to change the world, change the metaphor.
Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell
“If you want to change the world, change the metaphor. Change the story.”
—— Joseph Campbell
53:22
A Conversation with Bill Moyers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ8tlnrHVFw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ8tlnrHVFw
https://youtu.be/MJ8tlnrHVFw?t=3069
https://youtu.be/MJ8tlnrHVFw?t=3069
Twin Cities PBS
Published on Aug 31, 2017
... ... ...
51:09 I called him at his home in Hawaii and I
51:11 said, “Joe, I didn't ask you about God.
51:13 Would you come to New York? Let's do one
51:15 more show”, so he did, but when I was
51:17 leaving, when I was leaving Skywalker
51:21 Ranch for the last time, he walked with
51:23 me out to our car, and he said, “Are you going
51:26 stay in this?”, meaning you know, I not
51:28 been certain about journalism, not been
51:31 fixed in my trajectory, “Are you going to
51:35 stay in this work?” and I said, “Yes, I think so”
51:39 and he said, “Well, good!”, he said, “If you
51:41 want to change the world, change the
51:45 metaphor. Change the story.”
https://www.artsmedicineforhopeandhealing.com/poetry-baby-blog/the-power-of-myth-by-joseph-campbell-with-bill-moyers
____________________________________
mutatis mutandis,
[ Latin,
(1) “with the necessary modification”,
(2) Latin phrase means that (the necessary changes in details, such as names and places, will be made but everything else will remain the same.)
(3) Legal context, used when comparing two or more cases or situations, making necessary alternations while not affecting the main point at issue. ].
<-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
[pp.50-54]
The MAP AND clock changed language indirectly, by suggesting new metaphors to describe natural phenomena. Other intellectual technologies change language more directly, and more deeply, by actually altering the way we speak and listen or read and write. They might enlarge or compress our vocabulary, modify the norms of diction or word order, or encourage either simpler or more complex syntax. Because language is, for human beings, the primary vessel of conscious thought, particularly higher forms of thought, the technologies that restructure language tend to exert the strongest influence over our intellectual lives. As the classical scholar Walter J. Ong put it, "Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word." 18 The history of language is also a history of the mind.
Language itself is not a technology. It's a native to our species. Our brains and bodies have evolved to speak and to hear words. A child learns to talk without instruction, as a fledgling bird learns to fly. Because reading and writing have become so central to our identity and culture, it's easy to assume that they, too, are innate talents. But they're not. Reading and writing are unnatural acts, made possible by the purposeful development of the alphabet and many other technologies. Our minds have to be taught how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. Reading and writing require schooling and practice, the deliberate shaping of the brain.
Evidence of this shaping process can be seen in many neurological studies. Experiments have revealed that the brains of the literate differ from the brains of the illiterate in many ways--not only in how they understand language but in how they process visual signals, how they reason, and how they form memories. "Learning how to read," reports the Mexican psychologist Feggy Ostrosky-Solis, has been shown to "powerfully shape adult neuropsychological systems." 19 Brain scans have also revealed that people whose written language uses logographic symbols, like the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is considerably different from the circuitry found in people whose written language employs a phonetic alphabet. As Tufts University developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf explains in her book on the neuroscience of reading, Proust and the Squid, "Although all reading makes use of some portions of the frontal and temporal lobes for planning and for analyzing sounds and meanings in words, logographic systems appear to activate very distinctive parts of [those] areas, particularly regions involved in motoric memory skills." 20 Differences in brain activity have even been documented among readers of different alphabetic languages. Readers of English, for instance, have been found to draw more heavily on areas of the brain associated with deciphering visual shapes than do readers of Italian. The difference stems, it's believed, from the fact that English words often look very different from the way they sound, whereas in Italian words tend to be spelled exactly as they're spoken. 21
The earliest examples of reading and writing date back many thousands of years. As long ago as 8000 BC, people were using small clay tokens engraved with simple symbols to keep track of quantities of livestock and other goods. Interpreting even such rudimentary markings required the development of extensive new neural pathways in people's brains, connecting the visual cortex with nearby sense-making areas of the brain. Modern studies show that the neural activity along these pathways doubles or triples when we look at meaningful symbols as opposed to meaningless doodles. As Wolf describes, "Our ancestors could read tokens because their brains were able to connect their basic visual regions to adjacent regions dedicated to more sophisticated visual and conceptual processing." 22 Those connections, which people bequeathed to their children when they taught them to use the tokens, formed the basic wiring for reading.
The technology of writing took an important step forward around the end of the fourth millennium BC. It was then that the Summerians, living between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq, began writing with a system of wedge-shaped symbols, called cuneiform, while a few hundred miles to the west the Egyptians developed increasingly abstract hieroglyphic systems incorporated many logosyllabic characters, denoting not just things but also speech sounds, they placed far greater demands on the brain than the simple accounting tokens. Before readers could interpret the meaning of a character, they had to analyze the character to figure out how it was being used. The Summerians and the Egyptians had to develop neural circuits that, according to Wolf, literally "crisscrossed" the cortex, linking areas involved not only in seeing and sense-making but in hearing, spatial analysis, and decision making. 23 As these logosyllabic systems expanded to include many hundreds of characters, memorizing and interpreting them became so mentally taxing that their use was probably restricted to an intellectual elite blessed with a lot of time and brain power. For writing technology to progress beyond the Sumerian and Egyptian models, for it to become a tool used by the many rather than the few, it had to get a whole lot simpler.
That didn't happen until fairly recently--around 750 BC--when the Greeks invented the first complete phonetic alphabet. The Greek alphabet had many forerunners, particularly the system of letters developed by the Phoenicians a few centuries earlier, but linguists generally agree that it was the first to include characters representing vowel sounds as well as consonant sounds. The Greeks analyzed all the sounds as well as consonant sounds. The Greeks analyzed all the sounds, or phonemes, used in spoken language, and were able to represent them with just twenty-four characters, making their alphabet a comprehensive and efficient system for writing and reading. The "economy of characters," write Wolf, reduced "the time and attention needed for rapid recognition" of the symbols and hence required "fewer perceptual and memory resources." Recent brain studies reveal that considerably less of the brain is activated in reading words formed from phonetic letters than in interpreting logograms or other pictorial symbols. 24
The Greek alphabet became the model for most subsequent Western alphabets, including the Roman alphabet that we still use today. Its arrival marked the start of one of the most far-reaching revolutions in intellectual history: the shift from an oral culture, in which knowledge was exchanged mainly by speaking, to a literary culture, in which writing became the major medium for expressing thought. It was a revolution that would eventually change the lives, and the brains, of nearly everyone on earth, but the transformation was not welcomed by everyone, at least not at first.
(Carr, Nicholas G.; 'The shallows', © 2011, 2010, [612.80285-dc22], published by Norton, )
("The shallows : what the Internet is doing to our brains", Nicholas Carr., 1. Neuropsychology, 2. Internet-Physiological effect., 3. Internet-Psychological aspects., © 2011, 2010, [612.80285-dc22], pp.50-54)
<-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
[ Latin,
(1) “with the necessary modification”,
(2) Latin phrase means that (the necessary changes in details, such as names and places, will be made but everything else will remain the same.)
(3) Legal context, used when comparing two or more cases or situations, making necessary alternations while not affecting the main point at issue. ].
<-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
[pp.50-54]
The MAP AND clock changed language indirectly, by suggesting new metaphors to describe natural phenomena. Other intellectual technologies change language more directly, and more deeply, by actually altering the way we speak and listen or read and write. They might enlarge or compress our vocabulary, modify the norms of diction or word order, or encourage either simpler or more complex syntax. Because language is, for human beings, the primary vessel of conscious thought, particularly higher forms of thought, the technologies that restructure language tend to exert the strongest influence over our intellectual lives. As the classical scholar Walter J. Ong put it, "Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word." 18 The history of language is also a history of the mind.
Language itself is not a technology. It's a native to our species. Our brains and bodies have evolved to speak and to hear words. A child learns to talk without instruction, as a fledgling bird learns to fly. Because reading and writing have become so central to our identity and culture, it's easy to assume that they, too, are innate talents. But they're not. Reading and writing are unnatural acts, made possible by the purposeful development of the alphabet and many other technologies. Our minds have to be taught how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. Reading and writing require schooling and practice, the deliberate shaping of the brain.
Evidence of this shaping process can be seen in many neurological studies. Experiments have revealed that the brains of the literate differ from the brains of the illiterate in many ways--not only in how they understand language but in how they process visual signals, how they reason, and how they form memories. "Learning how to read," reports the Mexican psychologist Feggy Ostrosky-Solis, has been shown to "powerfully shape adult neuropsychological systems." 19 Brain scans have also revealed that people whose written language uses logographic symbols, like the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is considerably different from the circuitry found in people whose written language employs a phonetic alphabet. As Tufts University developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf explains in her book on the neuroscience of reading, Proust and the Squid, "Although all reading makes use of some portions of the frontal and temporal lobes for planning and for analyzing sounds and meanings in words, logographic systems appear to activate very distinctive parts of [those] areas, particularly regions involved in motoric memory skills." 20 Differences in brain activity have even been documented among readers of different alphabetic languages. Readers of English, for instance, have been found to draw more heavily on areas of the brain associated with deciphering visual shapes than do readers of Italian. The difference stems, it's believed, from the fact that English words often look very different from the way they sound, whereas in Italian words tend to be spelled exactly as they're spoken. 21
The earliest examples of reading and writing date back many thousands of years. As long ago as 8000 BC, people were using small clay tokens engraved with simple symbols to keep track of quantities of livestock and other goods. Interpreting even such rudimentary markings required the development of extensive new neural pathways in people's brains, connecting the visual cortex with nearby sense-making areas of the brain. Modern studies show that the neural activity along these pathways doubles or triples when we look at meaningful symbols as opposed to meaningless doodles. As Wolf describes, "Our ancestors could read tokens because their brains were able to connect their basic visual regions to adjacent regions dedicated to more sophisticated visual and conceptual processing." 22 Those connections, which people bequeathed to their children when they taught them to use the tokens, formed the basic wiring for reading.
The technology of writing took an important step forward around the end of the fourth millennium BC. It was then that the Summerians, living between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq, began writing with a system of wedge-shaped symbols, called cuneiform, while a few hundred miles to the west the Egyptians developed increasingly abstract hieroglyphic systems incorporated many logosyllabic characters, denoting not just things but also speech sounds, they placed far greater demands on the brain than the simple accounting tokens. Before readers could interpret the meaning of a character, they had to analyze the character to figure out how it was being used. The Summerians and the Egyptians had to develop neural circuits that, according to Wolf, literally "crisscrossed" the cortex, linking areas involved not only in seeing and sense-making but in hearing, spatial analysis, and decision making. 23 As these logosyllabic systems expanded to include many hundreds of characters, memorizing and interpreting them became so mentally taxing that their use was probably restricted to an intellectual elite blessed with a lot of time and brain power. For writing technology to progress beyond the Sumerian and Egyptian models, for it to become a tool used by the many rather than the few, it had to get a whole lot simpler.
That didn't happen until fairly recently--around 750 BC--when the Greeks invented the first complete phonetic alphabet. The Greek alphabet had many forerunners, particularly the system of letters developed by the Phoenicians a few centuries earlier, but linguists generally agree that it was the first to include characters representing vowel sounds as well as consonant sounds. The Greeks analyzed all the sounds as well as consonant sounds. The Greeks analyzed all the sounds, or phonemes, used in spoken language, and were able to represent them with just twenty-four characters, making their alphabet a comprehensive and efficient system for writing and reading. The "economy of characters," write Wolf, reduced "the time and attention needed for rapid recognition" of the symbols and hence required "fewer perceptual and memory resources." Recent brain studies reveal that considerably less of the brain is activated in reading words formed from phonetic letters than in interpreting logograms or other pictorial symbols. 24
The Greek alphabet became the model for most subsequent Western alphabets, including the Roman alphabet that we still use today. Its arrival marked the start of one of the most far-reaching revolutions in intellectual history: the shift from an oral culture, in which knowledge was exchanged mainly by speaking, to a literary culture, in which writing became the major medium for expressing thought. It was a revolution that would eventually change the lives, and the brains, of nearly everyone on earth, but the transformation was not welcomed by everyone, at least not at first.
(Carr, Nicholas G.; 'The shallows', © 2011, 2010, [612.80285-dc22], published by Norton, )
("The shallows : what the Internet is doing to our brains", Nicholas Carr., 1. Neuropsychology, 2. Internet-Physiological effect., 3. Internet-Psychological aspects., © 2011, 2010, [612.80285-dc22], pp.50-54)
<-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
