Convictions feel certain. But not everything we feel certain about is a conviction. I don't need conviction for anything I'm absolutely or logically certain about. When René Descartes declared he was certain that he thinks and exists (popularly, but erroneously, understood as the inference "I think, therefore I am"), he meant he couldn't actively doubt he was thinking at that moment — because doubting is thinking. But it would be odd to say this was Descartes's conviction. Indeed, the interesting thing about convictions is that they are often formed in the face of philosophical reflection. Unlike logical certainties like 2 and 2 make 4, or philosophical certainties like Descartes's belief in his own existence, we generally know that others may oppose our convictions. We are aware that our convictions can be doubted and challenged, even if we ourselves just cannot imagine that they are false.

In daylight, we only perceive full colour and fine detail in the central region of our visual field, with less-defined vision and reduced colour perception from the outer region. Our brain then takes the relatively small amount of detailed colour imagery it is presented with and uses it combined with the less-colourful, less-defined peripheral imagery to interpret the image by comparison to memories store throughout life. If we see a Y-shaped image on a page, for example, we can interpret it as a three-dimensional representation of a corner, which can in turn be perceived either protruding from the page or depressed within it. Most people see it as a projecting corner, perhaps recalling an early memory that a corner is hard and sharp, discovered when exploring on all fours as an infant. What is important to understand here is that our memory plays a critical role in the interpretation of the visual signals we receive from our photoreceptors. If we wish to become good at spotting things, we need to have built up a substantial store of imagery for comparison.

One of the most universal characteristics of the passage of time is that it's not universal: everybody experiences it a little bit differently. There's a physics sense in which that's quantifiably true, but most of the differences between our experiences of time are subjective. A full day of work can seem to fly by or drag on endlessly, depending on how you feel about the tasks at hand, and what seems to a parent like a perfectly reasonable wait for an amusement park ride will feel like HOURS to their young children. This difference in subjective experience is exacerbated by the fact that, particularly in the adult world, everybody keeps their own schedule. The person at the supermarket checkout fumbling to find the exact change for their purchases might see this as a good use of time because they have no pressing responsibilities at the moment, while the troubled person behind them is steaming because they're running late for a meeting. Everybody's doing their own thing, at their own pace, and when schedules bump up against each other it can create tension.

I think intuitively my colleagues and I have gravitated toward the kinds of questions that knock down barriers by challenging past assumptions and create new energy for pursuing solutions along some new pathway. And if we have, it is probably in part because asking a question is a very effective way of introducing a novel way of thinking about something without exposing oneself to judgment. A question, after all, is not a declaration of opinion aggressive enough to draw fire. It is an invitation to think further within a different framing or along a divergent line. If that line of thinking isn't taken up, or fails to lead somewhere valuable, there is no reputational damage to the person who suggested it. And, therefore, a person is more likely to put it out there.