learning Quotes

Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology - the plays of Shakespeare and so on.

Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.

The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.

Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.

The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.

My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one's convictions can be subjected to empirical test.

If you aren't just brought up in your tribe but interact with other people either directly or vicariously, through journalism and literature, you see what life is like from other points of view and are less likely to demonize them or dehumanize others and more likely to empathize with them.

Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that's going to expand.