Sublime

The highest level—where the best learning occurs—is achieved when a student is invested, curious, interested. Through our modern lens, we would say that a particular formula of neurotransmitters is required for neural changes to take place, and that formula correlates with investment, curiosity, and interest.

One after another, the greatest figures in physics seemed to develop an unexpected late-career interest in the mystery of life itself, even taking abrupt shifts toward the formal study of biology.

William James speculated that subjective time was measured in novel experiences, which become rarer as you get older. Perhaps life is lived on a logarithmic time scale, compressed toward the end.

Changes in the outer and middle ear helped our ancestors tune in to each other’s voices like never before. Over time, their brains began to pick out distinct pitches from all the sounds around them. This floors me: the separate tones we hear in music and speech are mental perceptions—all in our heads. In nature, there’s no such thing as “middle C.”

So Dunbar proposed a novel idea: the size of a species’ brain determines the optimal size of their social groups. Maintaining relationships, argued Dunbar, requires brain power. More relationships require more neurons. Extrapolating his straight line from primate brains to human brains, he found that the optimal human group size, if this hypothesis

Freeman Dyson

In Paris later, at the Museum of Natural History (the Jardin des Plantes), with the blessing and counsel of the great Georges Cuvier, he undertook his vast, illustrated Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles, at a time when fewer than a dozen generic types of fossil fish had been named and he was all of twenty-four.