Highlights from Unflattening by Nick Sousanis Last read on September 21, 2021
Highlights from this book
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Italo Calvino wrote, "Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I Hink I should fly like Perseu into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification."
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The distance separating our eyes means there is a different between the view each produces -- thus there is no single, "correct view". Our stereoscopic vision is the creation and integration of two views. Seeing, much like walking on two feet, is a constant negotiation between two distinct sources.
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Nothing changed, except the point of view -- which changed everything.
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Our literal ways of seeing metaphorically serve to encompass other ways of making meaning and experiencing the world. A dog reads everything it encounters as a time capsule unfolding with rich layers of sensory information from which to discern who's been here, what touched this, how long ago. So armed, dogs access dimensions of experience we can't fathom -- as with flatlanders' "Upwards not Northwards".
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The medium we think in defines what we can see. As S. I. Hayakwa described the situation: 'We are the prisoners of ancient orientations imbedded in the languages we have inherited'.
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I am thinking, therefore I exist. For Descartes, thinking was everything and thinking meant words -- inner speech. Through this dissection, mind was divorced from the senses... Leaving us disembodied... Afloat in a sea of words.
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Every language, Hayakawa suggests, "Leaves work undone for other languages to do."
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A picture is worth a thousand words? Perhaps. But because of their distinct structures, there is no direct correspondence between them. A description of an image never actually represents the image. Rather, as Michael Bexandall observes, it is a representation of thinking *about* having seen a picture -- it's already formulated in its own tersm. While image *is*, text is always *about*.
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Lakoff and Johnson and Nunez say that our fundamental concepts do not spring from the realm of pure, disembodied reason, but are grounded in our seeing and being in the world. That is, through our everyday perceptual and bodily activatives, we form dynamic image-like structures that enable us to organize and make sense of our experience. Sad is down. Intimacy is closeness. Isolation is apart. Importance is big. Difficulty is a burden. We grab hold of an idea and enclose it within a firm grip.
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Reaching across the gap to experience another's way of knowing takes a leap of imagination.
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From the novel to the commonplace, it's how we formulate concepts, which Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner explains bringing input from distinct sources together in a third space.