Feras

“But we can also ask the opposite question: Are there regions that are more active among bad readers and whose activity decreases as one learns to read? The answer is positive: in illiterates, the brain’s responses to faces are more intense. The better we read, the more this activity decreases in the left hemisphere, at the exact place in the cortex where written words find their niche—the brain’s letter box area. It’s as if the brain needs to make room for letters in the cortex, so the acquisition of reading interferes with the prior function of this region, which is the recognition of faces and objects.”
― Stanislas Dehaene, How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now

“I penetrated the outer cell membrane with a nanosyringe."
"You poked it with a stick?"
"No!" I said. "Well. Yes. But it was a scientific poke with a very scientific stick.”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

“To put Göbekli Tepe in context, its megaliths predate Stonehenge by at least six thousand years. They predate the first literate civilizations of Egypt, Sumer, India, and Crete by even more. Unearthing this kind of Stone Age sophistication so deep in our past is like finding out your great-grandparents have been secretly coding apps and trading cryptocurrency behind everyone’s back.”
― Brian C. Muraresku, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name

“Somewhere around 2136, various lines of development had collided. What had once been servile Borderline Intelligences had jumped the tracks into genuine sentience. The luminously clever engines of Transgressive intelligence had been much too clever, much too willing to oblige. In an instant, humanity had found itself in possession of tools powerful enough to remake entire worlds, but equally capable of shattering them to dust.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Pushing Ice