Home > Topic > hundreds or thousands
1 " It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding mirror neurons and their function. They may well be central to social learning, imitation, and the cultural transmission of skills and attitudes—perhaps even of the pressed-together sound clusters we call words. By hyperdeveloping the mirror-neuron system, evolution in effect turned culture into the new genome. Armed with culture, humans could adapt to hostile new environments and figure out how to exploit formerly inaccessible or poisonous food sources in just one or two generations—instead of the hundreds or thousands of generations such adaptations would have taken to accomplish through genetic evolution.Thus culture became a significant new source of evolutionary pressure, which helped select brains that had even better mirror-neuron systems and the imitative learning associated with them. The result was one of the many self-amplifying snowball effects that culminated in Homo sapiens, the ape that looked into its own mind and saw the whole cosmos reflected inside. "
― V.S. Ramachandran , The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human
2 " The temptations and reactions that can cause non-creativity, imbalance and distraction are many. Let’s start with the prejudice everyone has against imposed challenges. It’s a concept that people associate with an accusation, a kind of guilty until proven innocent. Or, you’re not good enough until you prove it, with the implication behind this that you will probably fail or are unworthy. If you settle for this association at the expense of perceiving the actuality and necessity of challenge, or Creative Resistance, in hundreds or thousands of situations in every day of your life, and in anything worthy of your attention, you bought into the illusion sold basically to keep you small, in control, like those and safe for those who sell it. "
― Darrell Calkins , Re:
3 " No living creature lives without mistakes, Leo.” As it spoke, the flightsuit played videos in the visor, showing diapered babies sitting down hard as they learned to walk, tiger cubs rolling with each other and a blur of dozens of different moments captured from Earth. Everything man and Explorer creates is designed from mistakes, learned and corrected, to improve subsequent designs. I am the product of millions of mistakes, adjustments made to original concepts and plans.” The images in the visor displayed bridges swaying wildly, buildings crumbling to the ground, the blackened interior of a space capsule through a charred open door. “Every device you've ever used-so familiar you may have never considered their creation. Every device is the product of mistakes, hundreds or thousands of previous mistakes. You see the results, but you do not see the mistakes.”The flightsuit paused. “You see yourself in the mirror and see the results, and you do not see the millions of shaping events that made you. You survived these challenges. There are millions more shaping events ahead of you. You have not yet survived these, and so they feel dangerous and uncertain. If you were able to precisely recall, at will, the feelings of fear and uncertainty you experienced in the past or the moments you long ago overcame and survived would you discourage your past self from trying? "
― Tom Deaderick , Flightsuit (The Lost Cove Series, #1)
