Bart Hopkins Jr.'s Blog, page 2

A Deeper Dive into Thought and Language

Why is deeper knowledge of language and the way we think important? Say you read this sentence: “It was a brand name everybody knew.” All of us would understand that. We’d think Coke or Ford or Verizon, say. But what if you knew that a brand was originally a stick or rod with a fiery, hot end used to mark animals? And then the name was used for the mark itself on the animal hide? You’d read that sentence differently, more deeply, because of your knowledge.

 

It makes me think about how deeply sy...

The Origin of Ideas

What is creativity? How does it come about? The Origin of Ideas is a fascinating and innovative book about the origins of creativity and its utilization of the process of conceptual integration or conceptual blending. I believe the author is certainly correct that creativity comes from the integration, or blending, of concepts in novel ways. The book contains many wonderful descriptions of instances and types of creativity.

That said, in my mind the emphasis on conceptual blending as a cognitiv...

Aha!

Aha moments are what scientists, discoverers, and explorers live for. That moment when your view of how the world works or is changes. If your discovery is true and vital, your model of the world becomes more accurate, more realistic. You have found something out!

 

Things have changed; they are not quite the same.

 

These moments sometimes involves putting two unrelated facts together. I remember doing exercises and practicing flash card drills years ago in school. We students reluctantly accep...

How Children Learn the Meanings of Words by Paul Bloom

This is an interesting and informative original work about how children acquire language. The author offered perhaps the first complete theory that language is acquired through sophisticated cognitive abilities that originated for other purposes. He is a knowledgeable researcher in the field and presents the important questions, various viewpoints, and offers his conclusions as well.

I thought the book was balanced and very well written. The important areas of language acquisition were...

The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich

The Secret of Our Success is easily the most original and best book I’ve ever read about how culture makes humans what we are, through the process of coevolution of genes and culture. It’s full of dozens and dozens of concrete examples that explain a wide variety of human traits. If I was able to bring only a shortstack of books to my stranding on a desert island, it would certainly be one of them.

The author defines culture as “the large body of practices, techniques, heuristics, tools,...

Mind Change by Susan Greenfield

This is an excellent, well-researched book on the digital revolution and how it is affecting us. As background to the changes the digital revolution has wrought, Susan Greenfield gives an overview of consciousness, its possible neurological correlates and dysfunctions, how it develops, and the ways increased digital involvement is changing the brain. She is a top neuroscientist and the overviews of consciousness and brain function and development, by themselves, are more than worth the price...

Happy New Year from Robert Frost

This immortal poem entered the public domain today, a forever gift from Mr. Frost:

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

–

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

–

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s t...

The Construction of Social Reality by John Searle

If you started out searching for truth, you may have read a lot of philosophy. I did, when younger, and eventually drifted toward science, because philosophy seemed too abstract and circular.

You can’t read a better argument for what truth is than is presented by John Searle, in The Construction of Social Reality. He delineates truth and fact in his explanation of “institutional facts” and facts in general.

Some facts, he says, are brute facts, true no matter what anybody thinks. The summit o...

From Molecule to Metaphor by Jerome Feldman

As promised, Jerome Feldman delivers a comprehensive, detailed theory that takes us from individual neuron function to the way the brain’s neural system works in language use, as it is currently known, all the way through embodied thought, grammar, language, and conceptual metaphor. Though there is obviously much more research to be done at most of these higher levels. This book reminded me how reading always depends on both writer and reader. I first read it some years back, but was much mor...

The Invention of Science by David Wootton

The Invention of Science is a very wise and erudite volume about the essential changes that were necessary for modern science, i.e. the Scientific Revolution, to occur in the 16th century. These included more efficient ways to disseminate information, such as the printing press, which also aided in building a scientific community; the turn toward both practical experiment and mathematics; the development of the very ideas of progress and discovery; and the way changes in scientific theories,...