101 Quotes by Maria Konnikova

Light helps the body predict the future: it's a sign of how our environment will change in the coming hours and days, and our bodies prepare themselves accordingly.

Las vegas shouldn't exist. The incongruity hits you from the moment you first glimpse it from the airplane. First mountains, then desert, then neat squares of identical houses that look as if they were plucked straight from Monopoly.

Spam filters are supposed to block e-mail scams from ever reaching us, but criminals have learned to circumvent them by personalizing their notes with information gleaned from the Internet and by grooming victims over time.

Electrodes aren't the only things we may someday start implanting in our brains. Consider what you could do with a chip in your head that linked directly to the Internet: Within milliseconds, you could retrieve just about any piece of information.

Down the road, the most controversial approach to neuroenhancement could be a way not of stimulating the brain but of reengineering it.

The truth is that we have no idea what the long-term effects of any artificial enhancement may be. Will our brains be able to withstand running at artificially heightened capacity?

Fraternities breed leaders. That, at least, is what most any chapter website will tell you, in not so many words - and the message certainly makes for a compelling rationale for joining the Greek system.

Once fraternities became tied to power and leadership, the powerful and would-be-leaders wanted to join.

It's not at all a far jump to think that overall perceptions of gender - and what is and is not important in gender roles - would carry over from life to fiction.