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The Goldfish Never Said That

A fabricated statistic taught a generation to believe their minds had broken. The truth about attention is stranger, and it names a culprit nobody wants to indict. Picture the goldfish. You have met it a thousand times, in conference keynotes and morning television and the opening line of ten thousand blog posts. It swims in its little bowl of received wisdom and carries one damning number on its back: nine seconds of attention, a full second longer than the modern human animal. We hold nuclear codes and write string quartets, and we supposedly lose the thread after eight seconds while the fish swims on, victorious. The crown of creation, outconcentrated by a snack with fins.

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One Eighth of an Inch: Julian Jaynes, the Bicameral Mind, and the Bandwidth of God

Start with a measurement, because the measurement is where the famous theory hides its best secret. In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, published in 1976, the Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes had to explain how one half of the brain could hand a finished thought to the other half. He reached for anatomy and found a strip of nerve fiber connecting the two temporal lobes, the anterior commissure, which he measured at slightly more than one eighth of an inch in diameter. That tiny bridge, he proposed, carried the voices of the gods. The width of the channel is the whole argument, and almost everyone who summarizes Jaynes leaves it out.

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Consciousness Explained Away: Daniel Dennett’s Illusionism and the Theory That Spends Its Own Foundation

When Daniel Dennett died on April 19, 2024, at the age of eighty-two, the philosophical world lost one of the last serious defenders of a position so counterintuitive that even sympathetic readers spent decades trying to talk themselves into it. Dennett argued, across more than fifty years of writing, that consciousness as we ordinarily understand it does not exist. The reds and greens you see, the texture of cool water against the palm, the sense that there is somebody home behind your eyes reading these words: all of it, on Dennett’s account, is what he called a user illusion, a simplified internal model the brain generates for navigation purposes, with no inner light behind it and no observer to whom the show is being staged. The position is called illusionism, and it remains the strongest possible challenge to the panpsychism we considered in the previous article on Iain McGilchrist. If Dennett was right, McGilchrist’s whole project rests on a misdescription of what we are.

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The Cognitive Bargain Has Ended: A Generation Born Without Comparative Advantage

The claim circulating in policy papers, venture capital essays, and parental anxiety threads runs like this: no child born this year will grow up to be smarter than artificial intelligence. The line gets used as a slogan, which is the first sign it deserves examination. Slogans that move easily through dinner parties usually carry hidden machinery. The machinery here is a definition of intelligence narrow enough to fit on a benchmark and broad enough to terrify a parent. Both functions are intentional, and both deserve to be unbundled before the consequences can be argued honestly.

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The Age of Coherence, the Time of Decay

After years of discovery and pondering, I have come to the clear decision that my favorite age of life for me, and for everyone else, is in The Year Twenty-Six. We aren’t in the Mozart Syndrome era yet — 26 is the imperfect and unsafe conflation of beauty and minding and of destruction and dismay.

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The Medication Generation: Searching for Perfection and Enlightenment

As I’ve written before, having a blog of a sustained length over time that can dive back a decade with in situ thoughts and facts-of-mind on the record makes for a wonderful repository that allows a certain grabbing back into what we thought we knew then in order to compare it against the modern treachery of The Now.

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The Over-Stimulated Brain in a Dead Mind

I spent most of last Sunday night slowly and steadily working through the heap of responsibilities that I had steadfastly ignored in favor of the weekend. I did this despite knowing the pitfalls of procrastination, and unsurprisingly, I was tired when I woke up in the morning. I walked to meet a friend for breakfast, silently bemoaning my terrible decision the whole way there, and when I arrived, she was not in much better shape. We exchanged mumbles, I admitted I’d brought this fate entirely on myself, and her reaction was misguided, although sympathetic: “You want an Adderall?”

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