You're Acceptable, Respectable, Presentable, a Vegetable.

David Brooks from NYT has run a series of essays about a project of Harvard's Steven Pinker.  Pinker asked experts from various fields: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?  The theories that came back are great fun to read and often enlightening.  A few examples:  John McWhorter, linguist and author, has a theory that many of us fall into a "path dependency" in thinking.  What worked before in a particular time and place is carried into the future even though such action or thinking is no longer effective.  Princeton's Daniel Kahneman has a theory that he calls the Focusing Illusion.  It's basically that "nothing is as important in life as you think it is while you are thinking about it."  All are of dust.

Read both essays for more interesting theories on how we can sharpen our thinking.  What interests me in the whole discussion of cognition and thinking is how much of what we think is genetically determined.  Perhaps logic and the ability to tweak how we think is as genetically determined as intelligence.  I happen to think it is.  Which is why it is pointless arguing with some people.  Outside of an extreme contrast to a held opinion such as that experienced by people from North Korea when exposed to the modern world or fear of ostracism from not adopting new social norms, a good number of people don't change opinions, ever.  I'm absolutely convinced of this.  Don't bother arguing with me.

Some experts and philosophers even question whether most of us bother to think at all.  Here's one.  Hanna Arendt wrote:

Thinking in its noncognitive, nonspecialized sense as a natural need of human life...is not a prerogative of the few but an ever-present faculty of everybody; by the same token, inability to think is not the "prerogative" of those many who lack brain power but the ever-present possibility for everybody - scientists, scholars, and other specialists in mental enterprises not excluded - to shun that intercourse with oneself...

And what to make of those seven seconds between brain spark and our actual conscious moment of acting out a thought?  Is it due to that crazy hip cat Quantum Mechanics, or to our complete lack of free will?  Perhaps I was genetically programmed to have this stupid blog. 

 

 

Comments

[justin bieber supras]

Love those! I enjoy following your posts on facebook and rss!

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