The Mystery of the Reading Ape

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If we are to reconsider the relation between brain and culture, we must address an enigma, which I call the reading paradox: Why does our primate brain read? Why does it have an inclination for reading although this cultural activity was invented only a few years ago?

There are good reasons why this deceptively simple question deserves to be called paradox. We have discovered that the literate brain contains specialized cortical mechanisms that are exquisitely attuned to the recognition of written words. Even more surprisingly, the same mechanisms, in all humans, are systematically housed in identical brain regions, as though there were a cerebral organ for reading.

But writing was born only fifty-four hundred years ago in the Fertile Crescent, and the alphabet itself is only thirty-eight hundred years old. These time spans are a mere trifle in evolutionary terms. Evolution thus did not have the time to develop specialized reading circuits in Homo sapiens. Our brain is built on the genetic blueprint that allowed our hunter-gatherer ancestors to survive. We take delight in reading Nabokov and Shakespeare using a primate brain originally designed for life in the African savanna. Nothing in our evolution could have prepared us to absorb language through vision. Yet brain imaging demonstrate that the adult brain contains fixed circuitry exquisitely attuned to reading.

The reading paradox is reminiscent of the Reverend William Paley’s parable aimed at proving the existence of God. In his Natural Theology (1802), he imagined that in a deserted heath, a watch was found on the ground, complete with its intricate inner workings clearly design e to measure time. Wouldn’t it provide, he argued, clear proof that there is an intelligent clockmaker, a designer who purposely created the watch? Similarly, Paley maintained that the intricate devices that we find in living organisms, such as the astonishing mechanisms of the eye, prove that nature is the work of a divine watchmaker.

Charles Darwin famously refuted Paley by showing how blind natural selection can produce highly organized structures. Even if biological organisms at first glance seem designed for a specific purpose, closer examination reveals that their organization falls short of the perfection that one would expect from an omnipotent architect. All sorts of imperfections attest that evolution is not guided by an intelligent creator, but follows random paths in the struggle for survival. In the retina, for example, blood vessels and nerve cables are situated in front of the photoreceptors, thus partially blocking incoming light and creating a blind spot --very poor design indeed.

Following in Darwin’s footsteps, Stephen Jay Gould provided many examples of the imperfect outcome of natural selection, including the panda’s thumb. The British evolutionist Richard Dawkins also explain how the delicate mechanisms of the eye or of the wing could only have emerged through natural selection or are the work of a “blind watchmaker.” Darwin’s evolutionism seems to be the only source of apparent “design” in nature.

When it comes to explaining reading, however, Paley’s parable is problematic in a subtly different way. The clockwork-like brain mechanisms that support reading are certainly comparable in complexity and sheer design to those of the watch abandoned on the heath. Their entire organization leans toward the single apparent goal of decoding written words as quickly and accurately as possible. Yet neither the hypothesis of an intelligent creator nor that of slow emergence through natural selection seems to provide a plausible explanation for the origins of reading. Time was simply too short for evolution to design specialized reading circuits. How, then, did our primate brain learn to read? Our cortex is the outcome of millions of years of evolution in a world without writing --why can it adapt to the specific challenges posed by written word recognition?

source: Reading in the Brain; Introduction (by Stanislas Dehaene

The Future : What Lies in Store for the Human Species

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The human biped is an extraordinary animal. In evolutionary terms this strange species is still young. Its unparalleled success story is still unfolding, and doing so at ever-increasing speed. It is impossible to predict the future with any precision, but it will certainly be exciting and full of major new discoveries. The genetic control of the ageing process will soon be understood. If they wish to, people will be able to live for a thousand years. Discoveries in the field of anti-gravity and possibly even the conquest of time travel will enable our species to explode beyond this small planet and on to other spheres. With our big brains and our insatiable curiousity, ‘the sky is the limit’ will seem like a modest boast.

All of this will be possible because we are the ape that never grew up, the ape that became fully adult while still retaining our childlike playfulness. Adult play is already evident in almost all aspects of human endeavour. Not merely in our greatest achievements in the arts and sciences, but also in our everyday life. The great chief converts the simple act of eating into an elaborate sensory experience. In the world of high fashion, the simple demands of comfort and modesty in clothing are almost completely overshadowed by by matters of style and taste. The same is true of house furnishings and decoration. Even the highly practical world of architecture is not free from human playfulness. From the ornate capitals of ancient columns to the wild excesses of Disneyland castles, the game is played wherever the architect can persuade his clients to allow him to go beyond the needs of simple security and comfort.

We play sex games, called dancing. We play war games and hunting games, called sp0rt. We play travel games, called tourism ---when we visit places we have no need to visit but where curiousity demands that we poke our noses, if only for a few tantalizing weeks.

As soon as our basic needs are satisfied, as soon as we have gone ‘beyond survival’, we are off and running. The naked ape should really be rechistened the creative ape. At our best we remain, all our lives, childlike adults, ready at the slightest excuse to indulge in mature play. If ever we give this up and become depressingly earnest, pious adult-adults, we will have betrayed our great biological heritage as the most exuberant, most mischievously imaginative animal on this planet. When that happens, if ever it does, it will be time for us to move on and make way for some more attractive species to replace us. In the meantime the beautiful game of life is ours for the taking.

There may be those who feel that by calling man’s greatest achievements ‘adult play’, I am belittling them. But I am not. My people, our greatest achievents is to be found in the realms of such pursuits as commerce, technology, medicine, politics and economics. But these are merely means to one of two ends: either better human survival or better adult play. If successful commerce is concerned with, for example, food and drink, the it is either helping to satisfy hunger and thirst or it is helping to improve the subtle aesthetics of gastronomic play.

If modern technology brings us the benefits of more advanced creature comforts, we are extremely grateful but we do not sit around marvelling at the inner workings of our air-conditioning units or our refrigerators, our radios or our telephones. We simply use them as a means to many other ends. If medicine is concerned with curing diseases, that is not an end in itself but a means to a healthier life --to survive better or to enjoy adult play better.

The essential dream of modern politics and economics is to ensure personal freedoms and affluence for all. The unspoken concept behind this endeavour is to take the world’s population ‘beyond survival’ and into the realms of advance, mature, adult play.

Our greatest , most supremely human quality is our insatiable curiousity. We have gone from mud hut to moon rocket in a just a few thousand years --a mere blink of the eye in evolutionary time. In the process we have transformed the face of the earth and built structures so impressive and so vast that some of them are visible from the moon to which we have travelled. We have done this because we have never stopped asking questions and, once have found the answers, we have used these to help us to ask even more.

Of all the many millions of animal species that have ever lived on this small planet we, the human animal. Are by fat the most extraordinary. But why us? Why have we gone so far when other close relatives, such as the gorilla and chimpanzee, are left skulking in remote tropical forests? What are so special about our story that has enabled us effectively to rule the world? In a nutshell, it is because we were primates that stood up and became co-operative hunters. The fact that we were primates meant that we had a good brain and unspecialized body, capable of many kinds of action. If we had possessed a smaller brain or a more specialized body we would have been unable t o take the next step. That step was upward. We became bipeds. By rearing up we (literally) gained a free hand to exploit the environment. We were able to make tools and use them intelligently. We were then able to kill prey.

Hunting made us braver, less selfish, more co-operative (out of necessity, not morality), more able to concentrate on long-term goals and, above all, better fed. The new high-protein died enabled us to become even more intelligent. Our urge to hunt co-operatively gave us the need to become more communicative. We developed language and, with it, understanding of complex symbolism. With this symbolism we were able to replace ancient actions with modern equivalents. We could make one thing stand for another so convincingly that we were able to take the make-believe world of children’s play and develop our body language into acting, athletics and ballet; our hunting into sport, gambling, exploration and collecting; our speech into singing, poetry and theatre; and our co-operation into altruism and generosity. We were the magic combination, the threshold-leaper, the risk-taker, the venerable child for all occasions.

With their often stunningly beautiful bodies, other animals are remarkable for what tey are. We, with our puny, rather unimpressive bodies, are remarkable for what we have done. And what we will undeniably do in the future, for the story has hardly begun.

Source: People Watching: The Desmond Morris Guide to Body Language (by Desmond Morris)

Preface - What The Dog Saw

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1.

When I was a small child, I used to sneak into my father’s study and leaf through the papers on his desk. He is a a mathematician. He wrote on graph paper, in pencil --long rows of neatly wirtten numbers and figures. I would sit on the edge of his chair and look at each page with puzzlement and wonder. It seemed miraculous, first of all, that he got paid for what seemed, at the time, like gibberish. But more important, I couldn’t get over the fact that someone whom I loved so dearly did something everyday, inside his own head, that I could not begin to understand.

This was actually a version of what I would later learn psychologists call the other minds problem. One-year-olds think that if they like Goldfish Crackers, then Mommy and Daddy must like Goldfish Crackers, too: they have not grasped the idea that what is inside their head is different from what is inside everyone else’s head. Sooner of later, though, children come to understand that Mommy and Daddy don’t necessarily like Goldfish, too, and that moment is one of the great cognitive milestone of human development. Why is a two-year-old so terrible? Because she is systematically testing the fascinating and, to her, utterly novel notion that something that gives her pleasure might not actually give someone else pleasure --and the truth is that as adults we never lose that fascination (bold is mine).

What is the first thing that we want to know, when we meet someone who is a doctor at a social occasion? It isn’t “What do you do?” We know, sort of, what a doctor does. Instead, we want to know what it means to be with sick people all day long. We want to know what it feels like to be a doctor, because we’re quite sure that it doesn’t feel at all like what it means to sit at a computer all day long, or teach school, or sell cars. Such questions are not dumb or obvious. Curiosity is one of the most fundamental of human impulses, and that same impulse is what led me to the writing you now hold in your hands.

source:

What The Dog Saw (Preface); by Malcolm Gladwell.

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Nook Took My Breath Away

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Ya ampun --bahunya :,-(

Your Friends Are Worth Something

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(Not a romantic story, but heart-melting nonetheless).

While elites like corporate directors clearly benefit from shaping social networks to suit their needs, it is less clear whether these benefits reach each other levels of society. If anything, social networks might be seen as an explanation for why the rich are getting richer, and why economic inequality continues to rise. The logic is simple: if you are rich, you can attract more friends, and if you have more friends, you can find more ways to become rich. And recent changes in technology might make the problem worse. When it is easier to search and navigate social networks, the positive-feedback loop between social connections and success could create a social magnifier that concentrate even more power and wealth in the hands of those who already had it.

Fortunately, the millions of poor around the world are not completely out of luck. Over the past thirty years, there has been an important movement to use social networks to fight inequality and improve the lot of the worse-off by giving the access to something they never had before: credit. Although it may be hard to believe in the United States, where we get sent unsolicited credit cards in the mail nearly every day, many people in the rest of the world cannot borrow even a dollar. And the main reason they cannot is that they have no collateral; they do not own land or property, and what few things they possess have such limited value that traditional lenders do not consider using them as guarantee.

Traditional banks around the world overlooked, however, a source of collateral that even the most destitute have: their friends and family. Social networks are ubiquitous, and, as it turns out, they can be used to successfully guarantee a loan. Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus is credited for having this insight, which he originally developed when visiting poor villages near Chittagong University where he worked. When Yunus learned that women in the village of Jobra were being gouged by local moneylenders to pay for the bamboo they turned into furniture, he agreed to lend them money himself. What was the staggering sum these forty-two women asked for? About twenty-seven dollars. Less than a dollar each. The new microcredit market was born.

Sensing the need for this kind of loan throughout the country, Yunus approached a band and became a guarantor for loans the bank would make to the villages, since it did not loan money to people without assets. Amazingly, the repayment rate for the loans he made actually exceeded the repayment rate the bank typically enjoyed. Yunus would go on to found the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which pioneered the microfinance loan.

One of the most important features of these very small loans is that they are given to groups, rather than to individual, to help them start small business or make other investments that will help them escape poverty (like paying for their children’s school or paying off high-interest loans from local moneylenders). In essence, individuals use their friends and family as social collateral to assure the bank that they will repay the loan. This makes these high-risk loans feasible because it dramatically reduces the probability of default. Social networks help distribute risk and help groups cope more effectively with unexpected events like a drought or a death in the family. But, most generally, this is a way to monetize social-network ties. The bank typically requires five people to form a group, and if each of the five successfully passes a test after a week of training in business skills, then individuals in the group are eligible to apply for loans. Loans are made to two people first, and if those are repaid, then the fifth group member can apply.

(...)

Source: Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. (Chapter 5); by Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD and James H. Fowler, PhD.

[this is as far as I go, yah :-) ]

Network Creativity

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(Part from previous subchapter):
Sociologist Brian Uzzi, a professor at Northwestern whose mother worked as a dressmaker in New York, had personally observed how some business in the apparel industry were embedded while others were not. He conducted interviews at several of these firms an found that embedded firms wer more likely to surviv than those that did not rely on their personal networks to decide with whom to trade. But also he found that too much embeddedness can be a bad thing. An unconditional commitment to a particular business partner (a strong tie) can be disastrous if it causes a frim to completely ignore opportunities with other firms (weak ties). Thus, there is a trade-off between bulding stable relationship with a certain group of partners an being willing to leave those relationships when changes in the market cause them to lose viability. It is important to have a mix of strong and weak ties, and hitting the sweet spot is key.

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Network Creativity:
Uzzi extended his insight from dressmakers to a little-studied corner of the corporate world. From Cats to Spamalot, Broadway musicals have been big business for decades, but investors usually have to follow their gut when they decide to back one show or another. Bye Bye Birdie starring Dick Van Dyke ran for 607 nights on Broadway and was a smashing success, but Bring Back Birdie was a flop and closed after just four. What was the difference? Why do some shows succeed and others fail?

Uzzi believed the social networks formed by the musical production companies played an important role, so he and Janet Spiro studied collaborations between the producers of 321 musicals that premiered on Broadway between 1945 and 1989. In particular, they were interested in whether the collaborators formed “small-world” networks like those Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz in their seminal 1998 Nature article. The idea underling small-world networks is that they exhibit two important features: low average path length (people can easily reach others in the network through a small number of intermediaries, as Stanley Milgram’s Nebraska mail experiment illustrated) and high transitivity (most of a person’s friend’s are friends with one another). Watts and Strogatz showed that you could put everyone on a highly structured network (like a ring or a grid where neighbors are only connected to each other) and the just add a few random connections to turn it into a small-world network with low average path length. The result was a highly ordered network with lots of cliques (groups in which everyone is connected to everyone else) but also with many ways that information can pass between these cliques from person to person to person.

Uzzi found that teams made up of individuals who had never before worked together fared poorly, greatly increased the chance of a flop. These networks were not well connected and contained mostl weak ties. At the other extreme, groups made up of individuals who had all worked together previously also tended to create musicals that were unsuccessful. Because these groups lacked creative input from the outside, they tended to rehash the same ideas that they used the first time they worked together. In between, however, Uzzi once again found a sweet spot that combines the diversity of new team members with the stability of previously formed relationship. The networks that best exhibited the small-world property were those that had the greatest success.

Production company networks with a mix of weak and strong ties allowed easy communication but also fostered greater creativity because of the ideas of new members of the group and the synergies they created. Thus, the structure of the network appears to have a strong effect on both financial and critical success.

Making better musicals might not be at the top of your list of world problems, but knowing how to spur creativity in teams has much broader applications. Uzzi has also studied human achievement and how it relates too social networks. Previous perspectives on scientific discovery, for instance, have stressed individual genius as the explanation for outstanding achievement, but over the course of the twentieth century, discovery and innovation increasingly came to be properties of groups rather than of individuals. Of course, innovation rarely, if ever, arises without input from others, as we saw with the inventor networks. Breakthroughs are created in collaborative circles, and networks can amplify talent (we have certainly seen this in our own experience, finding that complementary skills and knowledge enrich our joint work, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts). The empirical question is how to show whether individuals do better when they are part of teams than they would do if they acted alone.

To study this problem, Uzzi used citations as a marker for the “best” scientific work. In the scientific world, citation is a form of a praise or at least attention. Uzzi collected data on 21 million scientific papers published worldwide between 1945 and 2005 and also 1.9 million patent filings from a fifteen-year period. He then compared the papers written by individuals to the papers written by teams. Using citation as a measure of quality, Uzzi found that, on average, team efforts wer judged to be better and more important science than efforts by individuals.

Uzzi also evaluated whether there was any truth to what many academics know informally as the “thirty-foot rule.” This rule states that people collaborate only with others within thirty feet of them. But as we saw in the case of sexual partners, where people shift from finding partners “in the neighborhood" to finding them through their network, and as we saw in the case of obesity where social network connections were more important than geographic connection, physical distance is becoming less of a constraint on scientific collaboration. Studying 4.2 million papers published from 1975 to 205, Uzzi found that collaborative teams involving researchers at different universities are increasing relative to teams that are all from the same university. This trend has to do with a greater focus on specialization, and it surely has been spurred in part by globalization. But what is increasingly clear is that scientific collaboration works best in small-world forums of organization that make it easy to work with a mix of people from different places.

Source:
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. (Chapter 5); by Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD and James H. Fowler, PhD.

I Hate My Purse

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by Nora Ephron

I hate my purse. I absolutely hate it. If you're one of those women who think there's something great about purses, don't even bother reading this because there will be nothing here for you. This is for women who hate their purses, who are bad at purses, who understand that their purses are reflections of negligent housekeeping, hopeless organization, chronic inability to throw anything away, and an ongoing failure to handle the obligations of a demanding and difficult accessory (the obligation, for example, that it should in some way match what you're wearing). This is for women whose purses are a morass of loose Tic Tacs, solitary Advils, lipsticks without tops, ChapSticks of unknown vintage, little bits of tobacco even though there has been no smoking going on for at last ten years, tampons that have come loose from their wrappings, English coins from a trip to London last October, boarding passes from long-forgotten airplane trips, hotel keys from God-knows-what hotel, leaky ballpoint pens, Kleenexes that either have or have not been used but there's no way to be sure one way or another, scratched eyeglasses, an old tea bag, several crumpled personal checks that have come loose from the checkbook and are covered with smudge marks, and an unprotected toothbrush that looks as if it has been used to polish silver...

Source:
I Feel Back About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being A Woman
by Nora Ephron