“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.”
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…
Go, and pay tribute to Spalding Gray, one of THE great monologist of the modern era, and enjoy a visit to Austin, Texas and a visit to the most happening lit-centric Humanities Research Center this side of anywhere…
…[another] cognitive problem is: Every single thing you see is future trash. Everything. So we are surrounded by ephemera, but we can’t acknowledge that, because it’s kind of scary, because I think ultimately it points to our own temporariness, to thoughts that we’re all going to die.
So says Robin Nagle [anthropologist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY), since 2006]…
