Ted Chiang Quotes

The human brain is a product of natural selection. In the face of scarcity, our hominid great-great-uncles were unable to compete against our sapient great-great-grandparents' abilities to build more elaborate mental models and orchestrate their bodies' movements in more sophisticated ways.

Intelligence is something we are born with. Thinking is a skill that must be learned.

I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.

I tested in the top percentile for IQ, but I couldn't tie my shoes or really ride a bike without training wheels until I was almost 7.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

Humans are an infant species, a mere 150,000 years old. But, armed with a massive brain, we've not only survived, we've used our wits to adapt to and flourish in habitats as varied as deserts, Arctic tundra, tropical rainforests, wetlands and high mountain ranges.

You have to have the brain to conceptualize technique and apply it to your body.

What makes humans unique is that evolution gave us the most incredible and sophisticated vision system, motor system, and language system, and they all work together.

We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.

Intelligence is a separate gift, for the benefit of students, so that they may think of themselves as intellectual and not very intelligent, or intelligent and not very intellectual. One hopes, of course, that they try to bring the two virtues, the two elements, into their lives at the same time.

Adrian Dantley is a guy that I looked at . . . on how to maneuver my body around.

Thinking is the ultimate human resource. Yet we can never be satisfied with our most important skill. No matter how good we become, we should always want to be better

Jerry Ford is so dumb he can't walk and chew gum at the same time.... He's a nice fellow, but he spent too much time playing football without a helmet.

Consider a cow. A cow doesn't have the problem-solving skill of a chimpanzee, which has discovered how to get termites out of the ground by putting a stick into a hole. Evolution has developed the brain's ability to solve puzzles, and at the same time has produced in our brain a pleasure of solving problems.

It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?

the brain works better if the hand works too.

Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.

When mental development is under discussion, there are many who say, 'How does movement come into it? We are talking about the mind.' And when we think of intellectual activity, we always imagine people sitting still, motionless. But mental development must be connected with movement and be dependent on it. It is vital that educational theory and practice should be informed by that idea.

Man's great power of thinking, remembering, and communicating are responsible for the evolution of civilization.

Thinking nurseth thinking.

Look, you do everything in stages, right? I don't think everything happens at once. There are so many layers we are constantly chipping away at, down and down and down, closer and closer to what would be the body. I think what happened with cancer, was that I woke up out of nine hours of surgery and I was body. I was just body.

To develop thinking as a skill, it should be deliberate, focused, confident, and enjoyable.

It is impossible to live without brains, either one's own or borrowed.

What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is in a way a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons: territoriality and aggression and dominance hierarchies. We are each of us largely responsible for what gets put in to our brains. For what as adults we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain we can change ourselves. Think of the possibilities.

Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.