Anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, tells of a two-year-old American boy who grew up only able to speak Chinese. English made no sense to him. His understanding, his beliefs, and his philosophy were all Chinese, not American. He could easily interpret those strange writings that made no sense to us. How could this be?
This sets the stage for a journey through your own mind. Fully illustrated throughout with challenging 3-D illusions and ideas of beauty, this book takes us through a new perspective on how words color our very perception of reality, from the point where consciousness and cognition of our mind kick in, to the mind of the 9/11 terrorists, to the reasons why we have 10,000 versions of religions that many believe is the only true religion.
Learning does not just give the brain information to use in processing, as a computer; the new evidence shows that it CHANGES THE BRAIN itself so completely that it creates a new reality in the brain. From this reality, our conscious mind "sees" what the brain has been “hard-wired” to perceive by our earliest experiences. This is the new psychology that goes beyond the tame view you read in a textbook.
The first ideas embedded in our brain by others, like the language we speak, become the criteria by which we judge all things. All of this is learned through a process so subtle and so unconscious that it is taken for granted. We see this daily in our politics, our religions, our sports, and our interpersonal relationships.
According to the Ethnologue, there are 7,159 known languages; yet, we can only understand the words of one or a few of those languages. We cannot comprehend other words, ideas, or beliefs. Even in our personal relationships, politics, and religions, the beliefs of others sound like a foreign language. Our failure to teach our children how deeply this impacts their minds, emotions, and personal beliefs has contributed to the difficulty of understanding others and our politics of hate, endless wars, and witch hunts, with everyone convinced that their beliefs are the only sensible ones.
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