The bizarre myth that Ancient Greeks couldn't see blue The bizarre myth that Ancient Greeks couldn't see blue
Cognitively speaking, sighted people can perceive all colors , regardless of language . It’s just that some languages make an association between a perception and a word.
Monica A. Winkler • This is how your language affects your thoughts
In Through the Language Glass, the linguist Guy Deutscher reports that many primitive populations, without being color-blind, have verbal designations for only two or three colors.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb • Incerto 4-Book Bundle
“You have to imagine a caveman transported into the middle of Manhattan. He sees buses, cell phones, skyscrapers, airplanes. Then zap him back to his cave. What does he say about the experience? ‘It was big, it was impressive, it was loud.’ He doesn’t have the vocabulary for ‘skyscraper,’ ‘elevator,’ ‘cell phone.’ Maybe he has an intuitive sense th
... See moreMichael Pollan • How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics
In fact, we couldn’t even see blue until a few hundred years ago.9 Ancient civilizations had no word for “blue.” In The Odyssey, Homer describes the sea as “wine dark.” The color blue was the last to appear in most languages, including Greek, Chinese, Japanese, and Hebrew. The evidence suggests that since they had no name for it, these people did n
... See moreDave Asprey • Head Strong: The Bulletproof Plan to Activate Untapped Brain Energy to Work Smarter and Think Faster-in Just Two Weeks
But there is one thing that neither you nor anyone else could predict about the outcome of this experiment, and that is: what blue will look like. Qualia are currently neither describable nor predictable – a unique property that should make them deeply problematic to anyone with a scientific world view (though, in the event, it seems to be mainly p
... See moreDavid Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the stor... See more