Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose 2012 book “The Power of Habit” reframed how a generation thinks about behaviour change. His central model is the habit loop: a cue triggers a routine, which delivers a reward, and repetition wires the sequence into the basal ganglia until it runs without conscious effort. The practical…
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Charles M. Schwab was one of the great American industrialists — a man who started as a stake driver in a steel mill and rose to run Carnegie Steel and then found Bethlehem Steel, becoming one of the highest-paid executives of his era. He’s remembered in productivity circles for one anecdote. Schwab reportedly hired the…
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We tend to put all the intelligence in the brain, but the cell itself is a remarkably sophisticated information processor. A single cell senses its chemical environment through thousands of receptors, integrates competing signals, runs internal feedback loops, repairs its own DNA, decides whether to divide, migrate, differentiate, or trigger its own death — all…
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The mirror neuron system is a group of neurons in the brain that are activated both when an individual performs a specific action and when they observe another individual performing that same action. This system is thought to be involved in a variety of cognitive and social processes, such as empathy, theory of mind, and…
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The reticular activating system (RAS) is a network of nerve cells located in the brainstem that is involved in the regulation of wakefulness and sleep. It receives input from various sensory systems in the body, such as the eyes, ears, and skin, and uses this information to determine the appropriate level of arousal and alertness.…
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Archimedes of Syracuse, working in the third century BC, was arguably the greatest mathematician of the ancient world. He calculated pi to remarkable precision, worked out the surface area and volume of a sphere, founded hydrostatics and statics, and designed war machines that held off the Roman fleet. He got closer to integral calculus than…
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Decision theory is a branch of mathematics and philosophy that deals with the process of making choices. It provides a framework for modeling decision-making scenarios and for evaluating the outcomes of different choices. There are different approaches to decision theory, but one of the most widely-used is Bayesian decision theory. In Bayesian decision theory, decision-making…
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Robert John Aumann is a German-born Israeli mathematician and economist who was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis. He is a professor at the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. Aumann’s work has focused…
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