The Greatest Invention Quotes

“There’s an alphabet in things, and it’s no coincidence. If you pay attention, if you really look, you’ll see that all around you is an architecture of letters, emerging from the shapes of things. It seems almost obvious: our sense of vision is much more alert to lines, to contrasts, than to the flat or formless surfaces that contain them. What’s happening at the edges, the borders, the interstices—that’s what strikes our eyes.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“Which is why the birth of bureaucracy means, in the end, the birth of writing.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“along with the aroma of three ingredients that affect us in powerful ways, engaging our intellect, our logical skills, and our intuition. All three challenge us to understand one another more deeply and truly. They help us to better see the world, to recognize and reorganize the data we absorb from our environment, and to piece it all together. They are mystery, competition, experiment.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“In the 1950s, the neurophysiologist David Hubel began recording the activity of visual cells, using cats as his guinea pigs.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“human beings love to invent stories. Baboons, though no less fascinating than us, spend only 10 percent of their time interpreting, adopting, and imitating others’ actions. The rest of their time they dedicate to finding food and nourishment. Our percentages are the complete opposite. We spend an astonishing amount of time trying to understand others—putting ourselves in their shoes, empathizing, acting as a mirror for their emotions and intentions. This tendency has been a major force in the development of our social intelligence. Other factors, of course, have played a role, but we are the only species that uses imagination. Every day we create real, probable, possible, impossible, and absurd scenarios. An infinity of fictions, one layered atop the other. We create things that don’t exist in nature, such as symbols. Along with histories, laws, institutions, governments. All of this is made up. And all of it hinges on the exchange of information: storytelling, forging alliances, establishing and disrupting social equilibriums, gossip.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“Some things die hard, however, and we call these things emotions. And I’m not talking about emojis. I’m talking again about our brain and our evolution. For 200 million years now our emotional brain has been a work in progress. Our “rational” cortex, our cognitive apparatus, came later, around 1.8 million years ago. And our linguistic-symbolic development is even more recent. Emotions are as old as the earth, the”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts