Watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last Monday. There weren't too many people in the theater. I thought it was because the after office crowd wasn't there yet at 6PM. The movie ended at 9. Didn't know it was going to last that long. The only thing commendable about it is the technology and makeup they used to make Brad Pitt look really pretty.
Read the original Fitzgerald story here. It started in 1860 and ended after the First World War. They really just took the premise: man ages backwards. Other than that: It's Forrest Freaking Gump. The only thing missing was Jennifer Aniston and it would have been a big hoot if that happened.
Friday, January 16
Wednesday, January 14
In my genes
During an interview, the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker blanked out on the question: Why are you the way you are?
The interviewer gives as example the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who dedicated his first book to his father who brought him to see the dinosaurs at age 5. Surely, something of the same magnitude happened to Pinker that's why he became interested in the human mind?
He coughed something out about growing up in Quebec in the 70s when there were heated debates about the state of the province. But it was all hokey. He acknowledges what all writers of autobiography and memoir have long recognized: “None of us know what made us what we are, and when we have to say something, we make up a good story.”
But he also makes a case for genetics, that we are shaped by our genes in a way we can never directly know: “they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life."
The interviewer gives as example the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who dedicated his first book to his father who brought him to see the dinosaurs at age 5. Surely, something of the same magnitude happened to Pinker that's why he became interested in the human mind?
He coughed something out about growing up in Quebec in the 70s when there were heated debates about the state of the province. But it was all hokey. He acknowledges what all writers of autobiography and memoir have long recognized: “None of us know what made us what we are, and when we have to say something, we make up a good story.”
But he also makes a case for genetics, that we are shaped by our genes in a way we can never directly know: “they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)