Today's learning-a-new-job inspirational thought
Part of my latest New Yorker catch-up attempt, in the June 28 issue — neurologist Oliver Sacks examines the case of a writer who suffered a stroke and lost his ability to recognize all written words. As the writer struggles to practice his craft again, Sacks covers how reading works.
We are all faced with a world of sights and sounds and other stimuli, and our survival depends on making a rapid and accurate appraisal of these. Making sense of the world around us must be based on some sort of system, some swift and sure way of parsing the environment. Although seeing objects, defining them visually, seems to be instantaneous and innate, it represents a great perceptual achievement, one that requires a whole hierarchy of functions. We do not see objects as such; we see shapes, surfaces, contours, and boundaries, presenting themselves in different illumination or contexts, changing perspective from their movement or ours. From this complex, shifting visual chaos, we have to extract invariants that allow us to infer our hypothesize objecthood. It would be uneconomical to suppose that there are individual representations, on engrams, for each of the billions of objects around us. The power of combination must be called on; one needs a finite set or vocabulary of shapes that can be combined in an infinite number of ways, much as the twenty-six letters of the alphabet can be assembled (within certain rules and constraints) into as many words or sentences as a language ever needs.
