All posts by Adam

Did you Know?, General, Information

2010 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists Announced

Fiction

Nonfiction

via The Millions

Did you Know?, General, Information

“We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read…”

“We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute — the foundation of the human condition — and should be better.”

-Mario Vargas Llosa, address to the Swedish Academy, Dec. 7, 2010

(via)

Did you Know?, General, Information

Learning to read competes with face recognition ability…

A  New Scientist article

suggests that the human ability to read actually cannibalizes parts of the brain used for other visual skills, such as tracking animals… and recognizing faces. Neurologists have long been faced with the “reading paradox” of how our brain contains such a specific area for reading while reading itself has only existed for 5000 years–far too short a time for the reading area of the brain to be an adaptive trait.

[Our] visual plasticity may have allowed for humans to “recycle” visual portions of the brain for reading, but not, his new study suggests, without a cost…

That cost is our ability to recognize faces.

Wait, who said that?

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