“The common traits that people across all creative fields seemed to have in common were an openness to one’s inner life; a preference for complexity and ambiguity; an unusually high tolerance for disorder and disarray; the ability to extract order from chaos; independence; unconventionality; and a willingness to take risks.”

“The idea that learning to speak two languages is good for your brain has come to be widely accept as fact, particularly in popular media. … But a handful of attempts to replicate some of these seminal findings have failed to confirm this ‘bilingual advantage’ … [and] a heated debate over this issue now rages in the research community.”

“When we talk we take turns, where the ‘right’ to speak flips back and forth between partners. This conversational pitter-patter is so familiar and seemingly unremarkable that we rarely remark on it. But consider the timing: on average, each turn lasts for around 2 seconds, and the typical gap between them is just 200 milliseconds—barely enough time to utter a syllable. That figure is nigh-universal. It exists across cultures, with only slight variations. It’s even there in sign language conversations.”