That is, whether I can give reasons for them that can be appreciated from what Hume called a “common point of view” — reasons that can “move some universal principle of the human frame, and touch a string, to which all mankind have an accord and symphony.”

Democracies are, or should be, spaces of reasons.

we should take the project of defending our epistemic principles seriously is that the ideal of civility demands it.

We need to justify our epistemic principles from a common point of view because we need shared epistemic principles in order to even have a common point of view.

Without a common background of standards against which we measure what counts as a reliable source of information, or a reliable method of inquiry, and what doesn’t, we won’t be able to agree on the facts, let alone values.

But we can’t decide every issue that way, and we certainly can’t decide on our epistemic principles — which methods and sources are actually rationally worthy of trust — by voting

They are valuable because almost everyone can appeal to them. They have roots in our natural instincts, as Hume might have said. If so, then perhaps we can hope to give reasons for our epistemic principles. Such reasons will be “merely” practical, but reasons — reasons for reason, as it were — all the same.

It’s a long list. For me, if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not growing. It’s O.K. to try and not achieve, it’s not O.K. not to try

As your company has grown through acquisitions, you’ve had to integrate a lot of different teams. How do you tackle this integration of different cultures? A. Time. You can fundamentally approach acquisitions two ways. The company that acquires says, “This is the way we do it around here, so you will change and adopt our processes. Bang!”

For instance, she says it is not uncommon to meet someone you instantly distrust. The conventional approach is to dismiss these misgivings. But a closer analysis may reveal that the person's style is similar to that of someone who proved untrustworthy in the past

'It's highly biological,'' Dr. Agor says. ''Our body has been assimilating cues and is now retrieving the relevant information for us automatically.''

After taking a poll of 2,000 managers in corporate and agency settings in 1982, Dr. Agor concluded that those who had trusted their intuition had been the most successfu

''Once you start to manipulate your thoughts rather than allow them to come to you spontaneously, it's probably wishful thinking, not intuition,''

Since many intuitive thoughts come at times of quiet reflection, Dr. Agor suggests setting aside 15 minutes for silence when a decision must be made. He also recommends consciously thinking about a dilemma before going to sleep and placing a note pad by the bed, since intuitive thoughts are more likely to emerge when the conscious brain is at rest.

But as a parent, I’ve experienced another level of perception that seems to kick in with no clear outside cues

“The only really valuable thing is intuition,” Albert Einstein said

We are connected to our offspring on a level so deep that it sometimes defies reason. What are the possibilities of parental premonition? Is intuition underused and even unfairly maligned?

But I’ve been reminded again in recent weeks that yet tempering that common sense with some trust in gut might be the most useful advice we can get.

we might do well to heed our intuition, give it its due, and even discuss it among ourselves as parents. It could be one more tool — and perhaps an extremely powerful one — in our parental toolbox.

Without breaks in a repetitive routine, the mind has difficulty differentiating between memories, which psychologists call pattern separation,

the stress of the year itself can shift how our brains experience time

there is a medical explanation for the feeling of mental haziness: Covid brain fog, a lingering combination of dementia-like symptoms including memory loss, confusion and difficulty focusing

For some who have recovered from Covid-19

Sheer monotony has the ability to warp time and tangle our memories, psychologists say, with quarantines and lockdowns robbing us of the “boundary events” that normally divide the days, like chapters in a book.

Without the usual work mixers, festive holiday celebrations, far-flung vacations or casual dinners that typically mark and divide the calendar, the brain has a harder time processing and cataloging memories,

t doesn’t help that so much of our lives are virtual now, happening only on screens. Instead of stimulating our senses in real life — going to shops, meeting friends for coffee, chatting with colleagues in the office — we FaceTime when the mood strikes, we binge Netflix shows from three years ago and we browse Amazon perpetually

If one problem is that there is too little going on in our lives, another problem, it seems, is that there is also too much.

The unending sense of crisis is an “ongoing, chronic stressor” that can lead to a collapse of the reassuring sense that our lives move in orderly fashion: past, present, future, which is key to mental stability.

In researching the psychological repercussions of devastating Southern California wildfires in the 1990s, Dr. Holman said that victims felt like “time slowed down" and “the days blurred together.” “Their sense of reality changes,” she said. “They’re not sure what’s real anymore. They feel a sense of a blur, like time is just a blur.”

But even people in solitary confinement will tell you that the essence of that experience is something we’re all experiencing now — the deprivation of normal social contact. And human beings really do depend on each other to structure our lives and tell us who we are.”

“We’ve all had basically enough of wearing our masks and having our lives disrupted,” Ms. Spinney said, “which is what we’re seeing now with Covid fatigue.”

Or perhaps we just need to remember that time is a human construct.

the real purpose of the experiment: to determine how well they could remember where the foods were located in the room.

Of the 512 people in the experiment, half did the test by tasting, half by smelling the food. After leaving the room, they smelled or tasted the foods again in random order and were asked to locate them on a map of the room they had just traversed.

they were 27 percent more likely to correctly place the high-calorie foods than the low-calorie foods they tasted, and 28 percent more likely to correctly locate the high-calorie foods they smelled.

“Our results seem to suggest that human minds are adapted to finding energy rich food in an efficient way,”

“This may have implications for how we navigate our modern food environment.”

Mulling over past “what ifs” helps us better plan for the future.

“That’s a very important, very distinctive human ability,”

That means separating actual events from possible events and pretend play helps children do that. What would happen if I could use this banana to call my grandma? What if this pencil could take flight

by pretending, children are practicing deciphering others’ emotions and beliefs. But an alternate hypothesis is that pretend play helps kids develop a skill known as counterfactual reasoning.

Open the box, they told the kids, and you’ll be able to play with the toy.

They asked a quarter of the children to pretend to be someone else while they completed the task — Batman or an intrepid adventurer like Dora the Explorer.

And the kids did get frustrated. In an odd twist, none of the keys actually worked

The children who pretended to be the hardworking fictional characters stayed calmer. They also spent more time trying to open the box and tried more keys.

For kids, of course, play isn’t about learning or planning or regulating emotions. It’s about having fun. Play may be “evolution’s way of building in an insurance policy” to learn and develop, said Dr. Feigenson. It’s so enjoyable that most kids can’t resist, and along the way they develop the skills they need to succeed as adults.

Imbued with their own neurons, octopus arms can act semi-autonomously, gathering and exchanging information without routing it through the main brain.

It’s long been unclear, for instance, how the animals, just by probing their surroundings with their limbs, can distinguish something like a crab from a less edible object.

exposed to octopus ink, which is sometimes released as a “warning signal,” Dr. van Giesen said. “Maybe there is some kind of filtering of information that is important for the animal in specific situations,” like when danger is afoot, she said.

But they found that some of the cells in the animal’s suckers would shut down when

Humans, who tend to be very visual creatures, probably can’t fully appreciate the sensory nuances of a taste-sensitive arm

“Sometimes we assume in neuroscience or animal behavior, there’s only one way of doing it

But then again, most people could probably do without the metallic tang of keys every time they rummage in their pockets — or the funk that would inevitably dissuade every new parent from changing a diaper.

“When a driver cuts you off on the highway and your blood begins to boil, it’s your prefrontal cortex that allows you to think, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t have to act this way,’”

But the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully develop until adulthood and, according to Dr. Fields, inhibition and impulse control are among the PFC’s most complicated functions. “So when you try to reason with a child, you’re appealing to a part of the brain that isn’t fully functioning.”

Watching someone run, for instance, seems to activate a similar brain region as when you run yourself.

For example, mirror neurons have been found not only in the motor areas of the brain, but also in the areas that deal with emotion. The same part of your brain that lights up when you’re feeling happy may also light up when you observe happiness in others.

As much as you might want to try explaining to your kid why they should calm down, behavior correction rarely works when stress is high.

Uncertainty produces anxiety, but you can counter that, in part, by understanding what to expect on Election Day this year.

This year, Dr. Tillery observed, there’s a significant chance the presidential election will not be called on Tuesday night.

“Voters should get some comfort from knowing that we do have counting procedures and auditing procedures and voter notification procedures that would make it better for us to be calm and let those processes play out,”

Other analog activities can help you cope, too. “Anxious thoughts race by,” Dr. Stosny said, “and the faster they go, the less realistic they get.” Instead of dwelling on them, write them out longhand; this will slow down and moderate their frenetic pace. Next to each source of fear, write down how you’ll respond to it.

68 percent of adults report finding the election to be a significant source of stress. This is due, at least in part, to the vitriol and name-calling exhibited by candidates,

“Humans are quite resilient,” she said. “There’s a strong possibility that you will be able to cope.”

f a family member approaches you with anger, try to respond with compassion. Consider setting a time limit on your political discussions, Dr. Lee said, agreeing in advance to a fun, shared activity when your time is up.

If you’re feeling anxious or overwhelmed, or need to take time out of a challenging conversation, go for a walk or run, and try to spend at least 30 minutes outside.

Be on the lookout for viral disinformation: Check the provenance of news articles or memes making polarizing political claims or calling the election before a mainstream news outlet has done so.

“One of the things Covid has made abundantly clear in so many aspects of our life is that we have a lot of cracks in the system,”

“This is the first step in a long journey of really reimagining what America is going to look like and what America is going to be about,” Ms. Holland said. “That’s not going to end when the voting does.”

with feedback,'' Dr. Snowden said, ''we could teach them to be accurate and drive at a consistent speed.''

drivers were often reluctant to drag their eyes from a foggy road and tended to judge their speed by feel.

''We can't change our visual systems,'' Dr. Snowden said, ''so even when visibility is poor, it's worth having a look down to check your speed.'

Maybe Shattuck is right and we are all like this -- creatures of language, rather than its masters. Much of what we think we know firsthand we probably picked up from books or newspapers or friends or lovers and never checked against the world at all.

What she knew of her own observation is exactly what we want to know from her. We want to know what it felt like to be Helen Keller. We want to locate the boundaries between what was real to her and what she was forced to imagine. At least in this book, she seems not to have known where that boundary might lie.

Her ability to experience what others felt and heard, she said, illustrated the power of imagination, particularly one that had been developed and extended, as hers was, by books.

He tries to remember what he looks like and discovers that he cannot. He asks: ''To what extent is loss of the image of the face connected with loss of the image of the self? Is this one of the reasons why I often feel that I am mere spirit, a ghost, a memory?''

Keller, in short, matured, both as a person and a writer. She mastered a lesson that relatively few with all their senses have ever mastered, which is to write about what you know.

But when the disease is real — when we see actual death tolls climbing daily, as we do with the coronavirus — another factor besides our sensitivity to losses comes into play: fear.

asked people to imagine that the United States was preparing for an outbreak of an unusual Asian disease that was expected to kill 600 citizens. To combat the disease, people could choose between two options: a treatment that would ensure 200 people would be saved or one that had a 33 percent chance of saving all 600 but a 67 percent chance of saving none. Here, a clear favorite emerged: Seventy-two percent chose the former.

Using a nationally representative sample in the months following Sept. 11, 2001, the decision scientist Jennifer Lerner showed that feeling fear led people to believe that certain anxiety-provoking possibilities (for example, a terrorist strike) were more likely to occur.

we presented sad, angry or emotionally neutral people with a government proposal to raise taxes. In one version of the proposal, we said the increased revenue would be used to reduce “depressing” problems (like poor conditions in nursing homes). In the other, we focused on “angering” problems (like increasing crime because of a shortage of police officers).

when the emotions people felt matched the emotion of the rationales for the tax increase, their attitudes toward the proposal became more positive. But the more effort they put into considering the proposal didn’t turn out to reduce this bias; it made it stronger.

upervised learning depends on annotated data: images, audio or text that is painstakingly labeled by hordes of workers. They circle people or outline bicycles on pictures of street traffic. The labeled data is fed to computer algorithms, teaching the algorithms what to look for. After ingesting millions of labeled images, the algorithms become expert at recognizing what they have been taught to see.

There is also reinforcement learning, with very limited supervision that does not rely on training data. Reinforcement learning in computer science,

is modeled after reward-driven learning in the brain: Think of a rat learning to push a lever to receive a pellet of food. The strategy has been developed to teach computer systems to take actions.

My money is on self-supervised learning,” he said, referring to computer systems that ingest huge amounts of unlabeled data and make sense of it all without supervision or reward. He is working on models that learn by observation, accumulating enough background knowledge that some sort of common sense can emerge.

redict outcomes and choose a course of action. “Everybody agrees we need predictive learning, but we disagree about how to get there,”

A more inclusive term for the future of A.I., he said, is “predictive learning,” meaning systems that not only recognize patterns but also p

A huge fraction of what we do in our day-to-day jobs is constantly refining our mental models of the world and then using those mental models to solve problems,” he said. “That encapsulates an awful lot of what we’d like A.I. to do.”Image

Currently, robots can operate only in well-defined environments with little variation.

“Our working assumption is that if we build sufficiently general algorithms, then all we really have to do, once that’s done, is to put them in robots that are out there in the real world doing real things,”

So much scientific research takes place under conditions of “intellectual confinement” — painstaking, often tedious work that requires attention to minute details, accounting for fractions of an inch and slivers of a degree.

This kind of obsessiveness has made modern science enormously productive, but Strevens says there is something fundamentally irrational and even “inhuman” about it.

He points out that focusing so narrowly, for so long, on tedious work that may not come to anything is inherently unappealing for most people. Rich and learned cultures across the world pursued all kinds of erudition and scholarly traditions, but didn’t develop this “knowledge machine”

The same goes for brilliant, intellectually curious individuals like Aristotle, who generated his own theory about physics but never proposed anything like the scientific method.

but in order to communicate with one another, in scientific journals, they have to abide by this rule. The motto of England’s Royal Society, founded in 1660, is “Nullius in verba”: “Take nobody’s word for it.”

purged of all nonscientific curiosity by a “program of moralizing and miseducation.” The great scientists were exceptions because they escaped the “deadening effects” of this inculcation; the rest are just “the standard product of this system”: “an empiricist all the way down.”