Excerpts from the Books that I read - II

Why aren’t babies born talking? We know that part of the answer that babies have to listen to themselves to learn how to work their articulators, and have to listen to their elders to learn communal phonemes, words, and phase orders. …. Before birth, virtually all the neurons are formed, and they migrate into their proper locations in the brain. But head size, brain weight, and thickness of the cerebral cortex (gray matter) where the synapses (junctions) subserving mental computation are found, continue to increase rapidly in the year after birth. Long distance connections (white matter) are not complete until nine months, and they continue to grow their speed-inducing myelin insulation throughout childhood. Synapses continue to develop, peaking in number between nine months and two years (depending on the brain region), at which point the child has fifty percent more synapses than the adult! Metabolic activity in the brain reaches adult levels by nine to ten months, and soon exceeds it, peaking around the age of four. The brain is sculpted not only by adding neural material but by chipping it away. Massive numbers of neurons die in utero, and the dying continues during the first two years before leveling off at age seven. Synapses wither from the age of two through the rest of childhood and into adolescence, when the brain’s metabolic rate falls back to adult levels. Language development, the, could be on a maturational timetable, like teeth. Perhaps linguistic accomplishments like babbling, first words, and grammar require minimum levels of brain size, long-distance connections, and extra synapses, particularly in the language centers of the brain. So language seems to develop about as quickly as the growing brain can handle it. what’s the rush. Why is language installed so quickly, while the rest of the child’s mental development seems to proceed at a more leisurely pace? In a book on evolutionary theory often considered to be one of the most important since Darwin’s the biologist George Willims speculates: “We might imagine that Hans and Fritz Faustkell are told on Monday, “Don’t go near the water,” and that both go wading and are spanked for it. on Tuesday they are told, “Don’t play near the fire.” And again they disobey and are spanked. On Wednesday they are told “Don’t tease the saber-tooth.” This time Hans understands the message, and he bears firmly in mind the consequences of disobedience. He prudently avoids the saber-tooth and escapes the spanking. Poor Fritz escapes spanking, too, but for a very different reason.” Even today, accidental death is an important cause of mortality in early life, and parents who consistently spare the rod in other matters may be moved to violence when a child plays with electric wires or chases a ball into the street. Many of the accidental deaths of small children would probably have been avoided if the victims had understood and remembered verbal instructions and had been capable of effectively substituting verbal symbols for real experience. This might well have been true also under primitive conditions.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that the vocabulary spurt and beginnings of grammer follow closely on the heels of the baby, quite literally – the ability to walk unaccompanied appears around fifteen months. ~ Page289/290

To see why, consider the human kind we call dyslexic. At the psychological and social level of analysis, dyslexics are the real human kind; they’re schoolchildren (and adults) who don’t perceive words as most people do. The condition was first described at the end of nineteenth century as a form of “word blindness.” Today’s view is that dyslexic is a consequence of the way brain interpret phonemes, the chunks of sound that are building blocks of words. Dyslexia, like almost all traits, must result from interactions among many different genes. Nonetheless, one need not know which genes in order to figure out how important heredity is to the condition. Research began in the 1950s, with comparisons of fraternal and identical twins and more recent statistical studies suggest that part of what makes dyslexia happens is a consequence of inheritance. ~ Page 292

……. ‘If you want to avoid prison, don’t steal’ is an example of Hypothetical Imperative Categorical Imperative would simply be ‘Don’t Steal!’ it is an order telling you what your duty is. Kant thought that morality was a system of categorical imperatives. Your moral duty is your moral duty whatever the consequences and whatever the circumstances. ~ Page 118

A visual illusion called "Troxier fading" illustrates one of the many ways in which the subjective content of consciousness can be manipulated. Stare intently at the central cross. after a few seconds, some of the gray dots should vanish, then return at random moments. the objective stimulus is constant, but its subjective inetrpretation keeps changing. something must be changing inside your brain -- can we track it?

The visual slippage induced by our own motion is just one of many cues that our brain edits out of our conscious belief. Many other features set our conscious world apart from the blurry signals that reach our senses. When we watch TV, for instance, the image flickers 50 to 60 times per second, and recordings show that this hidden rhythm enters our primary visual cortex, where neurons flicker at the same frequency. Fortunately we do not perceive those rhythmic flashes; the fine-grained temporal information that is present in our visual areas is filtered out before it reaches our awareness. Likewise, a very fine mesh of lines is encoded by our primary visual cortex, even though it cannot be seen. But our consciousness is not just nearly blind: it is an active observer that dramatically enhances and transforms the incoming image. On the retina and at the earliest stages of cortical processing, the center of our vision is massively expanded relative to the periphery: many more neurons care about the center of our gaze than about the surroundings. Yet we do not perceive the world as though giant magnifying lens; nor do we experience a sudden expansion of whichever face or word we decide to look at. Consciousness ceaselessly stabilizes our perception. ~ Page 144

…….it is valuable to understand how this is the culmination of a process of comparative biology that starts with the most evident feature of organisms -- like the common bone structures in mammalian forelimbs that Darwin cited -- and proceeds to ever more minute details., the striking affinities of anatomy and physiology point clearly to relationships, but the exact character of the relationships, the determination of just which organisms are closer kin, depends on the history of modifications of the genetic material. ~ Page 53

The pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right, says the Declaration of Independence in its list of self-evident truths. The greatest happiness of the greatest number wrote Jeremy Bentham, is the foundation of morality. To say that everyone wants to be happy sounds trite, almost circular, but it raises a profound question about our makeup. What is this thing that people strive for? At first happiness might seem like just desserts for biological fitness (more accurately, the states that would have led to fitness in the environment in which we evolved). We are happier when we are healthy, well-fed, comfortable, safe, prosperous, knowledgeable, respected, non-celibate, and loved. Compared to their opposites, these objects of striving are conducive to reproduction. The function of happiness would be to mobilize the mind to seek the keys to Darwinian fitness. When we are unhappy, we work for the things that make us happy, when we are happy, we keep the status quo. ............. How do we know what can reasonably be attained? A good source of information is that other people have attained. If they can get it, perhaps so can you. Through the ages, observers of the human condition have pointed out the tragedy; People are happy when they feel better off than their neighbors, unhappy when they feel worse off. But, O! how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes! - William Shakespeare (As You Like it,) Happiness, n. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of others. Ambrose Bierce It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail. - Gore Vidal When does A hunchback rejoice? When he sees one with a larger hump _ Yiddish saying

Image from NASA www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDHS2aWcV9U

Image from the Book www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcyGIwJXGLw

....... Everyone has heard of "reducing cognitive dissonance," in which people invent a new opinion to resolve a contradiction in their minds. For example, a person will recall enjoying a boring task if he had agreed to recommend it to others for paltry pay, he actually recalls that the task was boring.) As originally conceived of by the psychologist Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance is an unsettled feeling that arises from an inconsistence in one's belief. But that's right: there is no contradiction between the proposition "The task is boring" and the proposition, "I was pressured into lying that the task was fun." Another social psychologist Eliot Aronson, nailed it down: people doctor their beliefs only to eliminate a contradiction with the proposition "I am nice and in control." Cognitive dissonance is always triggered by blatant evidence that yo are not as beneficent and and effective as you would like people to think. The urge to reduce it is the urge to get your self-serving story straight. Sometimes we have glimpses of our own self-deception. When does a negative remark sting, cut deep, bit a nerve? When some part of us know it is true. If every part knew it was true, the remark would not sting; it would be old news. If no part thought it was true, the remark would roll off; we could dismiss it as false. Trivers recounts an experience that is all too familiar. One of his paper drew a published critique, which stuck him at the time as vicious and unprincipled, full of innuendo and slander. Rereading the article years late, he was surprised to find that the wording was gentler, the doubts more reasonable, the attitude less biased than he had remembered. Many others have made such discoveries; they are almost the definition of "wisdom" If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein There's one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he's crooked. ~ Mark Twain Our enemies' opinion of us comes closer to the truth than our own. ~ Francois La Rochefoucauld. Oh wad some power to giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! ~ Robert Burns ~ Page 423