Words&Dirt

“‘Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else’s version of themselves––to anyone else’s version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!’”

––A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving, pg. 223

“Although neuroimaging has deepened our knowledge of brain anatomy and function, its popular application tends to reinforce the misbegotten notion of the brain as a repository of discrete modules that control distinct capacities to think and feel. This is not the case, of course. Studies that suggest a ‘brain spot for X’ are typically misleading because mental functions are rarely localized to one place in the brain. There is a babel of crosstalk among numerous brain regions as they are strung together in specialized neural circuits that work in parallel to process thoughts and feelings. Almost nothing is static in the brain. The organ continuously rewires itself in response to experience and learning by altering the strength of its connections countless times every second. Neuroscientists now think of the brain as an ever-changing ecosystem crackling with electrochemical energy from which our thoughts, emotions, and intentions arise, rather than a collection of blinking neural islands.”

––Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, by Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld, pg. 15-6