It was a really wonderful experience, but when I got home, I suddenly felt very disconnected and suddenly shut in and shut out, and I was really surprised by those feelings.
That, for centuries, we've inherited a view of human nature based on the notion that we're divided selves, that reason is separated from the emotions and that society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions.
This is a crucially important insight because it helps us explain the second law of thermodynamics -- the law that says that entropy increases in the universe, or in some isolated bit of the universe.
It's not as though, as I try to suggest, it's not as though either you have religion and then you have to accept all sorts of things, or you don't have religion and then you're cut off from all these very good things.
I was pretty sick, I had a chest cold, and I was in the hospital for a few days, and I was secluded from all of the aspects of my life that I felt made me, me, that kind of gave me my identity.
If you know the circumference of a circle, and you have two points on it, all you need to know is the distance between those two points, and you can extrapolate the circumference.
But, in fact, the brain also becomes who we are, and at the same time that her behaviors are taking away from the realm of social interaction, this is what's happening with her mind, and this is what's happening with her brain.
And when we talk about the Internet, yes, it's true, the Internet connected all of us, but we also know that the Internet created these echo chambers and political ghettos in which for all your life you can stay with the political community you belong to.
But video has been left out. It arrived on the web in a small box, and there it has remained, completely disconnected from the data and the content all around it.
They could rearrange themselves, form bipartisan committees, but as the moral electromagnet got cranked up, the force field increased, Democrats and Republicans were pulled apart.
(Laughter) This led to a full-scale investigation, and I was removed from the house for three days, until they finally decided to ask how I got the bruises.
It thought of itself as being disconnected from the Internet, but it was possible for somebody to smuggle a USB drive in there, or something like that, and software got in there that causes the centrifuges, in that case, to actually destroy themselves.
And that might seem surprising, because a lot of people think, "Philosophy is remote from the real world; economics, we're told, just makes us more selfish, and we know that math is for nerds."
Because, by Western definitions, a so-called civil society has to be separate or even in opposition to the political system, but that concept is alien for Chinese culture.
He had this shoebox that he carried with him everywhere containing nine comic books, two G.I. Joes painted to look like Spider-Man and five Gobots. And this was his treasure.
After two minutes, those solid rockets explode off and then you just have the liquid engines, the hydrogen and oxygen, and it's as if you're in a dragster with your foot to the floor and accelerating like you've never accelerated.
I think she couldn't, because I think she must realize that she represents a lost generation of Syrian refugee children, a generation isolated and frustrated.
So we turned to the vision science literature to figure out what should we do, and based on what we read, we came up with a strategy that we called, "Keep your eyes on the prize."
Now, I know there's more to good health than walking a little bit faster, but keeping your eyes on the prize might be one additional strategy that you can use to help promote a healthy lifestyle.
But on the other hand, if those kids are black, they are four times more likely to be removed, they spend longer periods of time in foster care, and it's harder to find them a stable foster placement.
My aunt, his primary caregiver, really struggled to stay awake at night to keep an eye on him, and even then often failed to catch him leaving the bed.
And here in the tepuis, the interesting thing is that these bacteria colonies have evolved in complete isolation from the external surface, and without being in contact with humans.
So in order to argue that what Myriad did was not an invention, and that isolated BRCA genes were products of nature, we had to explain a couple of basic concepts, like: What's a gene? What's DNA?
We need to pull the molecules of the brain apart from each other, and to do that, we need to have a little handle that allows those polymers to bind to them and to exert their force.
So now the choice is: Should I stay here in this horrible place, away from my family and my dependents, almost guaranteed to lose my job, and then fight the charges?
When Josephine passed away, he planted violets at her grave, and just before his exile, he went back to that tomb site, picked some of those flowers, entombed them in a locket and wore them until the day he died.
What we're learning through such experiments and our practice and the people we engage with is that creating concrete experiences can bridge the disconnect between today and tomorrow.
Thought experiment, because I like them: an entirely segregated society -- racially segregated, all towns, all neighborhoods and where we send the police only to the minority neighborhoods to look for crime.
It's what happened to our "Stolen Generations, " the indigenous children who were removed from their families with the belief that we could do a better job of raising their children.
The cold, hard truth is, the more money that floods in in support of these institutions, the more institutions open and the more children are removed from their families to fill their beds.
After being disconnected from the grid for months because the power company couldn't figure out how to collect bills, one settlement designed a system that collectivized remittances and got everyone cheaper rates into the bargain.
Unless you're stuck in a laboratory cage -- and you know, if you spend your entire life in a little box, you're not going to be as picky about who you have sex with, but I've looked in a hundred species, and everywhere in the wild, animals have favorites.
But also, surprising finds recently announced from the Island of Flores in Indonesia, where a group of these human ancestors have been isolated, and have become dwarfed, and they're only about a meter in height.
Did people see the movie "AI"? (Audience: Yes.) RB: Yeah, it was really bad, but -- remember, especially when Haley Joel Osment, the little robot, looked at the blue fairy for 2, 000 years without taking his eyes off it?
As heads are separated from bodies and money rains from the sky, the citizens of Moscow react with petty-self interest, illustrating how Soviet society bred greed and cynicism despite its ideals.
Then you have artists -- and you all know this is true as well -- artists will say things about scientists because they say they're too concrete, they're disconnected from the world.
Individual patients, if they know there's a strict quarantine protocol, may not go for health care, because they're afraid of the medical system or they can't afford care and they don't want to be separated from their family and friends.
(Laughter) This is an avian quarantine facility where all imported birds coming into America are required to undergo a 30-day quarantine, where they are tested for diseases including Exotic Newcastle Disease and Avian Influenza.
Descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization which once carpeted the Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia, in the wake of the conquest, these people retreated into an isolated volcanic massif that soars above the Caribbean coastal plain.
And finally, in the end, I think it's pretty obvious at least to all of all us who've traveled in these remote reaches of the planet, to realize that they're not remote at all.
The problem with today's cultural ghettos is not lack of knowledge -- we know a lot about each other, or so we think -- but knowledge that takes us not beyond ourselves: it makes us elitist, distant and disconnected.
It was a really wonderful experience, but when I got home, I suddenly felt very disconnected and suddenly shut in and shut out, and I was really surprised by those feelings. 