There is a presence in what is missing.” That presence is our own. - Jonah Lehrer

Trusting one's emotions requires constant vigilance; intelligent intuition is the result of deliberate practice.

As much as I loved the ideas, I excelled at experimental failure, I found new ways to make experiments not work. I would mess up PCRs, add the wrong buffers, northerns, westerns, southerns. I would make them not work in quite ingenious ways, and I realized slowly, over the course of those years, that the secret to being a great scientist is to love the manual labor of it.

Poe’s insight was that the audience didn’t care about the murder. That was just the setup, the inciting incident. What they really cared about was the mystery.