Leaps of Perception
A favorite passage from the book I'm reading, In the Palaces of Memory by George Johnson.:
"In trying to explain how difficult a problem neuroscience still faces, Cooper likes to tell a story.: Suppose you came here from another planet. You have no eyes, no ears, just infrared sensors to help you get around. You notice that an object is thrown on your doorstep every morning. But you are not equipped with the concept newspaper. You subject this strange artifact to physical and chemical analysis. You weigh it every day and see that it goes from thin to fat in seven-day cycles. You analyse the ratio of black to white and find that it is fairly constant. You note that the chemical composition of the paper sometimes changes. But in understanding what a newspaper is, much of tht turns out to be irrelevant. Will you, the alien, ever make the leap and somehow realize that on the surface of the paper are rows and rows of tiny markings, that they cluster into patterns that carry information? And, if you are someday driven to make this radical hypothesis, is there any hope that you will learn to read the thing?"....
"In trying to explain how difficult a problem neuroscience still faces, Cooper likes to tell a story.: Suppose you came here from another planet. You have no eyes, no ears, just infrared sensors to help you get around. You notice that an object is thrown on your doorstep every morning. But you are not equipped with the concept newspaper. You subject this strange artifact to physical and chemical analysis. You weigh it every day and see that it goes from thin to fat in seven-day cycles. You analyse the ratio of black to white and find that it is fairly constant. You note that the chemical composition of the paper sometimes changes. But in understanding what a newspaper is, much of tht turns out to be irrelevant. Will you, the alien, ever make the leap and somehow realize that on the surface of the paper are rows and rows of tiny markings, that they cluster into patterns that carry information? And, if you are someday driven to make this radical hypothesis, is there any hope that you will learn to read the thing?"....