I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Interesting. I learned English before I learned German (English is not my first language). I know much more English than German. After four years of learning German, I went there to learn some more. I was surrounded of German learners, but some were beginners, and with those I had to speak in English. But after a few days there, speaking a lot of German, when I tried to speak in English, German would come out instead! There must be some weird neurological mechanism there. Something like: "well, I'm speaking more German than English now; let's move German to the cache memory and English there, to the RAM".
ReplyDeleteI found a similar thing when I started teaching myself German. French kept invading(irony of ironies). And those of course are not both Romance.
ReplyDelete