mind that there’s roughly a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance that the person you’re calling just murdered someone.</li></ul>

Random Sneeze Call


Q. Assuming a zero-gravity environment with an atmosphere identical to Earth’s, how long would it take the friction of air to stop an arrow fired from a bow? Would it eventually come to a standstill and hover in midair?<ul><li>The arrow would slow down quickly. Air resistance is proportional to speed squared, which means that when it’s going fast, the arrow would experience a lot of drag.</li><li>But at minimum, it would probably fly 5 to 10 kilometers.</li></ul>

Weightless Arrow


Q. When, if ever, will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than of living ones?<ul><li>Either the 2060s or the 2130s. There are not a lot of dead people on Facebook. The main reasons for this is that Facebook—and its users—are young. The average Facebook user has gotten older over the last few years, but the site is still used at a much higher rate by the young than by the old.</li></ul>

Facebook of the Dead


Q. I was absentmindedly stirring a cup of hot tea, when I got to thinking, “Aren’t I actually adding kinetic energy into this cup?” I know that stirring does help to cool down the tea, but what if I were to stir it faster? Would I be able to boil a cup of water by stirring?<ul><li>No.</li><li>If you stir hard enough that your tea cavitates, its surface area will increase very rapidly, and it will cool to room temperature in seconds. No matter how hard you stir your tea, it’s not going to get any warmer.</li></ul>

Stirring Tea


Q. What if a rainstorm dropped all of its water in a single giant drop?<ul><li>In this storm, all that water instead condenses into one giant drop, a sphere of water over a kilometer in diameter.</li><li>The drop is now falling at 90 meters per second (200 mph).</li><li>When the water contacted the surface, you’d be crushed to death—the shockwave would briefly create pressures exceeding those at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.</li><li>Splash continues outward, demolishing all structures out to distances of 20 or 30 kilometers.</li></ul>

Raindrop


Q. What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? How many perfect scores would there be?<ul><li>The probability of getting all 158 questions right is: That’s one in 27 quinquatrigintillion.</li><li>How certain is it? Well, if they each used a computer to take the test a million times each day, and continued this every day for five billion years—the chance of any of them ever getting a perfect score on just the math section would be about 0.0001 percent.</li></ul>

SAT Guessing


The creator of the incredibly popular webcomic xkcd presents his heavily researched answers to his fans' oddest questions, including “What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool?” and “Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?” 100,000 first printing.

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Technology & The Future

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Learning & Education

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Problem Solving

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Books

From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans' strangest questions. The queries he receives range from merely odd to downright diabolical: - What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool? - Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns? - What if a Richter 15 earthquake hit New York City? - Are fire tornadoes possible? His responses are masterpieces of clarity and wit, gleefully and accurately explaining everything from the relativistic effects of a baseball pitched at near the speed of light to the many horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements. The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? is an informative feast for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.

Randall Munroe, a former NASA roboticist, is the creator of the webcomic xkcd and the author of xkcd: volume 0. The International Astronomical Union recently named an asteroid after him; asteroid 4942 Munroe is big enough to cause a mass extinction if it ever hits a planet like Earth. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Randall Munroe

What If?

1984 By George Orwell - 30 Quotes

1. “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

2. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

3. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

4. “The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.”

5. “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

6. “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

7. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

8. “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”

9. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

10. “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

11 . “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

12. “It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another.”

13. “It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones.”

14. “Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”

15. “But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.”

16. “If you kept the small rules you could break the big ones.”

17. “When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?”

18. “To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.”

19. “Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. (Continues next slide)

By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”

19. (Continued

20 . “The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.”

21. “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

22. “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

23. “Sanity is not statistical.”

24. “Where there is equality, there can be sanity.”

25. “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

26. “What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?”

27. “Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever… And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon.”

28. “Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was completely satisfying.”

29. “‘If he THINKS he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously THINK I see him do it, then the thing happens. … It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.’ … What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.”

30. “To die hating them, that was freedom.”

1984 by George Orwell - 30 Important Lines

Looking for the best quotes from 1984 by George Orwell? Here's our list of the 30 most popular & important lines from this classic.

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Science Fiction

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Motivation & Inspiration

1984 Quotes: The 30 Best & Most Important Lines From George Orwell's Masterpiece

5 key insights from the new book, The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit

We all lie, all the time—including you. Human deception is no different from its animal equivalent of camouflage, spots, and stripes. Charm is our very own version of frilly fins and peacock feathers. Like a stick insect adapted to hide among twigs, the effort to deceive, from camouflage to creative bullshit, is an evolutionary arms race as old as organic life.

1. You’re a natural-born liar.

Trickery is fundamental to interaction, and the instinct to misrepresent objective reality to suit our needs is fundamental to communication. In the evolution of deceit, language only came about quite recently, billions of years after more basic and more effective tools of the con. In fact, humans may have developed language specifically to manipulate each other in new and cleverer ways; it’s just the latest innovation in a billion-year-old chess game.

As Rutgers Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences Robert Trivers put it, “Our most prized possession, language, not only strengthens our ability to lie, but greatly extends its range.” Consider that when you lie with your scent, your pattern, or your petals, you can only lie about what you are, here and now. But lie with words, and you can lie about anything, anyone, anywhere; you can rewrite facts past, present, and future. In other words, human speech allows deceptions to transcend space and time. Dishonesty is truly a feature, not a bug, of our nature.

Jefferson Randolph Smith was a con man who set up the first telegraph office out of Skagway, Alaska. For the price of five dollars, settlers, frontiersmen, and prospectors could send a telegraph message to anyone in the United States. Unsurprisingly, there were lines around the building every day. It was great business—even though the first telegraph wires didn’t actually arrive in Alaska until two years later.

People lined up and paid for over a year to send important messages that went as far as the wall of Smith’s office. So why were people so ready to believe that Smith could send out telegrams just because he said so?

In the absence of evidence, humans tend to believe that whatever we’re presented with is true—be it someone’s name, a random fact, a complex explanation, even something as obvious as the presence of a physical object we see Neurologists refer to this tendency as the “honesty bias,” and it’s how we know almost everything that we know. It’s because of your honesty bias that you don’t automatically wonder if a lamp is a hallucination that only you can see, or suspect that everyone you meet might be lying about their name. If we didn’t lean toward this neurological shortcut, we’d all go insane.

It’s also the single adaptation that has allowed humans to develop speech, literacy, history, science, and civilization itself. You don’t have to discover, confirm, or even understand every fact or idea you learn, because you are biased to just accept them as true and keep climbing. This is the mechanism behind our species’ collective intelligence: To rapidly acquire another’s lifetime of experience or problem-solving for ourselves, all we need to do is ask—and then trust the answer.

So in the long run, we benefit more from the honesty bias than we risk in being overly trusting. Our honesty bias may be exploitable, but it’s also indispensable.

Seeing may be believing, but it really shouldn’t be. Your brain doesn’t actually have the processing power to deal with all of the sensory data available at every second—so, like all gamblers, it cheats. As a result, we often end up seeing what we expect to see.Take shell games; everybody falls for sleight of hand because it exploits several loopholes in perceptual cognition, the ways in which your brain processes and interprets input from your senses. In other words, if you have a normally functioning brain, you literally can’t not fall for it.

3. Lies take advantage of the way we perceive—and construct—reality.

Your visual cortex—the part of the brain that processes electrical signals from the retina and turns them into images in your mind—functions with a 0.1-second delay. So you can’t believe your eyes, because while your eyes may work, your brain is processing everything your eyes pick up about one-tenth of a second behind what’s happening.

Your brain also doesn’t have the bandwidth to process everything you see, so it fills in most of what’s around you with what it expects to be around you. It’s only when something changes radically that your brain notices, and loops back around to see what’s going on.

There are other exploitable neurological loopholes as well—for example, there’s the mirroring effect. Mirroring is when specialized cells in your brain called “mirror neurons” cause you to imitate the gesture, posture, or subtle movements of whomever you’re interacting with. Someone smiles, you smile back. Someone looks up suddenly, you look up too. You assume these are conscious choices, but they’re not—and it’s an incredibly effective way to make people look (or not look) at whatever you want.

In 1898, four Denver reporters from different newspapers went to a bar, got really drunk, and made up a story. They all claimed in their separate papers to have met a team of four American engineers on their way to China. The engineers, they said, told them that they’d been hired to destroy the Great Wall at China’s request. Supposedly this was being done as a gesture of goodwill, and as an invitation to foreign trade.

4. What matters is not if something is true, but if it is believed.

It was a multi-person hoax, and unfortunately, other newspapers picked up the story, and it went viral. Within weeks, a major east coast newspaper did an entire special Sunday spread about the fake destruction of the Great Wall, including elaborate illustrations and further exposition about the Chinese government’s historic plan to end their isolationist policy.

Because this was a respected newspaper, the story quickly spread to Europe, then to Asia, and finally to China, where political tempers were already running high. In fact, this fiction allegedly contributed to the Boxer Rebellion, a destabilizing and violent disaster that hastened the decline of the Qing Dynasty.

The point of this story is not that a single fake news story may have radically altered the course of 20th-century Chinese history—though it did—it’s that the Boxer Rebellion occurred just as it would have had the news been real. The cause may have been fictitious, but it had the same effect as its truthful parallel.

Reality, in other words, is circumstantial. In the greater scheme of things, it matters less whether or not a thing is actually true, but rather whether or not it is believed to be so.

If a whole civilization believes certain objects have power or value, and everyone behaves accordingly, then for all intents and purposes, they do possess that value or power. It may be a lie, but a quality counterfeit object still works precisely the same way the real object would—for exactly as long as it is believed to be authentic. And if a thing only needs to be believed in to be effective, then that begs the question: Was there ever anything to value or authority other than belief in the first place?

5. Nothing is entirely real.

The rule of law, the value of diamonds, the existence of the economy—when we all agree to believe certain things, those things become real. Take paper money—it’s just paper, but as long as we all agree to believe in it together, it has value. It takes on the weight of reality.

Why we lie and how we believe are so inextricably intertwined that there can be no faith without fraud, no truth without lies, no civilization without cons. Whether they’re the lies we tell each other, or the subtler and more complicated lies we tell ourselves, deceit and belief are two halves of one whole. One can’t exist without the other, and society can’t function without both.

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit 

Scientist and historian Aja Raden untangles the complex relationship of truth to lie, belief to faith, and deception to propaganda.

history

History

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit

<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43212922-our-wild-calling">Our Wild Calling </a>  delves into the subject of our lost sense of identity in relation to the natural world and all the living things that surround us, such as plants and animals, and aims to address the need of reconnecting with our wild side.

Our Wild Calling - Book 

"Poems are constricted not only with words but also from the spaces between the words. This is true for our relationships with other people, and it is also true for our connection to other animals l."-Richard Louv

Author Quote 

If you have a feeling that something’s missing from your life, yet can’t really put a finger on it, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43212922-our-wild-calling">Our Wild Calling: How Connecting with Animals Can Transform Our Lives—and Save Theirs </a>by <a href="https://richardlouv.com/">Richard Louv </a>might be the book for you.  The author addresses the urge all humans have to reconnect with nature and its earthlings, an urge often repressed in today’s society.  The beauty behind reconnecting with the natural world lies within our native inclination to gravitate towards our rawest, purest form. By doing so, we improve our self-awareness and become more grounded.

Book Overv

Plus, the benefits that arise from spending more time in nature go far beyond improved health, including a sense of reconnection with oneself and a clearer, more peaceful mind.

<ol><li>Connecting with animals can help us tame loneliness.  </li><li>Humans are quite similar to animals, sharing common motivators.  </li><li>Our planet needs us just as much as we need it, so it’s our duty to protect it. </li> </ol>

Top 3 Book Ideas

Animals are a God-given gift to our planet. Everything about them is remarkable if you allow yourself to notice it and immerse yourself in their beauty. As the author suggests, in order to reconnect with nature and your wild side, you must connect yourself to animals first.  As such, make sure to take a day off and explore your natural surroundings. How? Let me explain! Once you step foot in nature, detach yourself from all your thoughts and worries, and simply focus on whatever you see.

Lesson 1: Notice the beauty of animals and connect with them

Whether there’s a group of squirrels around you, a fox, a small lizard, or any animal at all, just explore their beauty, look for inspiration in their little routines, and try to connect with them. You can talk, follow, play with them, or do whatever makes you happy when you’re around them.  The connection humans have with animals goes <a href="https://fourminutebooks.com/the-four-agreements-summary/">way back to ancestral times </a>. Our co-dependence existed from the beginning when our species would live together and share common practices. The fondness we have towards them is extremely powerful and lasts to our days.

Just look at all pet owners who consider their little animals like their family members. It’s only natural for us to form connections with other species, so in order to live a healthier and happier life, take some time to connect with them.

Rene Descartes was a French philosopher in the seventeenth century. Although he discovered some brilliant philosophical facts, he also came up with <a href="https://fourminutebooks.com/descartes-error-summary/">a rather disappointing concept </a>– that animals were resources to exploit for the development of humans, and they exist to serve humans such as robots.  Naturally, the convenience of this idea was enough to make everyone adopt this philosophy. Since then, people alienated themselves from animals more and more, creating a society based on consumption and making us lose <a href="https://fourminutebooks.com/feral-summary/">our sense of connectivity with them </a>.

Lesson 2:  Humans and animals resemble each other in many ways.

However, recent studies suggest that humans and animals are more similar than we might’ve thought. Dogs, for example, are social animals, just like us. They crave a sense of belongingness and live well in communities.  We also share similar motivators with animals. Moreover, we have a shared sense of identity that makes our encounters feel natural and happy, and if we see that an animal is hurting, we feel for them.

If we manage to once again let humans and animals coexist and contribute to each other’s happiness, we’ll be one step closer to becoming more grounded and fulfilled.

Not all change has to be groundbreaking and monumental. Sometimes a small act of kindness and consideration can improve everything around us. Think of a bird that can get trapped in a plastic foil and die or a turtle that may get caught up in other types of residue.  However, if we pay more attention to our planet and clear our waste whenever we get a chance, we might be one step closer to saving the world.

Lesson 3:  Help the environment by protecting it

Nowadays, people seem to be too interested in profits, and forget about the bigger picture: this planet is our only home, and if we don’t maintain it, there’s not going to be another one waiting for us.  Therefore, we must mobilize ourselves and educate our communities to reduce waste, recycle, and nurture our fauna. With a little bit of empathy and a strong sense of responsibility, we can bring the necessary change to our society.

The ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht developed a concept named solophilia, which implies that if we help our environment and take care of our animals, we’ll help ourselves.  This philosophy proves how a series of actions can dictate our quality of life on this planet, so it’s truly up to each and every one of us to take action and do away with the detrimental actions we make every day.

<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43212922-our-wild-calling">Our Wild Calling </a>highlights the importance of having a connection with nature, animals, and all earthlings in general. By reconnecting with our roots in the natural world, something remarkable clicks in our brain, which in turn makes us feel less stressed, less anxious, and more grounded.  This book will teach you how to observe the beauty of nature, recall your wild side, and connect with the world as it is – raw, healing, and eternal. Frankly, this is a must-read for every modern, busy human stuck in the digital era, and not only.

Our Wild Calling - Book Review

The 30-year-old office worker who feels like they’re spending too much time inside their walls, the 24-year-old person who wants to connect with nature on a deeper level, and anyone approaching retirement, which they’d like to use to spend more time outside.

Who would I recommend the Our Wild Callingto?

Read our summary of Our Wild Calling by Richard Louv to rediscover the magical connection we have with animals.

Our Wild Calling Summary

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