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Likewise, the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans give significantly less to charity as a fraction of income (1.4 percent) than the poorest 20 percent do (3.5 percent), according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That may be partly because affluence insulates us from need, so that disadvantage becomes theoretical and remote rather than a person in front of us. Wealthy people who live in economically diverse areas are more generous than those who live in exclusively wealthy areas.

I’m not saying that the artist doesn’t put their feelings into it, or any part of their biography, but that there’s a lot of constraints and considerations and templates that they work with – unconscious decisions or constraints put upon them that guide what they’re going to do.Otherwise, why didn’t people in the 14th century start writing full-blown operas with giant orchestras and whatever?” These things just weren’t available to them. Our imaginations are constrained by all these other things — which is a good thing. There’s kind of a process of evolution that goes on where the creative part of you adapts to whatever circumstances are available to you. And if you decide you want to make pop songs, or whatever, there’s a format. You can push the boundaries pretty far, but it’s still a recognized thing. And if you’re going to do something at Lincoln Center, there’s a pretty prescribed set of things you are going to do. You can push that form, but kind of from inside the genre. So I guess I’m saying that a lot of creative decisions are kind of made for us, and the trick is then working creatively within those constraints.

Throughout evolutionary history, we never saw anything like a montage. So why do we hardly notice the cuts in movies?

Simply put, visual perception is much jerkier than we realise. First, we blink. Blinks happen every couple of seconds, and when they do we are blind for a couple of tenths of a second. Second, we move our eyes. Want to have a little fun? Take a close-up selfie video of your eyeball while you watch a minute’s worth of a movie on your computer or TV.

Between blinks and saccades, we are functionally blind about a third of our waking life.

For me, a bigger issue raised by this kind of research is whether there isn't a tendency to operate with a caricature of what "just thinking" is. We tend to think of thinking as cerebral and inward looking and we contrast that with a kind of selfless outward orientation to what is going on around us. But this is confused. Is the mathematician working out a problem on paper looking out or in? And what about the visitor to a gallery concentrating on a painting. Isn't this kind of looking (at the painting) or doing (writing on the paper) one of the forms that thinking can take for us? And something similarly goes for the idea that we can simply range complex human psychological attitudes and choices along a spectrum from aversive to extremely pleasurable.

Maybe in choosing music and baseball over quiet as a boy, I wasn't choosing noise and distraction; I was learning to concentrate in new ways and acquiring the capacity for new kinds of pleasure.

"How do you know where you are? What room you're in ? What town you're in and what state you're in?  And how do you go from your house to the grocery store? How do you move through the physical environment?" "Because we take it for granted.  It's only a problem when it goes wrong. But when it goes wrong it can be quite distressing and it can be lethal. I mean if you're really lost and you're in some some wilderness or something like that, it can be really bad. "