by Kevin Ashton
41 Reichelt had made sure his test: He met with journalists the evening before the jump; the Pathé news footage of his jump, which was never aired, is at http://bit.ly/reicheltjump. The description of Reichelt’s preparations, leap, and subsequent death, are based on this film.
42 “I am so convinced my device will work properly”: Edited and translated from the French: “Je suis tellement convaincu que mon appareil, que j’ai déjà experimenté, doit bien fonctionner, que demain matin, après avoir obtenu l’autorisation de la préfecture de police, je tenterai l’expérience du haut de la première platforme de la Tour Eiffel.” From Le Petit Journal, February 5, 1912, “L’Inventeur Reichelt S’est Tué Hier,” at http://bit.ly/petitjournal.
43 Reichelt fell for four seconds: Calculated from Green Harbor Publications, “Speed, Distance, and Time of Fall for an Average-Sized Adult in Stable Free Fall Position,” 2010, at http://bit.ly/fallspeed.
44 Hervieu was not the only one: Le Matin, February 5, 1912 (number 10205), “Expérience tragique,” at http://bit.ly/lematin: “La surface de votre appareil est trop faible, lui disait-on; vous vous romprez cou”—“The surface of your device is too small, he was told; you will break your neck.”
45 “For a successful technology”: From Volume 2, Appendix F, of the United States Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, 1986, at http://bit.ly/feynmanfooled.
46 In the 1950s, two psychologists: “High school” is assumed based on the grade level and birth years the children mentioned in their autobiographical essays. Getzels 1962. There were 533 children in total.
47 Getzels and Jackson found that the most creative students: These are all bright children to begin with. The mean IQ at the school was around 135. The difference in IQ scores between the “most creative” and “least creative” here is relative to their peers.
48 It has been repeated many times: See, for example, Bachtold, 1974; Cropley, 1992; and Dettmer, 1981.
49 98 percent: Feldhusen, 1975. Cited in in Westby, 1995. Westby also hypothesizes that teachers favor less creative childen over more creative children in part because more creative children tend to be harder to control.
50 The Getzels-Jackson effect is not restricted: Staw, 1995.
51 In one experiment, Dutch psychologist Eric Rietzschel: Rietzschel, 2010, Study 2.
52 When Rietzschel asked people to assess their own work: Rietzschel, 2010, Study 1.
53 When we are in familiar situations: Gonzales, 2004: “Normally, hippocampal cells fire perhaps only once every second on average. But at that mapped place, they fire hundreds of times faster.”
54 Uncertainty is an aversive state: See, for example, Heider, 1958; Whitson, 2008
55 Psychologists can show this in experiments: See, for example, Mueller, 2012.
56 rejection hurts: For the neural basis of why this is so, see Eisenberger, 2004; Eisenberger, 2005.
57 comes from the Old English spurnen, “to kick”: “Old English” means English spoken from the mid-fifth through mid-twelfth centuries.
58 In 1958, psychologist Harry Harlow proved: Artistotle, 2011, VIII.1155a5: “Without friends no one would wish to live, even if he possessed all other goods.” Cited in Eisenberger and Lieberman, 2004.
59 We know we should not suggest: Flynn and Chatman, 2001; Runco, 2010. Both cited in Mueller et al., 2012.
60 “Luddism,” our closest word: There is also the word “neophobia,” but this is uncommon and normally used only in technical literature. See, for example, Patricia Pliner and Karen Hobden. “Development of a Scale to Measure the Trait of Food Neophobia in Humans.” Appetite 19, no. 2 (October 1992):105–20.
61 Luddism was, in the words of Thomas Pynchon: Pynchon, 1984.
62 Children’s is one of America’s highest-ranked hospitals: As of 2012, U.S. News & World Report has ranked Children’s near or at the top of its honor roll for more than twenty years. Comarow, 2012.
63 “A man does not attain the status of Galileo”: From “Velikovsky in Collision,” in Gould, 1977.
64 William Syrotuck analyzed 229 cases: Syrotuck and Syrotuck, 2000. Cited in Gonzales, 2004.
CHAPTER 4: HOW WE SEE
1 “It contains numerous bacteria”: Warren, 2005.
2 Every patient with a duodenal ulcer: A “duodenal ulcer” is sometimes known as a “peptic ulcer.” The “acidic passage” is “the duodenum.”
3 It was eventually given the name Helicobacter pylori: H. pylori was known as Campylobacter pylori, also “pyloric campylobacter,” for some years—H. pylori is its final and current name.
4 the Lancet, one of the world’s highest-impact medical journals: In the 2011 Journal Citation Report: Science Edition (Thompson Reuters, 2012), the Lancet’s impact factor was ranked second among general medical journals, at 38.278, after the New England Journal of Medicine, at 53.298. From Wikipedia’s entry on the Lancet, at http://bit.ly/lancetwiki.
5 “appeared to be a new species”: Marshall and Warren, 1984.
6 Ian Munro was no ordinary journal editor: Freeman, 1997.
7 even adding a note saying: Munro, 1984. Quoted in Van Der Weyden, 2005.
8 We now know that there are hundreds of species of bacteria: See, for example, Sheh, 2013.
9 “As my knowledge of medicine and then pathology increased”: Warren, 2005.
10 “I preferred to believe my eyes”: Marshall, 2002. Cited in Pincock, 2005.
11 a group of American scientists: Ramsey et al., 1979. Six scientists, variously from the University of Texas, Harvard Medical School, and Stanford University, authored the paper.
12 they were led by a decorated professor of medicine: John S. Fordtran, who is the last-named author on the paper. Biographical details at Boland, 2012.
13 H. pylori was clearly visible: From Munro, 1985: “That outbreak was in a series of volunteers taking part in a study involving multiple gastric intubations and the cause was then assumed to have been viral. However, biopsy specimens have now been examined retrospectively and pyloric campylobacters have been found.”
14 “Failing to discover H. pylori was my biggest mistake”: W. I. Peterson, in a GastroHep.com profile: “What is the biggest mistake that you have made? Failing to discover H. pylori in 1976.” Available at http://bit.ly/walterpeterson.
15 In 1967, Susumo Ito, a professor at Harvard Medical School: Ito, 1967. Cited in Marshall, 2005.
16 In 1940, Harvard researcher Stone Freedberg: Freedberg and Barron, 1940. Cited in Marshall, 2005: “The new spiral organism was not just a strange infection occurring in Western Australia, but was the same as the ‘spirochaete’ which had been described in the literature several times in the previous 100 years.… In 1940, Stone Freedberg from Harvard Medical School had seen spirochaetes in 40% of patients undergoing stomach resection for ulcers or cancer. About 10 years later, the leading US gastroenterologist, Eddie Palmer at Walter Reid [sic] Hospital, had performed blind suction biopsies on more than 1000 patients but had been unable to find the bacteria. His report concluded that bacteria did not exist except as post mortem contaminants.” See also Altman, 2005.
17 H. pylori has now been found in medical literature: See Kidd and Modlin, 1998; Unge, 2002; and Marshall, 2002.
18 “inattentional blindness”: Mack and Rock, 2000.
19 “Something that we can’t see, or don’t see”: Adams, 2008. The quotation consists of two separate elements edited and combined: “An S.E.P.,” he said, “is something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what S.E.P. means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out; it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye,” and, later, “The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what is more can be r
un for over a hundred years on a single flashlight battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting or can’t explain.”
20 The path from eye to mind is long: Description of visual loop based on Seger, 2008.
21 This is why it is a bad idea: The literature on this point is unequivocal: see, for example: Harbluk et al., 2002; Strayer et al., 2003; Rakauskas et al., 2004; Strayer and Drews, 2004; Strayer et al., 2006; Strayer and Drews, 2007; and Young et al., 2007.
22 In one study, researchers put a clown on a unicycle: Hyman et al., 2010.
23 Harvard researchers Trafton Drew and Jeremy Wolfe: Drew et al., 2013, “The Invisible Gorilla Strikes Again.”
24 In 2004, a forty-three-year-old woman: Lum et al., 2005. The incident took place at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York. Cited in Drew et al., 2013.
25 When Robin Warren accepted his Nobel Prize: Warren, 2005, citing Doyle, 2011, from “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” first published in 1891.
26 They can diagnose a disease after looking at a chest X-ray: Drew et al., 2013.
27 Adriaan de Groot, a chess master and psychologist: De Groot, 1978. Cited in Weisberg, 1986.
28 In 1960, twelve elderly Japanese Americans: Biographical details about Shunryu Suzuki are from Chadwick, 2000.
29 these men and women were imprisoned: Americans of Japanese descent living in San Francisco were interred at Tanforan Racetrack, now a shopping mall at 1150 El Camino Real, San Bruno, California, where they were housed in stables and barracks before being moved to other camps farther inland. University of Southern California, 1942; San Francisco Chronicle, 1942.
30 They were Zen Buddhists and congregants of Sokoji: Chadwick, 2000: “The name he gave the abandoned synagogue had a simple meaning: Soko stood for San Francisco and the ji meant temple.” The original temple was at 1881 Bush Street, four miles southeast of Fort Point and the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge. The building was originally the Ohabai Shalome synagogue of the Jewish Congregation Ohabai Shalome; it was sold to Japanese American Teruro Kasuga in 1934 after the congregation experienced misfortunes, including a loss of membership due to religious reforms and the murder of its rabbi during what may have been a homosexual encounter. Kasuga turned it into Sokoji, also known as the “Soto Zen Center.” The congregation moved to larger facilities on Page Street between 1969 and 1972, partly as a result of the increased interest in Zen Buddhism that Shunryu Suzuki had helped create. The building’s history is beautifully described in Kenning, 2010.
31 As the sun rose: Suzuki arrived on May 23, 1959. Sunrise that day was at around 5:55 a.m. (see http://bit.ly/sfsunrise). Japan Air Lines flight 706 arrived at 6:30 a.m. (http://bit.ly/jaltime). The plane was a DC-6B, with silver-and-white livery, as shown at http://bit.ly/jaldc6; also http://bit.ly/jaldc6b. The “Pacific Courier” designation is from http://bit.ly/jaltime. Suzuki’s clothing is described in Chadwick, 2000: “He was wearing his priest’s traveling robes with a rakusu hanging around his neck, zori, and white tabi socks.”
32 “I sit at 5:45 in the morning”: Chadwick, 2000.
33 People in India and East Asia: From Wikipedia, http://bit.ly/easia: “The UN subregion of Eastern Asia and other common definitions of East Asia contain the entirety of the People’s Republic of China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Mongolia and Taiwan.” According to Everly and Lating, 2002, meditation has been practiced since 1500 B.C.E. Writer Alan W. Watts helped introduce meditation to the United States in the 1959 as the presenter of KQED San Francisco’s public television series Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life. His episode on meditation, “The Silent Mind,” is at http://bit.ly/wattsmind.
34 Suzuki made his students sit on the floor: Chadwick, 2000. Picture at http://bit.ly/shunryu.
35 If he suspected they were sleeping: The name of the stick is typically transliterated as keisaku, but it is called kyōsaku in the Soto school, of which Suzuki was a member. Picture at http://bit.ly/kyosaku.
36 His was American Buddhism’s first voice: Suzuki, 1970. From Fields, 1992: “It was, in fact, an American Buddhist voice, unlike any heard before, and yet utterly familiar. When Suzuki Roshi spoke, it was as if American Buddhists could hear themselves perhaps for the first time.” Fields is cited in the 2011 edition of Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.
37 Nyogen Senzaki, one of the first Zen monks in America: Senzaki, 1919.
38 David Foster Wallace made the same point: Wallace, 2009.
39 Kuhn was recovering from a great disappointment: Biographical details about Thomas Kuhn are from Nickles, 2002.
40 This change in Kuhn’s path: Kuhn, 1977: “One memorable (and very hot) summer day those perplexities suddenly vanished.” Nickles, 2002, citing Caneva, 2000, quotes Kuhn describing the event as taking place during an “afternoon,” while attending a ceremony at the University of Padua, Italy, in 1992. Weinberg, 1998, also describes talking with Kuhn at this event about his understanding of Aristotle.
41 The conventional view was that the book: See, for example, Heidegger, 1956: “Aristotelian ‘physics’… determines the warp and woof of the whole of Western thinking, even at that place where it, as modern thinking, appears to think at odds with ancient thinking. But opposition is invariably comprised of a decisive, and often even perilous, dependence. Without Aristotle’s Physics there would have been no Galileo.” Cited in the Wikipedia entry on Aristotle’s Physics, at http://bit.ly/aristotlephysics.
42 “Everything that is in locomotion”: Edited from Aristotle, 2012. The complete quotation is: “Everything that is in locomotion is moved either by itself or by something else. In the case of things that are moved by themselves it is evident that the moved and the movement are together: for they contain within themselves their first movement, so that there is nothing in between. The motion of things that are moved by something else must proceed in one of four ways for there are four kinds of locomotion caused by something other than that which is in motion, viz.: pulling, pushing, carrying, and twirling. All forms of locomotion are reducible to these.”
43 Science is not a continuum, he concluded: Another example, discussed at length by Kuhn, 1962: in 1667, German Johann Joachim Becher published a book called Physical Education, in which he first described his theory of how and why things burned. Becher identified a new element called “terra pinguis,” which was a part of anything that burned. Burning released terra pinguis into the air until the air was so full of terra pinguis that it could take no more, at which point the burning stopped. Things that did not burn contained no terra pinguis. In the eighteenth century, Georg Ernst Stahl changed the name of terra pinguis to “phlogiston,” and the theory dominated physics for almost a hundred years. Phlogiston, or terra pinguis, has no modern equivalent—according to current science, it does not exist.
44 Despite its obscure topic, Kuhn’s book: Garfield, 1987: “The 10 most-cited books, in descending order, are Thomas S. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions …” In May 2014, Google Scholar listed more than seventy thousand citations for the book (http://bit.ly/kuhncitations). In 2012, on the fiftieth anniversary of its release, the University of Chicago Press said, “We had no idea that we had a book on our hands that would sell over 1.4 million copies.” Press release at http://bit.ly/1pt4million.
45 “the most influential work of philosophy”: Gleick, 1996. The book started a debate in philosophy that continues today. Critics have accused Kuhn of using “paradigm” to mean many different things (see, for example Masterman, 1970, in Lakatos et al., 1970; Eckberg and Hill, 1979; Fuller, 2001), but they all add up to one thing: a paradigm is a way of seeing the world. The word “paradigm” also became so well known that it appeared in several cartoons in the New Yorker, including one in which a doctor tells a patient, “I’m afraid you’ve had a paradigm shift” (J. C. Duffy, December 17, 2001, at h
ttp://bit.ly/paradigmcartoon1) and one in which one unlucky-looking man says to another, “Good news—I hear the paradigm is shifting” (Charles Barsotti, January 19, 2009, at http://bit.ly/paradigmcartoon2).
46 “During revolutions scientists see new and different things”: Kuhn, 1962. The sudden appearance of H. pylori is not a new phenomenon. One example from Kuhn: in 1690, Britain’s astronomer royal John Flamsteed saw a star and called it “34 Tauri.” In 1781, William Herschel looked at it through a telescope but saw a comet, not a star. He pointed it out to Nevil Maskelyne, who saw a comet that might be a planet. German Johann Elert Bode saw a planet, too, and this soon led to a consensus: the object was a planet and was eventually called Uranus. Once one new planet had been discovered, the paradigm changed: finding new planets seemed possible. Astronomers, using the same instruments as before to look at the same sky, suddenly found twenty more minor planets and asteroids, including Neptune, which, like Uranus, had looked like a star since the seventeenth century. Something similar happened when Copernicus said the earth revolved around the sun: the previously unchangeable sky suddenly filled with comets that had been made visible not by new instruments but by a new paradigm. Meanwhile, Chinese astronomers, who had never believed that the sky was unchangeable, had been seeing comets for centuries.
47 Neil deGrasse Tyson, speaking at the Salk Institute: Tyson, 2006. Video at http://bit.ly/NdGTSalk. Quotation edited from the transcript at http://bit.ly/NdGTsenses. The complete quotation as transcribed is: “And we so much praise about the human eye, but anyone who has seen the full breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum will recognize how blind we are, okay, and part of that blindness means we can’t see, we can’t detect, magnetic fields, ionizing radiation, radon. We are like sitting ducks for ionizing radiation. We have to eat constantly, because we’re warm blooded. Crocodile eat a chicken a month, it’s fine. Okay, so we are always looking for food. These gases at the bottom [referring to a slide, with the words CO (carbon monoxide), CH4 (methane), CO2 (carbon dioxide)]: you can’t smell them, taste them you breath [sic] them in you’re dead, okay.”