“It isn’t just that noise distracts,” Szalma says. “It consumes your mental capacities in a way that depletes them, so you have less available for your primary task. We found that human voices are actually the most disruptive kind of noise, more than white noise or industrial noise. So if you’re thinking about your next move, and you hear someone yelling from the stands, that sound can disrupt your thought process—unless you’ve developed coping skills to ignore it.”

“In sum, illusions teach us that perception goes far beyond the information picked up by our senses. Perception is an indirect, interpretive top-down process that is not driven simply by stimulus patterns, but is instead a dynamic, active search for the best interpretation of the available sensory data.”

‘She said that it was hard to know what chimps understood about the transition from raw to cooked food, but said similar questions could be asked about “most teenagers who are microwaving their pot pies,” she said.’

“And there is more bad news for the ‘education, education, education’ crowd: Most of the skills that a labor force possesses were acquired on the job. What a society knows how to do is known mainly in its firms, not in its schools.”