Our sense of a composition largely inheres in how we feel about the individual parts; narrative arcs are almost always essential in drama but (unless… - Gary F. Marcus
" "Our sense of a composition largely inheres in how we feel about the individual parts; narrative arcs are almost always essential in drama but (unless there are lyrics involved) often less essential in music. All of this is, I suspect, again symptomatic of human memory limitations. We live, to a remarkable degree, in the present; what happened thirty seconds ago is already rapidly fading from our memory (or at least rapidly becomes harder for us to retrieve).
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Additional quotes by Gary F. Marcus
"In a 1957 experiment that helped launch the modern study of language acquisition, the late Roger Brown showed that children know that if you say, "Can you see a sib?" you probably have in mind an action or a process. No other mammal seems to be equipped to use such clues for word learning.
Even more dramatically, no other species seems to be able to make much of word order. The difference between the sentence "Dog bites man" and the sentence "Man bites dog" is largely lost on our nonhuman cousins. There is a bit of evidence that Kanzi can pay attention to word order to some tiny extent, but certainly not in anything like as rich a fashion as a three-year-old human child."
What propels an embryo from one stage to the next-and makes one species different from another-is not a blueprint but rather an enormous autonomous library of the instructions contained within its genome. Each gene does double duty, specifying both a recipe for a protein and a set of regulatory conditions for when and where it should be built. Taken together suites of these IF-THEN genes give cells the power to act as parts of complicated improvisational orchestras. Like real musicians, what they play depends on both their own artistic impulses and what the other members of the orchestra are playing. As we will see in the next chapter, every bit of this process-from the Cellular Big 4 to the combination of regulatory cues-holds as much for development of the brain as it does for the body.
In place of a view of the genome as a static blueprint that operates independently of experience and only up to the moment of birth, we have come to understand the genome as a complex, dynamic set of self-regulating recipes that actively modulate every step of life. Nature is not a dictator hell-bent on erecting the same building regardless of the environment, but a flexible Cub Scout prepared with contingency plans for many occasions.
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