محمد الخواص

“العقل لا يكون عقلا إلا إذا كان ناقداً”
― جورج طرابيشي

“Whenever a noise exceeds our processing abilities—we can’t
decipher all the different sound waves hitting our hair cells—
the mind . . . stops trying to understand the individual notes
and seeks instead to understand the relationships between the
notes. The human auditory cortex pulls off this feat by using
it's short- term memory for sound (in the left posterior hemisphere) to uncover patterns at the large level of the phrase,
motif, and movement. This new approximation lets us extract order from all those notes haphazardly ͒flying through
space, and the brain is obsessed with order . . .
It is this psychological instinct—this desperate neuronal
search for a pattern, any pattern, that is the source of music . . . We continually abstract on our own inputs, inventing
patterns in order to keep pace with the onrush of noise. And
once the brain ͒finds a pattern, it immediately starts to make
predictions . . . It projects imaginary order into the future . . .
The structure of music reflects the human brain’s penchant for patterns . . . But before a pattern can be desired by
the brain, that pattern must play hard to get”
― Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction

“humans are a strange lot. We have the power to analyze and explore the world around us, yet panic as soon as the evidence threatens to violate our expectations”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents