Quotes from Brain and Culture

By Bruce Wexler (2006)

• The brain depends upon sensory stimulation to develop physically, and the functional and structural organization of the brain is strongly influenced by the nature of that stimulation.#
  Cognitive Science
• The chemical mechanisms of neuronal growth and learning that are so active during childhood are much less evident in adult brains, and learning in adults depends largely on different cellular mechanisms.#
  Cognitive Science
• Our biology is social in such a fundamental and thorough manner that to speak of a relation between the two suggests an unwarranted distinction. It is our nature to nurture and be nurtured.#
  Cognitive Science
• The evolutionary appearance of the limbic system is associated with the evolutionary appearance of parenting and other familial behaviors#
  Cognitive Science
• The relationship between the individual and the environment is so extensive that it almost overstates the distinction between the two to speak of a relationship at all.#
  Cognitive Science
• We have limited ability to see even prominent features of a new environment if those features were absent from our rearing environment.#
  Cognitive Science
• Discomfort in the absence of sensory input and the pursuit of stimulation apparently for its own sake (i.e., stimulation without extrinsic utilitarian value) has led some investigators to consider stimulus seeking an inherent drive or motivation manifest in the sense of curiosity and the experience of play.#
  Cognitive Science
• Even much of the reasoning offered as a rational basis for following the goals or valuations of others is itself imitative in its nature or origins. This is not to argue that there are no drives, desires, or needs intrinsic to human nature. It is to say that the need to eat, the need to procreate, and the need for physical self-defense are no more basic to human nature than the need for sensory stimulation, the need for affiliation, and the inclination to imitate.#
  Cognitive Science
• An essential feature of play is that it occurs in a paradoxical context in which rules for interacting with the environment are treated as objects of discourse rather than as plans controlling behavior.#
• Learning and action are in an inverse relationship throughout the lifespan. We learn the most when we are unable to act. By the time we are able to act on the world, our ability to learn has dramatically diminished.#
  Cognitive Science
• The stronger a hypothesis or belief system, the less input is needed for confirmation.#
  ScienceEpistemology
• Science fiction writers describe future cultures that are bleak in their homogeneity, filled with individuals whose thoughts and feelings are so much the same that they seem hardly alive. However, if this were the inevitable outcome of an integrated global culture, we would have to assign a similar existential fate to all individuals who passed their lives in the cultures of old that were each worlds unto themselves, unaware of or without contact with other cultures. It seems to me that such bleak predictions arise from discomfort at the prospect of losing the world of cultural diversity that has become familiar during the past 300 years. #

Clifford Geertz, ” The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind” (1962)

• A culture-less human being would probably turn out to be not an intrinsically talented though unfulfilled ape, but a wholly mindless and consequently unworkable monstrosity.#
  Cognitive Science