I’m in the middle of reading This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, a delightful work by Daniel J. Levitin. I plan to write about this book when I’m finished reading it, but one thing he wrote in his introduction especially intrigued me. Levitin writes…
About ten years ago, when I first started auditing graduate-level classes in cognitive science, I felt overwhelmed by the amount of information I needed to learn (I still do). The topics included such things as connectionism, evolutionary theory, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and education theory. It felt like I was learning less and less about more and more to such an extent that I was eventually going to know nothing about everything.
One of the professors acknowledged the enormous scope and depth of the material. He commented to me “it’s like trying to take a drink of water out of a fire hydrant.
That phrase stuck with me ever since. It seems like I run into yet another entirely new overwhelming topic every few weeks. It helps me to keep in mind that it’s often not supposed to be easy. That’s why people spend much of their lives getting good at each of the many hundreds of disciplines. There’s very few people that have command over more than a few of the numerous challenging fields out there.
That feeling of being overwhelmed while studying cognitive science reminded me that I felt the same way in my first year of law school. If you did what many of the professors told you to do, you would be spending 18 hours every day reading material that would be largely unhelpful. An alternative strategy that worked for me was to work hard to quickly determine what to ignore. In law school, …
I have already read about 15 of these short essays published by Edge. It's hard to stop, because the answers are especially thoughtful and well-articulated. Daniel Dennett's response is representative of the quality of these responses. Here is an excerpt from Dennett's response, entitled: "The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique…
This age. Bizarre. Part of the bizarreness rests in how much we actually know about it. We swim in a deepening sea of information. How to cope? We compartmentalize. So, though, do those providing us the information, and therein lies another problem, which is a question of integration. Recently at…
We’re right in the middle of massively expensive Christmas displays. No, not just the light displays. I’m referring to the numerous expenditures of time, energy and money that, because they are expensive, serve as reliable messages to others that we are interested in bonding with them . . . or not. Christmas is as good a time as any to let the truth hang out.
These displays take many forms. To whom do we send Christmas cards (and from whom do we receive them?)? To whose parties will we be invited? Who are those select people with whom we will end up exchaning gifts? It doesn’t matter if we don’t really enjoy cards, parties and gifts. It doesn’t really matter whether we believe in virgin birth. It doesn’t matter whether there were three kings or whether there was an especially bright star. As with oh-so-many things, Christmas is really about relationships. At bottom, Christmas is about rubbing elbows and bonding, no matter what the conventional wisdom.
The conventional wisdom says that Christmas is about a particular set of alleged historical truths. We need to keep in mind, though, that there are many cultures that give no credibility to the Jesus story who engage in similar gatherings and similar gift exchanges based on their own lore, much of if as unlikely as the story of a virgin giving birth to a God. They have their own gift exchanges and parties and songs and decorations framed by lore that makes no …