Marta Zaraska - "How Loneliness Reshapes the Brain"

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-loneliness-reshapes-the-brain-20230228/

 Instead, circuits in our brain and changes in our behavior can trap us in a catch-22 situation: While we desire connection with others, we view them as unreliable, judgmental and unfriendly. Consequently, we keep our distance, consciously or unconsciously spurning potential opportunities for connections.

Donald Knuth interview

https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knuth-cant-stop-telling-stories-20200416/

A person's success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum. If you ca do something really well but there are other things at which you're failing, the latter will hold you back. But if almost everything you do is up there, then you've got a good life. And so I try to learn how to get through things that others find unpleasant.

Jordana Cepelewicz - "How the brain creates a timeline of the past"

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-brain-creates-a-timeline-of-the-past-20190212/ For us, time is a sequence of events, a measure of gradually changing content. That explains why we remember recent events better than ones from long ago, and why when a certain memory comes to mind, we tend to recall events that occurred around the same time. Tsao and his colleagues were excited because, they posited, they had begun to tease out a mechanism behind subjective time in the brain, one that allowed memories to be distinctly tagged. “It shows how our perception of time is so elastic,” Shapiro said. “A second can last forever. Days can vanish. It’s this coding by parsing episodes that, to me, makes a very neat explanation for the way we see time. We’re processing things that happen in sequences, and what happens in those sequences can determine the subjective estimate for how much time passes.”