Cognitive Quotes - page 8
For Pollock, the fact that [...] have written about Ayodhya, Mount Meru, Ganga, etc., in multiple locations is dumbfounding and irrational..... I propose a different interpretation of the same data. As per our tradition, the conceptual space of Hindus can be replicated and localized easily. The Hindu metaphysics of immanence leads to the decentralization of sacred geography.... This is why people in south India substitute their local rivers for Ganga for ritualist purposes; there is a town called Ayodhya in Thailand; the cognitive landscape of people in Java started to include Mount Meru as a local place, and so on.
Rajiv Malhotra
At every turn, skeptical observers have attacked the idea that pooling our cognitive surplus could work to create anything worthwhile, or suggested that if it does work, it is a kind of cheating, because sharing at a scale that competes with older institutions is somehow wrong. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft denounced the shared production of software as communism. Robert McHenry, a former editor in chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, likened Wikipedia to a public rest room. Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, compared bloggers to monkeys. These complaints, self-interested though they were, echoed more broadly held beliefs. Shared, unmanaged effort might be fine for picnics and bowling leagues, but serious work is done for money, by people who work in proper organizations, with managers directing their work.
Clay Shirky
I believe there are three institutions in Western society that could ease the transition into Western citizenship of these millions of nomads from the tribal cultures they are leaving. They are institutions that can compete with the agents of jihad for the hearts and minds of Muslims.
The first is public education. The European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century gave birth to schools and universities run on the principles of critical thinking. Education was aimed at helping the masses emancipate themselves from poverty, superstition, and tyranny through the development of their cognitive abilities....This public education was geared toward grooming citizens, not preserving the separateness of tribe, the sanctity of the faith, or whatever happened to be the prejudice of the day.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Unlike other aspects of cognitive function, emotions have never been readily confinable to one hemisphere. Though generated by lateralized input, the emotional effects tend to spread rapidly to involve both hemispheres, apparently through crossed fiber systems in the undivided brain stem.
Roger Wolcott Sperry
I think time will show that the new approach, emphasizing emergent "macro" control, is equally valid in all the physical sciences, and that the behavioral and cognitive disciplines are leading the way to a more valid framework for all science. Although the theoretic changes make little difference in physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and so on, they are crucial for the behavioral, social, and human sciences. They don't change the analytic, reductive methodology, just the interpretations and conclusions. There seems little to lose, and much to gain.
Roger Wolcott Sperry
It is true that some percentage of bright people really do not test well, but most of the time the only thing about "common man's intelligence" that is indubitably true is that it is common. The concept of some ephemeral, elusive nonverbal intelligence simply allows one to impute intelligence to anyone who strikes your fancy. ... Eliminating standardized tests allows the cognitive elite to manipulate the soft stuff in ways the less-often-washed cannot. Mount Holyoke has accomplished nothing more than replacing a tyranny of merit with a tyranny of privilege.
Ann Coulter
If we keep raising carbon dioxide levels, we may not be able to think straight anymore. At a thousand parts per million (which is within the realm of possibility for 2100), human cognitive ability falls 21 percent. "The largest effects were seen for Crisis Response, Information Usage, and Strategy,” a Harvard study reported, which is too bad, as those skills are what we seem to need most.
Bill McKibben
