* It is not possible to settle whether this change reflects the filter of written language, censorship, narrative trends and styles, effects of translations, or rewritings and new editions of the original books. There is also the issue of whether these books reflected popular thought or just that of the elites. And also whether these books are historical (and hence reflect real characters) or are simply fiction. There are many possible critiques which in my view are completely founded and inevitable in this form of research, in which thoughts are inferred from sparse and scattered traces left by our ancestors. The method we developed can prove what we call the soft Jaynes hypothesis: that as time goes on ancient books reflect more and more introspective content. It cannot go beyond this to provide direct evidence in favour of Jaynes’s strong hypothesis, that this transition in text is a reflection of the way our ancestors thought. Resolving this dilemma requires ideas and tools that we have yet even to imagine.
* ‘Never let anyone know what you’re thinking’ (Michael Corleone).
* In Latin, cor is literally the heart and is found in some Romance-language words as ‘passing through the heart’, i.e. remembering, and in English shows up in cordial and discourage. In English we can know things by heart, and we find a similar metaphor in the etymology of remember, ‘to pass through a body part’.
* You only have to watch the film Troy to notice an extraordinary resemblance between Achilles and Brad Pitt.
* For example, Prince.
** In Pra ninguém, Caetano Veloso lists the pieces of music that move him the most. And then he says: ‘But better than all of them is silence. And better than silence, only João.’
* Such as Manu Ginóbili, with his height for basketball; or like X, with that name, for the violin.
* Najdorf’s grandson told me that Don Miguel was only able to find one of his cousins. It was by chance. On the subway in New York they recognized the similarities between them, started a conversation and discovered they were related.
* The visual areas are named–to make it simple–with the letter V and a number that is a measurement of their place in the computing hierarchy, which means that V4 is one of the first stages of the more than sixty areas of visual processing.
* ‘They got the guns, we’ve got the numbers,’ sings Jim Morrison in ‘Five to One’.
** The ‘as if’ here is literal. The visual cortex doesn’t speak in English with the parietal cortex. But these metaphors help us to understand how certain mechanisms work, as long as they are not too exaggerated or distracting.
* When the celebrated world chess champion José Raúl Capablanca was asked how many plays he calculated, he replied: ‘Just one, the best one.’
* Luis Pescetti suggests that how natural a food is can be determined by counting the number of syllables in its name. Apple, peach, zucchini–all natural foods have fewer than five syllables.
* Try to read the following sentence backwards: ‘A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.’ It’s a quite awkward way of saying the same thing, isn’t it?
** CAPTCHA is an acronym (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) for an automated process that separates humans from machines. They are those drawn and camouflaged words that we have to type in to do many transactions on the Internet. Since computers cannot read these images, when we write them we are opening a lock only humans have the key to.
* In English, syllables usually have a complex structure. In Spanish and Italian, on the other hand, the simple consonant-vowel structure is frequent, and it is even more common in Japanese. That is why the Japanese have such difficulty pronouncing, when they appear in other languages, syllables ending in a consonant, saying ‘aiscrimu’ and ‘beisoboru’ for ice cream and baseball.
* And champagne.
* This was clearly and concisely expressed by Jorge Luis Borges in Funes the Memorious. ‘Not only did he struggle to understand that the generic symbol dog covered so many disparate individuals of diverse sizes and diverse shapes; it bothered him that the dog from three fourteen (seen in profile) had the same name as the dog from three fifteen (seen head on). His own face in a mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time […] I nevertheless suspect that he was not very capable of thought. Thinking is forgetting differences, it is generalizing, abstracting.’
* John Lennon knew something about this: ‘Because the world is round it turns me on.’
* Although most likely that conversation never happened. It is a myth invented in modernity that all those in medieval times believed that the earth was flat. Aristotle had already proven that the earth is spherical, and everyone accepted it (Eratosthenes even measured its size). It was something that any medieval person who was averagely educated knew. It is an incredibly widespread modern invention that Columbus was the bold one who wanted to try to prove that. This story is told in Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians by J. Russell (New York, Praeger, 1997).
* This was the word problem. You can rewrite it and you’ll see how much easier it is to solve. ‘The floors of a building are numbered from 0 to 25. The building’s elevator has only two buttons, one yellow and one green. When the yellow button is pressed it goes up 9 floors, and when the green button is pressed, it goes down 7 floors. If the yellow button is pushed when there are not enough floors above, the elevator will not move, and the same thing happens when the green button is pushed and there aren’t enough floors below. Write a sequence of buttons that will allow a person to go up from floor 0 to 11 in the elevator.’ And this is my translation, written almost in code, which allowed me to solve it much more easily without uselessly saturating my memory buffer:Elevator: up 9 or down 7.Building: 25 floors.You cannot go past the ground level or the roof.How can you get from 0 to 11?
* It’s fabulous that these two extraordinary Hungarians, who revealed the mysteries of human communication, are linked, in that the last name of one is the first name of the other. Now we need a record by the singers Luis Miguel and Miguel Mateos, and the now impossible trio of Boy George, George Michael and Michael Jackson.
* Ironically, ‘teaching’ and ‘cheating’ are anagrams.
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The Secret Life of the Mind Page 28
