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Those findings apply to a single generation, yet they tug at the edges of evolutionary theory, in which species change slowly over millennia, not rapidly over the months or years of a single life. Charles Darwin’s process of natural selection holds that nature choses the best-adapted organisms to reproduce and survive in any given ecosystem. The process operates when DNA sequences mutate randomly, and organisms with the specific sequences best-adapted to the environment multiply and prevail – causing gene expression to shift. Yet as surely as the slow march of Darwinian evolution shapes life on Earth over aeons, scientists have found that epigenetic signals can work each day, and not just through methyl groups. Experience in the environment could also alter chromatin, the molecular matrix making up our chromosomes; RNA, the messenger molecules that translate genetic instructions from DNA into protein; and histones, the proteins involved in packaging and structuring the chromatin comprising the genes.

More than a few thoughts emerged from the exercise, but the one that stands out is that the customer, the ultimate arbiter of success, must be held in awe.

Most of the strategies and practices advocated by Amazon’s founder have broad applicability, but a central mystery remains: Bezos himself, his combination of early life experience, intellect, emotional abilities and communication skills. Being Bezos isn’t teachable.

How to summon our power to think elastically? First of all, play — and its cousin, daydreaming — can provide forums for the subconscious to form novel associations. (Think of Einstein’s delightful thought experiments — how he conceived the theory of relativity by imagining himself riding a beam of light.) Unfortunately, compulsively busy people regard activities like doodling and staring into space as a waste of time. And in this age of the ubiquitous pocket helper-brain, Mlodinow laments that the “dearth of idle time” fences off exciting new paths that the mind might otherwise wander. In this regard, Mlodinow asserts, people with ADHD may have a distinct advantage over others.

If organised forms of political resistance could be efficiently thwarted by such a system, often by subtle assimilation rather than outright suppression, the last barricade against it was the individual’s own refusal to think and respond in the prescribed ways. The hardest task facing any emancipatory politics today is to encourage people to think for themselves, in a way that transcends simple sloganising and the dictates of instrumental reason. True critical thinking requires not just a refusal to identify with the present structures of society and commercial culture, but a deep awareness of the historical tendencies that have brought about the current impasse, and of which all present experience is composed. That impulse, compared to the project of constructively helping the system out of its own periodic crises, retains the spark of a dissidence that might just, one day, throw it into the very crisis that would prompt a general, and genuine, liberation.