When people claim that “mindfulness works”, they can mean different things. There are claims that it promotes psychological flexibility, awareness, resilience, better decision-making, job performance, reduced absence rates and the ability to learn new tasks. No wonder businesses are interested.
ReadSeeing others act selflessly makes us feel guilty about our own failures to be as virtuous. It’s far easier to dismiss the apparent selflessness of others than it is to challenge our own very real selfishness.
ReadSome find our increased reliance on mental prosthetics troubling. Will a generation that can google everything, everywhere, grow up unable to remember anything?
ReadIn the physical sciences, a plethora of theories is often a sign of weakness, an admission that we haven’t yet worked out which is right. In ethical and political thinking, however, I suspect there is no such thing as one, all-encompassing true theory. Different models describe different aspects of the world but none captures them all.
ReadI say ‘very’ rather than ‘super’. I think mountains are awesome but simply having the right money for my waiter is not. I don’t think I’m amazing: I don’t even believe I should think that. In sunny Silicon Valley, this moderate British scepticism makes me feel churlish and cynical. It certainly has no place at Googleplex in Mountain View, California, where I found myself recently, among 250 ‘thought leaders’ – researchers, writers, educators, artists, policymakers, investors – gathered for the Sci Foo ‘unconference’…
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