Leonard Shlain Quotes

We human beings were never born to read; we invented reading and then had to teach it to every new generation. Each new reader comes to reading with a 'fresh' brain - one that is programmed to speak, see, and think, but not to read.

It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For this reason, the evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today.

Killing animals and eating meat have been significant components of human evolution that had a synergistic relationship with other key attributes that have made us human, with larger brains, smaller guts, bipedalism, and language.

When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you are born with, and eventually lose...Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult...is only a slow sewing it shut.

Today, there are over 7,000 languages spoken throughout the world. They may sound different, but in every case, they're drawing on the same regions of the brain. If you had told me that stone-tool-making had something to do with our ability to speak, I would have said you've got rocks in your head, but the latest studies indicate that once Homo erectus got creative with stone, our brains were on the way to inventing the most powerful tool of all: language.

I have not suggested that the emergence of language is instantaneous. Rather, that the rewiring of the brain enabling an infinite array of structured expressions was in effect instantaneous. I have never heard of an alternative to this suggestion.

We must plow through the whole of language.

For one thing, studying language is by itself a part of a study of human intelligence that is, perhaps, the central aspect of human nature. And second, I think, it is a good model for studying other human properties, which ought to be studied by psychologists in the same way.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

...language is not the frosting, it's the cake.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? If a painting, by the normal definition of the term, is paint on canvas, why can't it be painted words on canvas?

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

There's one thing that shows up on all of the lists of what makes us human: language. Our ability to share our thoughts and complex information with others far surpasses all the barks, squeaks and growls of our animal friends.

I do not pretend that language is science. It isan instrument for the attainment of science.

By such innovations are languages enriched, when the words are adopted by the multitude, and naturalized by custom.

I love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.

It's as if we're higher apes who had a language faculty inserted.

To suppose that man without language taught himself to speak, seems to me as absurd as it would be to suppose that without legs he could teach himself to walk. Language, therefore, must have been the immediate gift of God.

Every experience in life changes the brain's anatomy.

Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.

Language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has become written.

If the rewiring of the brain that yielded recursive generation of hierarchically structured expressions took place in an individual, not a group (and there seems to be no coherent alternative), then interaction must have been a later phenomenon.

But all this language gotten, and augmented by Adam and his posterity, was again lost at the tower of Babel , when by the hand of God, every man was stricken for his rebellion, with an oblivion of his former language.

I think that human beings have gotten as far as we've gotten because of our adaptability, our ability to adapt, and our ability to dovetail our technologies - our brains to our tools. With the Industrial Revolution, we transcended the limits of our muscles. With the digital revolution, we transcend the limits of our minds.