1663 본문읽기 20
카테고리 없음2023. 5. 22. 14:57
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1663-36
The ancient Greeks sought to improve memory through brain training methods such as memory palaces and the method of loci. At the same time, they and the Egyptians became experts at externalizing information, inventing the modern library, a grand storehouse for externalized knowledge. We don't know why these simultaneous explosions of intellectual activity occurred when they did (perhaps daily human experience had hit a certain level of complexity). But the human need to organize our lives, our environment, even our thoughts, remains strong. This need isn't simply learned; it is a biological imperative— animals organize their environments instinctively. Most mammals are biologically programmed to put their digestive waste away from where they eat and sleep. Dogs have been known to collect their toys and put them in baskets; ants carry off dead members of the colony to burial grounds; certain birds and rodents create barriers around their nests in order to more easily detect invaders.
1663-37
Imitation seems to be a key to the transmission of valuable practices among nonhumans. The most famous example is that of the macaque monkeys on the island of Koshima in Japan. In the early 1950s, Imo, a one-year-old female macaque, somehow hit upon the idea of washing her sweet potatoes in a stream before eating them. Soon it was hard to find a Koshima macaque who wasn't careful to wash off her sweet potato before eating it. A few years later, Imo introduced another innovation. Researchers on the island occasionally gave the monkeys wheat (in addition to sweet potatoes). But the wheat was given to them on the beach, where it quickly became mixed with sand. Imo, though, realized that if you threw a handful of wheat and sand into the ocean, the sand would sink and the wheat would float. Again, within a few years most of her fellow macaques were throwing wheat and sand into the sea and obtaining the benefits.
1663-38
In humans, body clocks are responsible for daily changes in blood pressure, body temperature, hormones, hunger, and thirst, as well as our sleep-wake cycles. These biological rhythms, which we experience as internal time, are probably older than sleep, developed over the course of millions of years of evolution. They facilitate physiological and behavioral changes on a roughly twenty-four-hour cycle no matter what is happening outside, whether a cold front moves in or clouds block the light of the sun. That is why people experience jet lag when traveling across time zones. Their internal clocks continue to run in accordance with the place they left behind, not the one to which they have come, and it can take some time to realign the two. The most remarkable thing is that our internal body clocks can be readjusted by environmental cues. We may get jet lag for a few days when we ask our body clocks to adapt to a vastly different schedule of day and night cycles on the other side of the Earth, but they can do it.
1663-39
The customer service representatives in an electronics firm under major restructuring were told they had to begin selling service contracts for their equipment in addition to installing and repairing them. This generated a great deal of resistance. To the service representatives, learning to sell was a very different game from what they had been playing. But it turned out they already knew a lot more about sales than they thought. For example, the first step in servicing or installing equipment is talking with the clients to understand how they used the equipment. The same is true in selling. The salesperson first has to learn about the customer's needs. The service representatives also had a great deal of product knowledge and hands-on experience, which is obviously important in sales.
1663-40
Lawyers and scientists use argument to mean a summary of evidence and principles leading to a conclusion; however, a scientific argument is different from a legal argument. A prosecuting attorney constructs an argument to persuade the judge or a jury that the accused is guilty; a defense attorney in the same trial constructs an argument to persuade the same judge or jury toward the opposite conclusion. Neither prosecutor nor defender is obliged to consider anything that weakens their respective cases. On the contrary, scientists construct arguments because they want to test their own ideas and give an accurate explanation of some aspect of nature. Scientists can include any evidence or hypothesis that supports their claim, but they must observe one fundamental rule of professional science. They must include all of the known evidence and all of the hypotheses previously proposed. Unlike lawyers, scientists must explicitly account for the possibility that they might be wrong.
The ancient Greeks sought to improve memory through brain training methods such as memory palaces and the method of loci. At the same time, they and the Egyptians became experts at externalizing information, inventing the modern library, a grand storehouse for externalized knowledge. We don't know why these simultaneous explosions of intellectual activity occurred when they did (perhaps daily human experience had hit a certain level of complexity). But the human need to organize our lives, our environment, even our thoughts, remains strong. This need isn't simply learned; it is a biological imperative— animals organize their environments instinctively. Most mammals are biologically programmed to put their digestive waste away from where they eat and sleep. Dogs have been known to collect their toys and put them in baskets; ants carry off dead members of the colony to burial grounds; certain birds and rodents create barriers around their nests in order to more easily detect invaders.
1663-37
Imitation seems to be a key to the transmission of valuable practices among nonhumans. The most famous example is that of the macaque monkeys on the island of Koshima in Japan. In the early 1950s, Imo, a one-year-old female macaque, somehow hit upon the idea of washing her sweet potatoes in a stream before eating them. Soon it was hard to find a Koshima macaque who wasn't careful to wash off her sweet potato before eating it. A few years later, Imo introduced another innovation. Researchers on the island occasionally gave the monkeys wheat (in addition to sweet potatoes). But the wheat was given to them on the beach, where it quickly became mixed with sand. Imo, though, realized that if you threw a handful of wheat and sand into the ocean, the sand would sink and the wheat would float. Again, within a few years most of her fellow macaques were throwing wheat and sand into the sea and obtaining the benefits.
1663-38
In humans, body clocks are responsible for daily changes in blood pressure, body temperature, hormones, hunger, and thirst, as well as our sleep-wake cycles. These biological rhythms, which we experience as internal time, are probably older than sleep, developed over the course of millions of years of evolution. They facilitate physiological and behavioral changes on a roughly twenty-four-hour cycle no matter what is happening outside, whether a cold front moves in or clouds block the light of the sun. That is why people experience jet lag when traveling across time zones. Their internal clocks continue to run in accordance with the place they left behind, not the one to which they have come, and it can take some time to realign the two. The most remarkable thing is that our internal body clocks can be readjusted by environmental cues. We may get jet lag for a few days when we ask our body clocks to adapt to a vastly different schedule of day and night cycles on the other side of the Earth, but they can do it.
1663-39
The customer service representatives in an electronics firm under major restructuring were told they had to begin selling service contracts for their equipment in addition to installing and repairing them. This generated a great deal of resistance. To the service representatives, learning to sell was a very different game from what they had been playing. But it turned out they already knew a lot more about sales than they thought. For example, the first step in servicing or installing equipment is talking with the clients to understand how they used the equipment. The same is true in selling. The salesperson first has to learn about the customer's needs. The service representatives also had a great deal of product knowledge and hands-on experience, which is obviously important in sales.
1663-40
Lawyers and scientists use argument to mean a summary of evidence and principles leading to a conclusion; however, a scientific argument is different from a legal argument. A prosecuting attorney constructs an argument to persuade the judge or a jury that the accused is guilty; a defense attorney in the same trial constructs an argument to persuade the same judge or jury toward the opposite conclusion. Neither prosecutor nor defender is obliged to consider anything that weakens their respective cases. On the contrary, scientists construct arguments because they want to test their own ideas and give an accurate explanation of some aspect of nature. Scientists can include any evidence or hypothesis that supports their claim, but they must observe one fundamental rule of professional science. They must include all of the known evidence and all of the hypotheses previously proposed. Unlike lawyers, scientists must explicitly account for the possibility that they might be wrong.
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