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In 1806, entrepreneur Frederic Tudor sailed to the island of Martinique with a precious cargo. He had harvested ice from frozen Massachusetts rivers and expected to make a tidy profit selling it to tropical customers. There was only one problem: the islanders had never seen ice. They had never experienced a cold drink, never tasted a pint of ice cream. Refrigeration was not a celebrated innovation, but an unknown concept. In their eyes, there was no value in Tudor’s cargo. His sizable investment melted away unappreciated and unsold in the Caribbean heat.
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In financial dealings, almost two-thirds of Americans are hypocognitive of compound interest, unaware of how much saving money can benefit them and how quickly debt can crush them. In health, a full third of people suffering from type 2 diabetes remain hypocognitive of the illness. They fail to seek needed treatment—despite recognizing blurry vision, dry mouth, frequent urination—because they lack the underlying concept that would unify the disparate warning signals into a single alarm.
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Hypocognition is about the absence of things. It is hard to recognize precisely because it is invisible. To recognize hypocognition requires a departure from the reassuring familiarity of our own culture to gain a grasp of the unknown and the missing. After all, it is difficult to see the culture we inhabit from only within.
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Consider this: how well can you discern different shades of blue? If you speak Russian, Greek, Turkish, Korean or Japanese, your chances are much better than if you speak English. The former groups have two distinctive linguistic representations of blue. In Russian, for example, dark blue (sinii) and light blue (goluboi) are as distinct as red and pink. But in English, we know blue as a single concept. The deprivation of finer-grained color concepts poses a great perceptual disadvantage. English speakers more easily confuse blue shades, not because we have poorer vision, but because we lack the more granular distinctions in the language we speak.
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The emotion in play is amae, which you, like us, might have a difficult time parsing, unless you were brought up in Japanese culture. Amae is a pleasant feeling the man experiences when he basks in the indulgence of his wife, and vice versa. The man feels loved, not because his wife cooked for him, but because she cooked for him despite his ill-mannered demand—one he masterfully orchestrated in the first place. Amae, an emotion with no equivalent counterpart in English, may feel befuddling and Machiavellian to a Western mind. But it makes perfect sense to the Japanese. It welcomes intimacy, fosters affection, and invites vulnerability. It is the cement of social relationships in Japan.
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If all of the protons, neutrons, and electrons, the very things we think of as most important, were completely removed, the total mass/energy of the universe would be only slightly diminished. And 100 billion years from now, the universe will be a largely empty place:
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"The groups concluded that the expansion of the universe slowed down for the first 7 billion years after the initial outward burst, much like a car slowing down as it approaches a highway tollbooth. This was as expected. But the data revealed that, like a driver who hits the gas pedal after gliding through the EZ-Pass lane, the expansion of the universe has been accelerating ever since. The expansion rate of space 7 billion years ATB was less than the expansion rate 8 billion years ATB, which was less than the expansion rate 9 billion years ATB, and so on, all of which are less than the expansion rate today. The expected deceleration of spatial expansion has turned out to be an unexpected acceleration.
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The human mind is an amazing organic hard drive of information. The typical English speaker will know the equivalent of 48,000 dictionary entries by age 60.
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