The same wavelength: how language stimulates the brains of speakers and listeners in similar ways. Prof. Uri Hasson of Princeton, a philosophy undergraduate major, studies the complexity of understanding with imagination and magnetic resonance imaging. From the article: On average, the listener's brain responses mirrored the speaker's brain responses with some time delays. The delays [...]
The language of numbers: how learning a language can become the model for acquiring the basics of engineering. From the article: Trying to reprogram my brain sometimes seemed like a ridiculous idea—especially when I looked at the fresh young faces of my younger classmates and realized that many of them had already dropped their hard math and [...]
The mission and meanderings of learning: thoughts on the purpose of education 2000 years ago. You have been wishing to know my views with regard to liberal studies. My answer is this: I respect no study, and deem no study good, which results in money-making. Such studies are profit-bringing occupations, useful only in so far [...]
Thought, language, and knowledge: does our use of language shape our view of things, and rationality? What could be more obvious than that people carry over the way they comprehend things through statements onto the structure of things themselves? Yet this opinion, seemingly critical but in reality rash, has first to explain how the carry-over of the [...]
How language -- its clarity, immediacy, and nuance -- is vital to both patients and doctors, for it can overcome the split between scientific specialization and the experience of suffering. From the article: Many of the great doctors have been writers, and those who have not have required writers to set down their insights. Hippocrates, Galen, [...]
Umberto Eco explains how books, as our familial elders, deepen our emotional lives across generations. Valentino Bompiani once circulated a saying: “one person who reads is worth two.” It was said by a publisher probably as a clever slogan, but I think it means that writing (and in general language) lengthen one’s life. From the time when [...]
How language lends itself to the sciences.
How can we learn from the writings of dead sages?
