Krimel said: I think Marshall McLuhan may have also weighed in on the topic when talked about the way text changed the way people think and see the world. ... The brain is not a muscle but it acts like one. If you use it a particular way, you get better at it and change the way it functions.
Matt: Absolutely. The whole set of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis and Eric Havelock (the classicist) were all at Toronto during the formative period for their ideas about orality and literacy. I think understanding "language" as a set of sentential attitudes, as dispositions towards thinking X when Y happens, is a following out on the metaphor of muscle for thought, a furthering of the pragmatist "beliefs are habits of action." [Krimel] If this idea, of specific practices or different ways of thinking producing different kinds of brains, works then perhaps Jaynes' ideas are not as weird as they sound a first blush. After all this would lead us to suspect similar structural differences in the brains of musicians, mathematicians, athletes and well you get the picture. Habits of action produce changes in the brain and visa versa. [Matt] Why do ditto-heads act the way they do? Because their thought-muscles are trained to. [Krimel] All I know is that whatever triggers the ditto response in some produces a gag reflex in me. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
