Businesses of design and entertainment are essentially competing with one another to predict the consumer's taste―but also have some ability to influence it through clever marketing plans. In fashion, there is something of a cottage industry to predict which colors will be popular in the next season. This must be done a year or so in advance because of the planning time required to turn around a clothing line. If a group of influential designers decide that brown will be the hot color next year and start manufacturing lots of brown clothes, and they get models to wear brown, and stores begin to display lots of brown in their windows, the public may well begin to comply with the trend. But they're responding more to the marketing of brown than expressing some deep underlying preference for it. The designer may look like a savant for having "anticipated" the popular color, but if he had picked white or lavender instead, the same process might have unfolded.

An independent artist is probably the one who lives closest to an unbounded creative situation. Many artists have considerable freedom from external requirements about what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and why. At the same time, however, we know that artists usually limit themselves quite forcefully by choice of material and form of expression. To make the choice to express a feeling by carving a specific form from a rock, without the use of high technology or colors, restricts the artist significantly. Such choices are not made to limit creativity, but rather to cultivate it. When everything is possible, creativity has no tension. Creativity is strange in that it finds its way in any kind of situation, no matter how restricted, just as the same amount of water flows faster and stronger through a narrow strait than across the open sea.

Evolution works to maximize the number of descendants that an animal leaves behind. Where the risk of death from fishing increases as an animal grows, evolution favors those that grow slowly, mature younger and smaller, and reproduce earlier. This is exactly what we now see in the wild. Cod in Canada's Gulf of St. Lawrence begin to reproduce at around four today; forty years ago they had to wait until six or seven to reach maturity. Sole in the North Sea mature at half the body weight they did in 1950. Surely these adaptations are good news for species hard-pressed by excessive fishing? Not exactly. Young fish produce many fewer eggs than large-bodied animals, and many industrial fisheries are now so intensive that few animals survive more than a couple of years beyond the age of maturity. Together this means there are fewer eggs and larvae to secure future generations. In some cases the amount of young produced today is a hundred or even a thousand times less than in the past, putting the survival of species, and the fisheries dependent on them, at grave risk.

Driving is, for most of us, what psychologists call an overlearned activity. It is something we are so well practiced at that we are able to do it without much conscious thought. That makes our life easier, and it is how we become good at things. Think of an expert tennis player. A serve is a complex maneuver with many different components, but the better we become at it, the less we think of each individual step. One of the interesting things about learning and attention is that once something becomes automated, it gets executed in a rapid string of events. If you try to pay attention, you screw it up. This is why the best hitters in baseball do not necessarily make the best hitting coaches.

The difference between learning by instruction and learning by discovery is primarily a difference in the materials on which the learner works. When he is being instructed―discovering with the help of a teacher―the learner acts on something communicated to him. He performs operations on discourse, written or oral. He learns by acts of reading or listening. Note here the close relation between reading and listening. If we ignore the minor differences between these two ways of receiving communication, we can say that reading and listening are the same art―the art of being taught. When, however, the learner proceeds without the help of any sort of teacher, the operations of learning are performed on nature or the world rather than on discourse. The rules of such learning constitute the art of unaided discovery. If we use the word "reading" loosely, we can say that discovery is the art of reading nature or the world, as instruction is the art of reading books or, to include listening, of learning from discourse.

In the past few years, many new devices have been developed to assist people with sight problems. A laser cane, for example, helps blind people walking around. It sends out three beams of light. If the beams hit something, the cane makes sounds. The sounds warn a walker if something is in the way at head, waist, or foot level. One company has also invented traffic lights that make a difference sound when each color light is illuminated. Another company has created talking street signs that tell what street a walker is approaching. More complex machines have been created to help people read. One machine magnifies type to many times its printed size to make it easy for people with poor sight to read.

Grammar is the branch of linguistics which deals with the form and structure of words, and their interrelation in sentences. While many people, influenced by writing, tend to think of words as the basic units of grammatical structure, linguists recognize a smaller unit, the morpheme. The word cats, for instance, consists of two elements, or morphemes: cat, the meaning of which can be roughly characterized as "feline animal," and -s, as "more than one." Antimicrobial, meaning "capable of destroying microorganisms," can be divided into the morphemes anti-(against), micorbe(microorganism), and -ial, a suffix that makes the word an adjective. The study of these smallest grammatical units and the ways in which they combine into words, is called morphology.