This Explains Everything

John Brockman

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780062230188
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Scienze cognitive

Drawn from the cutting-edge frontiers of science, This Explains Everything will revolutionize your understanding of the world.

What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation? This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org ("The world's smartest website"— The Guardian ), posed to the world's most influential minds. Flowing from the horizons of physics, economics, psychology, neuroscience, and more, This Explains Everything presents 150 of the most surprising and brilliant theories of the way of our minds, societies, and universe work.

Jared Diamond on biological electricity • Nassim Nicholas Taleb on positive stress • Steven Pinker on the deep genetic roots of human conflict • Richard Dawkins on pattern recognition • Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek on simplicity • Lisa Randall on the Higgs mechanism • BRIAN Eno on the limits of intuition • Richard Thaler on the power of commitment • V. S. Ramachandran on the "neural code" of consciousness • Nobel Prize winner ERIC KANDEL on the power of psychotherapy • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on "Lord Acton's Dictum" • Lawrence M. Krauss on the unification of electricity and magnetism • plus contributions by Martin J. Rees • Kevin Kelly • Clay Shirky • Daniel C. Dennett • Sherry Turkle • Philip Zimbardo • Lee Smolin • Rebecca Newberger Goldstein • Seth Lloyd • Stewart Brand • George Dyson • Matt Ridley

INDEX

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.

absurdity, 9–12

Acton, Lord, 376

Adams, Douglas, 384

adaptation, 6–7, 43, 122–24, 157–58

adolescence, 320–23

aging process, 181

alcohol, 352, 353

Alexander, Richard, 43

Alfvén waves, 70

altruism, 44

amphetamines, 329

amputation, 57

amygdala, 92, 266, 300

animation, 269–70

ant colonies, 97–98

anticipatory salivation, 324–27

antifragility, 350

apathy, 283–84

apparent motion, 269–72

Aristotle, 13–14, 22, 178, 198–200, 218, 259, 261, 305, 356

Arrhenius, Svante, 247–48

arthropods, 163–65

artificial intelligence, 93, 94–95, 122–23

art-music connections, 227–29

athletic contests, 47–49

Atiyah, Michael, 145

atomic theory, 31–32, 84, 196–200

attention, 92

Attneave, Fred, 6

attraction, 98

auditory cortex, 97

autism, 301

Avery, Oswald, 88

Axelrod, Robert, 104–5

Bacon, Roger, 305

Bakker, Robert, 202

Barlow, Horace, 5–8

Baudrillard, Jean, 315–16

Baxter, Lewis, 295

Bayes, Thomas, 57

Bayes’ Law, 372–75

beauty, 25–27, 30–33, 36–37, 37, 38–39, 106

Beck, Aaron, 292–95

bees, 328

behaviorism, 22, 106–7, 324–27

belief desire psychology, 121

Bell Laboratories, 170, 171

Bem, Daryl, 354–55

Berkeley, George, 215

Bernstein, Julius, 389–90

Big Bang, 59, 66, 70, 71–74, 240

birds, 157, 158, 183, 201–3

Bishop, Bill, 50–51

black holes, 78, 143, 197

black markets, 353

blank slate, 182

Blech, Ilan, 32

Bode, Johann, 75

Bohr, Niels, 81, 259–60

Boltzmann, Ludwig, 19–21, 61–62

Bonner, John Tyler, 172–73

Born, Max, 80

Boscovich, Roger, 198–99

bounded rationality, 94–95

Bourke, Andrew, 155

brain

fetal testosterone, 265–68

hemispheres, 92–93

language acquisition, 99–101

modular mind theory, 106–7, 108–11

orderly map, 91–93

brain imaging, 343–44

Brooks, Frederick, 225–26

Brownian motion, 372–73

Buddhism, 175–76

Bush, Vannevar, 170

Cage, John, 227–29

Cahn, John, 32

Cameron, David, 333

Campbell, Fergus, 204

Cantor, Georg, 234–35, 365

causation, 13–14, 149–51

cell division, 71–74, 153–55

chance, 356–58, 377–80

Chang, Edward, 217

change, sensory adaptation to, 6–7

Charlier, Carl Vilhelm Ludvig, 70

China, 250, 313

chordates, 163–65

Christiansen, Morten, 395

chromosomes, 87–88

claustrum, 89–90

climate change, 247–51

cocaine, 102–3, 329

cognition, perception in, 57–58

cognitive behavioral therapy, 292–95

cognitive revolution, 215–17

cognitivism, 15–16

Cohn, Martin J., 268

coincidence, 287–88

Coleman, Sidney, 230

Collingridge dilemma, 255

commitment, 102–3

compact disk, 171

competition, 1–2, 9–12, 42, 44–45, 241, 243

complexity theory, 35–37, 59–60, 176, 183, 239–41, 273–75, 29...