Intellectual Abilities Quotes

It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.

Every time we make jokes about how jologs someone's school is, we are not insulting the poor student's intellectual abilities but their parents' financial capacity.

It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.

It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.

At least I was true. My intellectual abilities gave me a release, and an excuse. I shunned company because I preferred books; and the dreams I confided to my father were of becoming a scholar in good earnest, and going to University. It was unheard-of several shocked governesses were only too quick to tell me, when I spoke a little too boldly -- but my father nodded and smiled and said, 'We'll see.' Since I believed my father could do anything -- except of course make me pretty -- I worked and studied with passionate dedication, lived in hope, and avoided society and mirrors.

It is one of the great ironies of corporate control that the corporate state needs the abilities of intellectuals to maintain power, yet outside of this role it refuses to permit intellectuals to think or function independently.

part of the art of teaching is the ability to rearrange the world for students - to force them to see things in a new way. i've known too many stupid intellectuals to believe that education and wisdom come as a package deal along with facts, it's your perspective that counts - your ability to see differently, not just to see a lot.

I have problems with a religion which says that faith in itself is enough for a ticket to heaven. In other words, that the ideal is your ability to manipulate your own common sense to accept something your intellect rejects. It's the same model of intellectual submission that dictatorships have used throughout time, the concept of a higher reasoning without any obligation to discharge the burden of proof.

The generality of mankind is lazy. What distinguishes men of genuine achievement from the rest of us is not so much their intellectual powers and aptitudes as their curiosity, their energy, their fullest use of their potentialities. Nobody really knows how smart or talented he is until he finds the incentives to use himself to the fullest. God has given us more than we know what to do with.

But the secret of intellectual excellence is the spirit of criticism ; it is intellectual independence. And this leads to difficulties which must prove insurmountable for any kind of authoritarianism. The authoritarian will in general select those who obey, who believe, who respond to his influence. But in doing so, he is bound to select mediocrities. For he excludes those who revolt, who doubt, who dare to resist his influence. Never can an authority admit that the intellectually courageous, i.e. those who dare to defy his authority, may be the most valuable type. Of course, the authorities will always remain convinced of their ability to detect initiative. But what they mean by this is only a quick grasp of their intentions, and they will remain for ever incapable of seeing the difference.

Narcissistic cathexis of the child by the mother does not exclude emotional devotion. On the contrary, she loves the child as her self-object, excessively, though not in the manner that he needs, and always on the condition that he presents his "false self." This is no obstacle to the development of intellectual abilities, but it is one to the unfolding of an authentic emotional life.

job, requiring intellectual ability and acuity

It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These are the two things that the psychedelics attack. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.

To know is not too demanding: it merely requires memory and time. But to understand is quite a different matter: it requires intellectual ability and training, a self conscious awareness of what one is doing, experience in techniques of analysis and synthesis, and above all, perspective.

As a woman, my body is scrutinized, policed, and treated as a public commodity. As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trials, and – the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on – my ability to be loved. So the subtext, when a thin person asks a fat person, ‘Where do you get your confidence?’ is, ‘You must be some sort of alien because if I looked like you, I would definitely throw myself into the sea.

Every time we make jokes about how jologs someone's school is, we are not insulting the poor student's intellectual abilities but their parents' financial capacity

Here is yet another important consideration for helping us to understand the individual in a group: Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised group, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian— that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings. He then dwells especially upon the lowering in intellectual ability which an individual experiences when he becomes merged in a group.

What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?" demanded Miss Haydock. "Well, Eve -- it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva.

But the Spirit was not limited to doing surprising and extraordinary things. He was present in the Old Testament period in giving civil rule and government ... moral virtues ... physical strength ... and intellectual abilities.

I did not know what I was going to do with my life; before anything else I wanted to find an answer, my answer, to the timeless questions, and then after that I would decide what I would become. If I did not begin by discovering what was the grand purpose of life on earth, I said to myself, how would I be able to discover the purpose of my tiny ephemeral life? And if I did not give my life a purpose, how would I be able to engage in action? I was not interested in finding what life's purpose was objectively - this, I divined, was impossible and futile - but simply what purpose I, of my own free will, could give it in accord with my spiritual and intellectual needs. Whether or not this purpose was the true one did not, at that time, have any great significance for me. The important thing was that I should find (should create) a purpose congruent with my own self, and thus, by following it, reel out my particular desires and abilities to the furthest possible limit. For then at last I would be collaborating harmoniously with the totality of the universe.

Instead of an intellectual search, there was suddenly a very deep gut feeling that something was different. It occurred when looking at Earth and seeing this blue-and-white planet floating there, and knowing it was orbiting the Sun, seeing that Sun, seeing it set in the background of the very deep black and velvety cosmos, seeing - rather, knowing for sure - that there was a purposefullness of flow, of energy, of time, of space in the cosmos - that it was beyond man's rational ability to understand, that suddenly there was a nonrational way of understanding that had been beyond my previous experience. There seems to be more to the universe than random, chaotic, purposeless movement of a collection of molecular particles. On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious.

Think outside the box? Indeed. But to add balance to that, one should not in the process forget what the inside of the box looks like as well. Those who are best at thinking outside the box do it not to puff themselves up, but to see how small they really are. As a contented fish in its fish tank appears to have a small, boring existence to us, imagine a larger, more perceptive kingdom (even by scientific taxonomy) to whom our contented existences may appear to be small and boring. This is where true creativity and massive perceptive abilities spawn a sense of intellectual humility; the kind which God adores.

Have they been educated to the level of their intellectual ability or ambition? Is their use of free time engaging, meaningful, and productive? Have they formulated solid and well-articulated plans for the future? Are they (and those they are close to) free of any serious physical health or economic problems? Do they have friends and a social life? A stable and satisfying intimate partnership? Close and functional familial relationships? A career—or, at least, a job—that is financially sufficient, stable and, if possible, a source of satisfaction and opportunity? If the answer to any three or more of these questions is no, I consider that my new client is insufficiently embedded in the interpersonal world and is in danger of spiraling downward psychologically because of that.

Conventional measures of mental ability, such as intelligence tests and scholarship, show some of the very highest records belong to INFP and INFJ types, who relegate thinking to last place or next to last. The preference for thinking appears to have far less intellectual effect than the preference for intuition, even in some technical fields, such as scientific research, where its influence was expected to be most important.

In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions. Those that fit with the reality of our nature and the world produce greater power and scope for our abilities and a deeper joy and fulfillment. Experimentation, risk, and making mistakes bring growth only if, over time, they show us our limits as well as our abilities. If we only grow intellectually, vocationally, and physically through judicious constraints–why would it not also be true for spiritual and moral growth? Instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn’t we be seeking to discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it?

Without deception, sexual attraction isn’t possible. Men deceive women in many ways, and women deceive men on a whole different, god-like level. It’s not just makeup. It’s something far much greater. Many women try to play dumb, lest the man get scared of their intellectual abilities. Many women fake flexibility when it comes to opinions, as they know many men aren’t accepting of a highly opinionated woman. It’s a multitude of things with women. Whereas with men, things are quite simple. They just have to portray that they are the most sorted out guys, will be good providers, and know what they are doing in their lives. Putting it in a nutshell, both men and women deceive each other. But after a few months of marriage, the veil of deception is lifted. The woman who once seemed timid suddenly begins to voice her concerns. The woman who once seemed flexible suddenly begins to assert her unpopular opinions and impose her will. Men disappoint too. The woman realizes her guy isn’t as sorted out as he pretended to be. All in all, only when people start living together do they come to know of their partners for real. No wonder why so many love marriages end up in divorce within a year.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of these subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

The trick would be to find which few of them had the potential for raw power, the nearly superhuman stamina, the indomitable willpower, and the intellectual capacity necessary to master the details of technique. And which of them, coupled improbably with all those other qualities, had the most important one: the ability to disregard his own ambitions, to throw his ego over the gunwales, to leave it swirling in the wake of his shell, and to pull, not just for himself, not just for glory, but for the other boys in the boat.

..begin by talking about the kind of existentialist chaos that exists in our own lives and our inability to overcome the sense of alienation and frustration we experience when we try to create bonds of intimacy and solidarity with one another. Now part of this frustration is to be understood again in relation to structures and institutions. In the way in which our culture of consumption has promoted an addiction to stimulation - one that puts a premium on packaged and commodified stimulation. The market does this to convince us that our consumption keeps oiling the economy for it to reproduce itself. But the effect of this addiction to stimulation is an undermining, a waning of our ability for qualitatively rich relationships.

He wore clothes to cover his nakedness, he drove a car, and he ate with a knife and a fork and a linen napkin. He was gainfully employed in a job that required intellectual ability and acuity. He controlled his sexual urges through various civilized means and would never take a woman against her will. Nevertheless, as he stared at Miss Mitchell and Paul, he realized that he was an animal. Something primitive. Something feral. And something made him want to go over there and rip Paul’s hands from his body and carry Miss Mitchell off. To kiss her senseless, move his lips to her neck, and claim her.

Design is one of the few disciplines that is a science as well as an art. Effective, meaningful design requires intellectual, rational rigor along with the ability to elicit emotions and beliefs. Thus, designers must balance both the logic and lyricism of humanity every time they design something, a task that requires a singularly mysterious skill.

Anger and aggressive behavior create a combative environment and temporarily reduces one’s ability to utilize their intellectual capacity.

Saint Bartleby's School for Young Gentlemen Annual Report Student: Artemis Fowl II Year: First Fees: Paid Tutor: Dr Po Language Arts As far as I can tell, Artemis has made absolutely no progress since the beginning of the year. This is because his abilities are beyond the scope of my experience. He memorizes and understands Shakespeare after a single reading. He finds mistakes in every exercise I administer, and has taken to chuckling gently when I attempt to explain some of the more complex texts. Next year I intend to grant his request and give him a library pass during my class. Mathematics Artemis is an infuriating boy. One day he answers all my questions correctly, and the next every answer is wrong. He calls this an example of the chaos theory, and says that he is only trying to prepare me for the real world. He says the notion of infinity is ridiculous. Frankly, I am not trained to deal with a boy like Artemis. Most of my pupils have trouble counting without the aid of their fingers. I am sorry to say, there is nothing I can teach Artemis about mathematics, but someone should teach him some manners. Social Studies Artemis distrusts all history texts, because he says history was written by the victors. He prefers living history, where survivors of certain events can actually be interviewed. Obviously this makes studying the Middle Ages somewhat difficult. Artemis has asked for permission to build a time machine next year during double periods so that the entire class may view Medieval Ireland for ourselves. I have granted his wish and would not be at all surprised if he succeeded in his goal. Science Artemis does not see himself as a student, rather as a foil for the theories of science. He insists that the periodic table is a few elements short and that the theory of relativity is all very well on paper but would not hold up in the real world, because space will disintegrate before lime. I made the mistake of arguing once, and young Artemis reduced me to near tears in seconds. Artemis has asked for permission to conduct failure analysis tests on the school next term. I must grant his request, as I fear there is nothing he can learn from me. Social & Personal Development Artemis is quite perceptive and extremely intellectual. He can answer the questions on any psychological profile perfectly, but this is only because he knows the perfect answer. I fear that Artemis feels that the other boys are too childish. He refuses to socialize, preferring to work on his various projects during free periods. The more he works alone, the more isolated he becomes, and if he does not change his habits soon, he may isolate himself completely from anyone wishing to be his friend, and, ultimately, his family. Must try harder.

Pregnancy = "the slow, difficult, and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one's affective, intellectual, and professional personality - such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity.

Socialism lost its way largely when it became decoupled from the processes of democracy. My vision of a socially just society is one that is deeply democratic, that allows people’s voices to be heard, where people actually govern. C.L.R James sometimes used the slogan “every cook can govern” to speak to the concept that there should be no hierarchies of power between those who lead and their constituencies. This idea is related to Antonio Gramsci’s argument that the goal of the revolutionary party is for every member to be an intellectual. That is, everyone has the capacity, has the ability to articulate a vision of reality and to fight for the realization of their values and goals in society. Gramsci is pointing toward the development of a strategy that is deeply democratic, one where we don’t have elitist, vanguardist notions of what society should look like, but have humility and the patience to listen to and learn from working class and poor people, who really are at the center of what any society is.

I’m sharing this with you because I want the world to understand that depriving a child of the ability to express their gender authentically is life threatening. I’m sharing this with you because I want you to understand that gender policing is not some abstract, intellectual concept; it is a pattern of emotional abuse that came from every direction and singularly robbed me of my childhood. I’m sharing this with you because I want you to understand that telling a boy not to wear a dress is an act of spiritual murder.

Achieving success is your ability to eliminate the weakness and biases that are inherent within yourself

Over the years he began displaying that rarest of intellectual gifts—the ability and willingness to change his mind and do it in an orderly, well-reasoned way.

People who are not blessed with the ability to make others laugh compensate for that by saying (or trying to say) things that are profound.

The ability to feel 'with' rather than 'for' is the essential difference between consciousness and emotion. When we feel for things we are emotionally moved. Pity, sympathy, and kindred feelings stir us, and yet they seldom give any definite impulse that is of value in the adjustment of any chain of circumstances. When we feel with things we are so much a part of them that we understand the innermost elements of their being. Thus understanding comes with consciousness, and knowledge with intellectual comprehension. According to the ancient doctrines, perfect consciousness — the ability to feel with everything as part of everything — was regarded as the ultimate state of so-called human unfoldment, and he who had achieved this had attained to godhood in his own right. The gods are simply emblematic of varying degrees of consciousness in that vast interval between ignorance and realization.

They were really willing to pay to avoid any trouble. No doubt they had overestimated the ability of academics to make a nuisance of themselves. It had been years since an academic title gained you access to major media.... Even if all the university professors in France had risen up in protest, almost nobody would have noticed, but apparently they hadn't found that out in Saudi Arabia. They still believed, deep down, in the power of the intellectual elite. It was almost touching.

The third leg of critical pedagogy's three-legged stool involves something called "affective learning." How students feel in class shapes so much of how they receive content as well as their ability to develop critical thinking. Emotions matter for students and teachers alike. Social inequalities become important here via all the classroom practices that create privilege and penalty in the classroom, with all the feelings of empowerment and hurt that go with them. When we set up our classes such that some people dominate classroom discussions and others never say anything, we are actually teaching inequality and the emotions that it engenders. Social hierarchy is quite crucial to how students feel about learning, regardless of content and critical thinking.

His was the profession at that era in which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political life; for—leaving a higher motive out of the question it offered inducements powerful enough in the almost worshipping respect of the community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even political power—as in the case of Increase Mather—was within the grasp of a successful priest.

For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge. To train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs is to educate him or her in a skill. To train them to debate stoic, existential, theological, and humanist ways of grappling with reality is to educate them in values and morals. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. Morality is the product of a civilization, but the elites know little of these traditions. They are products of a moral void. They lack clarity about themselves and their culture. They can fathom only their own personal troubles. They do not see their own bases or the causes of their own frustrations. They are blind to the gaping inadequacies in our economic, social, and political structure and do not grasp that these structures, which they have been taught to serve, must be radically modified or even abolished to stave off disaster. They have been rendered mute and ineffectual. “What we cannot speak about” Ludwig Wittgenstein warned “we must pass over in silence.

1. That reason is a gift of God and that we should believe in its ability to comprehend the world. 2. That they have been wrong who undermined confidence in reason by enumerating the forces that want to usurp it: class struggle, libido, will to power. 3. That we should be aware that our being is enclosed within the circle of its perceptions, but not reduce reality to dreams and the phantoms of the mind. 4. That truth is a proof of freedom and that the sign of slavery is the lie. 5. That the proper attitude toward being is respect and that we must, therefore, avoid the company of people who debase being with their sarcasm, and praise nothingness. 6. That, even if we are accused of arrogance, it is the case that in the life of the mind a strict hierarchy is necessary. 7. That intellectuals in the twentieth century were afflicted with the habit of baratin, i.e., irresponsible jabber. 8. That in the hierarchy of human activities the arts stand higher than philosophy, and yet bad philosophy can spoil art. 9. That the objective truth exists; namely, out of two contrary assertions, one is true, one false, except in strictly defined cases when maintaining contradiction is legitimate. 10. That quite independently of the fate of religious denominations we should preserve a "philosophical faith," i.e., a belief in transcendence as a measure of humanity. 11. That time excludes and sentences to oblivion only those works of our hands and minds which prove worthless in raising up, century after century, the huge edifice of civilization. 12. That in our lives we should not succumb to despair because of our errors and our sins, for the past is never closed down and receives the meaning we give it by our subsequent acts.

Cognitive flexibility is an important executive function that reflects our ability to shift thinking and to produce a steady flow of creative thoughts and answers as opposed to a regurgitation of the usual responses. The trait correlates with high-performance levels in intellectually demanding jobs. So if you have an important afternoon brainstorming session scheduled, going for a short, intense run during lunchtime is a smart idea.

And no matter how much the gray people in power despise knowledge, they can’t do anything about historical objectivity; they can slow it down, but they can’t stop it. Despising and fearing knowledge, they will nonetheless inevitably decide to promote it in order to survive. Sooner or later they will be forced to allow universities and scientific societies, to create research centers, observatories, and laboratories, and thus to create a cadre of people of thought and knowledge: people who are completely beyond their control, people with a completely different psychology and with completely different needs. And these people cannot exist and certainly cannot function in the former atmosphere of low self-interest, banal preoccupations, dull self-satisfaction, and purely carnal needs. They need a new atmosphere— an atmosphere of comprehensive and inclusive learning, permeated with creative tension; they need writers, artists, composers— and the gray people in power are forced to make this concession too. The obstinate ones will be swept aside by their more cunning opponents in the struggle for power, but those who make this concession are, inevitably and paradoxically, digging their own graves against their will. For fatal to the ignorant egoists and fanatics is the growth of a full range of culture in the people— from research in the natural sciences to the ability to marvel at great music. And then comes the associated process of the broad intellectualization of society: an era in which grayness fights its last battles with a brutality that takes humanity back to the middle ages, loses these battles, and forever disappears as an actual force.

Stanford University's psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues have discovered that what you believe about intellectual ability—whether you think it's a fixed gift, or an earned ability that can be developed—makes a difference to your behavior, persistence, and performance. Students who see ability as fixed—as a gift—are more vulnerable to setbacks and difficulties. And stereotypes, as Dweck rightly points out, "are stories about gifts—who has them and who doesn't." Dweck and her colleagues are shown that when students are encouraged to see math ability as something that grows with effort—pointing out, for example, that the brain forges new connections and develops better ability every time they practice a task—grades improve and gender gaps diminish (relative to groups given control interventions).

The long-term value of an enterprise is not captured by the value of its products and intellectual property but rather by its ability to continuously increase the value it provides to customers — and to create new customers — through innovation.

The power of the intelligentsia is demonstrated not only by their ability to create a general climate of opinion that strikes fear into those who oppose their agenda but also by their ability to create a climate of opinion which richly rewards those political leaders whose decisions are consonant with the vision of the intelligentsia.

Ada’s ability to appreciate the beauty of mathematics is a gift that eludes many people, including some who think of themselves as intellectual. She realized that math was a lovely language, one that describes the harmonies of the universe and can be poetic at times.

Smart means having intellectual humility rather than high cognitive ability.

Nothing boosts confidence quite like simulating a disaster, engaging with it fully, both physically and intellectually, and realising you have the ability to work the problem.

How did it come to pass that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity? The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. Naturally I could go deeper into the problem than a child with normal abilities.

Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years. It is only the scholar who appreciates that all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values. It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise.

As the noted author and intellectual W .E. B. Du Bois says, we’ve given all of our economic power away. “When you owe another, your freedom is impaired,” Du Bois counseled. “Your ability to decide your destiny is tainted by the amount you owe.

There are few more powerful mirrors of the human brain's astonishing ability to rearrange itself to learn a new intellectual function than the act of reading. Underlying the brain's ability to learn reading lies its protean capacity to make new connections among structures and circuits originally devoted to other more basic brain processes that have enjoyed a longer existence in human evolution, such as vision and spoken language. [...] we come into the world programmed with the capacity to change what is given to us by nature, so that we can go beyond it. We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs.

Intellectual cowardice is only one of the problems of the academic community. Fort rubbed their noses in the swill generated by their gibberish and illiteracy. It was no secret then or now that academic publications are designed to protect the inept and to conceal ignorance. People with nothing to say, who even lack the ability to say nothing, can hide behind the academic method for a lifetime.

If one chooses to call tests that require the mastery of abstractions culturally biased, because some cultures put more emphasis on abstractions than others, that raises fundamental questions about what the tests are for. In a world where the ability to master abstractions is fundamental to mathematics, science and other endeavors, the measurement of that ability is not an arbitrary bias. A culture-free test might be appropriate in a culture-free society—but there are no such societies.

At the same time, minor failings or incidental impropriety may, he feels, be interpreted as a direct expression of his stigmatized differentness. Ex-mental patients, for example, are sometimes afraid to engage in sharp interchanges with spouse or employer because of what a show of emotion might be taken as a sign of. Mental defectives face a similar contingency:   It also happens that if a person of low intellectual ability gets into some sort of trouble the difficulty is more or less automatically attributed to “mental defect” whereas if a person of “normal intelligence” gets into a similar difficulty, it is not regarded as symptomatic of anything in particular.31

If you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and love, with pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.

I was successful and acceptable and loved because I was—and still am—great at negotiating with whiteness. But that means my white friends often mistakenly believe that my ability to successfully negotiate the white world means that I am white—or more white than Native. My white friends can mistakenly believe that my intellectual and artistic abilities are intrinsically white.

But when you doubt that you have anything to offer, you question God's ability to use you beyond your own weakness. Your usefulness in the lives of others is not dependent on your own intellectual or creative abilities, though God will use your talents whatever they are. Your usefulness to God and his people is connected with your dependence on God and his Word and your love for his people.

Ever since the rape, Maggie had been able to compartmentalize feelings that were just too much for her to handle. She could push them down, push them back, make them wait for another time. Intellectually, she knew that it was considered unhealthy, a symptom of damage.  She considered it a bonus, some kind of recompense for the occasional nightmares and flashbacks, this ability to protect herself.

Humankind’s struggle against a hostile environment causes people throughout the ages to deploy their full armory of logic, training, strategy, imagination, inventiveness, and creativity. We are born with the natural ability to strategize. The most influential tool in humankind’s intellectual tool kit is the ability to regenerate a sense of unruffled alertness, to establish a poised stance that leads to intuitive discoveries generated by the conscious and unconscious mind constantly filtering a plethora of data, selecting critical facts, and producing elegant solutions to seemingly insoluble dilemmas.

Since McDougall contrasts the behaviour of a highly organised group with what has just been described, we shall be particularly interested to learn in what this organisation consists, and by what factors it is produced. The author enumerates five principal conditions ' for raising collective mental life to a higher level. The first and fundamental condition is that there should be some degree of continuity of existence in the group. This may be either material or formal: the former, if the same individuals persist in the group for some time; and the latter, if there is developed within the group a system of fixed positions which are occupied by a succession of individuals. The second condition is that in the individual member of the group some definite idea should be formed of the nature, composition, functions and capacities of the group, so that from this he may develop an emotional relation to the group as a whole. The third is that the group should be brought into interaction (perhaps in the form of rivalry) with other groups similar to it but differing from it in many respects. The fourth is that the group should possess traditions, customs and habits, and especially such as determine the relations of its members to one another. The fifth is that the group should have a definite structure, expressed in the specialisation and differentiation of the functions of its constituents. According to McDougall, if these conditions are fulfilled, the psychological disadvantages of the group formation are removed. The collective lowering of intellectual ability is avoided by withdrawing the performance of intellectual tasks from the group and reserving them for individual members of it.

If it is true that the ability to be puzzled is the beginning of wisdom, then this truth is a sad commentary on the wisdom of modern man. Whatever the merits of our high degree of literary and universal education, we have lost the gift for being puzzled. Everything is supposed to be known—if not to ourselves then to some specialist whose business it is to know what we do not know. In fact, to be puzzled is embarrassing, a sign of intellectual inferiority. Even children are rarely surprised, or at least they try not to show that they are; and as we grow older we gradually lose the ability to be surprised. To have the right answers seems all-important; to ask the right questions is considered insignificant by comparison.

One of the many signs of verbal virtuosity among intellectuals is the repackaging of words to mean things that are not only different from, but sometimes the direct opposite of, their original meanings. 'Freedom' and 'power' are among the most common of these repackaged words. The basic concept of freedom as not being subjected to other people's restrictions, and of power as the ability to restrict other people's options have both been stood on their heads in some of the repackaging of these words by intellectuals discussing economic issues. Thus business enterprises who expand the public's options, either quantitatively (through lower prices) or qualitatively (through better products) are often spoken of as 'controlling' the market, whenever this results in a high percentage of consumers choosing to purchase their particular products rather than the competing products of other enterprises. In other words, when consumers decide that particular brands of products are either cheaper or better than competing brands of those products, third parties take it upon themselves to depict those who produced these particular brands as having exercised 'power' or 'control.' If, at a given time, three-quarters of the consumers prefer to buy the Acme brand of widgets to any other brand, then Acme Inc. will be said to 'control' three-quarters of the market, even though consumers control 100 percent of the market, since they can switch to another brand of widgets tomorrow if someone else comes up with a better widget, or stop buying widgets altogether if a new product comes along that makes widgets obsolete. ....by saying that businesses have 'power' because they have 'control' of their markets, this verbal virtuosity opens the way to saying that government needs to exercise its 'countervailing power' (John Kenneth Galbraith's phrase) in order to protect the public. Despite the verbal parallels, government power is in fact power, since individuals do not have a free choice as to whether or not to obey government laws and regulations, while consumers are free to ignore the products marketed by even the biggest and supposedly most 'powerful' corporations in the world.

Oh! Almighty and Everlasting God, Creator of Heaven, Earth and the Universe: Help me to be, to think, to act what is right, because it is right; make me truthful, honest and honorable in all things; make me intellectually honest for the sake of right and honor and without thought of reward to me. Give me the ability to be charitable, forgiving and patient with my fellowmen—help me to understand their motives and their shortcomings—even as Thou understandest mine! Amen, Amen, Amen. Say

As we’ve seen, the task of changing a schema is two-fold: we have to unlearn the self-defeating old habit and replace it with a new, healthier one. That change is very different from mere intellectual understanding—it involves the emotional brain. It takes much persistent practice, cultivation of the ability to bring awareness to what had been unconscious behavior, and sustained effort to try out the new way of thinking and acting despite its initial awkwardness and relapses into old habit.

This, to be sure, is not the entire truth. For there were individuals in Germany who from the very beginning of the regime and without ever wavering were opposed to Hitler; no one knows how many there were of them—perhaps a hundred thousand, perhaps many more, perhaps many fewer—for their voices were never heard. They could be found everywhere, in all strata of society, among the simple people as well as among the educated, in all parties, perhaps even in the ranks of the N.S.D.A.P. Very few of them were known publicly, as were the aforementioned Reck-Malleczewen or the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Some of them were truly and deeply pious, like an artisan of whom I know, who preferred having his independent existence destroyed and becoming a simple worker in a factory to taking upon himself the “little formality” of entering the Nazi Party. A few still took an oath seriously and preferred, for example, to renounce an academic career rather than swear by Hitler’s name. A more numerous group were the workers, especially in Berlin, and Socialist intellectuals who tried to aid the Jews they knew. There were finally, the two peasant boys whose story is related in Günther Weisenborn’s Der lautlose Aufstand (1953), who were drafted into the S.S. at the end of the war and refused to sign; they were sentenced to death, and on the day of their execution they wrote in their last letter to their families: “We two would rather die than burden our conscience with such terrible things. We know what the S.S. must carry out.” The position of these people, who, practically speaking, did nothing, was altogether different from that of the conspirators. Their ability to tell right from wrong had remained intact, and they never suffered a “crisis of conscience.” There may also have been such persons among the members of the resistance, but they were hardly more numerous in the ranks of the conspirators than among the people at large. They were neither heroes nor saints, and they remained completely silent. Only on one occasion, in a single desperate gesture, did this wholly isolated and mute element manifest itself publicly: this was when the Scholls, two students at Munich University, brother and sister, under the influence of their teacher Kurt Huber distributed the famous leaflets in which Hitler was finally called what he was—a “mass murderer.

It is hard to understand how a compassionate world order can include so many people afflicted by acute misery, persistent hunger and deprived and desperate lives, and why millions of innocent children have to die each year from lack of food or medical attention or social care. This issue, of course, is not new, and it has been a subject of some discussion among theologians. The argument that God has reasons to want us to deal with these matters ourselves has had considerable intellectual support. As a nonreligious person, I am not in a position to assess the theological merits of this argument. But I can appreciate the force of the claim that people themselves must have responsibility for the development and change of the world in which they live. One does not have to be either devout or non devout to accept this basic connection. As people who live-in a broad sense-together, we cannot escape the thought that the terrible occurrences that we see around us are quintessentially our problems. They are our responsibility-whether or not they are also anyone else's. As competent human beings, we cannot shirk the task of judging how things are and what needs to be done. As reflective creatures, we have the ability to contemplate the lives of others. Our sense of behavior may have caused (though that can be very important as well), but can also relate more generally to the miseries that we see around us and that lie within our power to help remedy. That responsibility is not, of course, the only consideration that can claim our attention, but to deny the relevance of that general claim would be to miss something central about our social existence. It is not so much a matter of having the exact rules about how precisely we ought to behave, as of recognizing the relevance of our shared humanity in making the choices we face.

Now consider Google, one of the largest, richest, and respected companies in the world. Guess what – they don’t hire new college graduates based on SAT or GPA41. Google believes that top students lack “intellectual humility.” In other words when they make a mistake, “it’s not my fault.” For Google, the ability to learn from mistakes (like C students do), is more important than test scores or class rank. Google believes that top students seldom fail in school and, therefore, are deprived of the opportunity to learn from failure.

But although it is the case that anyone who contends that in the Catholic medieval civilization of Europe woman was on the whole reckoned as the second—not the first—sex, can support his view by examples which appear conclusive, yet it is equally certain that women who in one way or another possessed more than average ability were given a chance of developing their talents and exercising them with a freedom from interference which would be inconceivable in a society molded by Lutheranism or Calvinism. Both the one-sided Lutheran eulogy of a snug family life and the Calvinistic hatred of spiritual charm, of the imaginative and poetical element in religion, and especially the Calvinists’ glorification of the industrious accumulation of capital and their belief in economic success as a peculiar favor bestowed on God’s elect—all this resulted in a contempt for specially feminine intellectual qualities: intuition, a psychological sense manifesting itself in tact and a gentle dignity in the courtesies of life, discretion, and feeling in the work of Christian charity.

Studies show that girls - especially smarter ones - have severe problems in the area of self-confidence. They consistently underestimate their own ability. When asked how they think they'll do on different tasks - whether the tasks are untried or ones they've encountered before - they give lower estimates than boys do, and in general underestimate their actual performance as well. One study even showed that the brighter the girl, the less expectations she has of being successful at intellectual tasks. (...) Low self-confidence is the plague of many girls, and it leads to a host of related problems. Girls are highly suggestible and tend to change their minds about perceptual judgments if someone disagrees with them. They set lower standards for themselves. While boys are challenged by difficult tasks, girls try to avoid them. (...) Given her felt incompetence, it's not surprising that the little girl would hotfoot it to the nearest Other and cling for dear life. (...) As we can see, the problems of excessive dependence follow female children right into adulthood.

Finally, the work of the minister tended to be judged by his success in a single area - the saving of souls in measurable numbers. The local minister was judged either by his charismatic powers or by his ability to prepare his congregation for the preaching of some itinerant ministerial charmer who would really awaken its members. The 'star' system prevailed in religion before it reached the theater. As the evangelical impulse became more widespread and more dominant, the selection and training of ministers was increasingly shaped by the revivalist criterion of ministerial merit. The Puritan ideal of the minister as an intellectual and educational leader was steadily weakened in the face of the evangelical ideal of the minister as a popular crusader and exhorter. Theological education itself became more instrumental. Simple dogmatic formulations were considered sufficient. In considerable measure the churches withdrew from intellectual encounters with the secular world, gave up the idea that religion is a part of the whole life of intellectual experience, and often abandoned the field of rational studies on the assumption that they were the natural province of science alone. By 1853 an outstanding clergyman complained that there was 'an impression, somewhat general, that an intellectual clergyman is deficient in piety, and that an eminently pious minister is deficient in intellect.

Ethan’s parents constantly told him how brainy he was. “You’re so smart! You can do anything, Ethan. We are so proud of you, they would say every time he sailed through a math test. Or a spelling test. Or any test. With the best of intentions, they consistently tethered Ethan’s accomplishment to some innate characteristic of his intellectual prowess. Researchers call this “appealing to fixed mindsets.” The parents had no idea that this form of praise was toxic. 　　Little Ethan quickly learned that any academic achievement that required no effort was the behavior that defined his gift. When he hit junior high school, he ran into subjects that did require effort. He could no longer sail through, and, for the first time, he started making mistakes. But he did not see these errors as opportunities for improvement. After all, he was smart because he could mysteriously grasp things quickly. And if he could no longer grasp things quickly, what did that imply? That he was no longer smart. Since he didn’t know the ingredients making him successful, he didn’t know what to do when he failed. You don’t have to hit that brick wall very often before you get discouraged, then depressed. Quite simply, Ethan quit trying. His grades collapsed. What happens when you say, ‘You’re so smart’ 　　Research shows that Ethan’s unfortunate story is typical of kids regularly praised for some fixed characteristic. If you praise your child this way, three things are statistically likely to happen: 　　First, your child will begin to perceive mistakes as failures. Because you told her that success was due to some static ability over which she had no control, she will start to think of failure (such as a bad grade) as a static thing, too—now perceived as a lack of ability. Successes are thought of as gifts rather than the governable product of effort. 　　Second, perhaps as a reaction to the first, she will become more concerned with looking smart than with actually learning something. (Though Ethan was intelligent, he was more preoccupied with breezing through and appearing smart to the people who mattered to him. He developed little regard for learning.) 　　Third, she will be less willing to confront the reasons behind any deficiencies, less willing to make an effort. Such kids have a difficult time admitting errors. There is simply too much at stake for failure. 　　  　　What to say instead: ‘You really worked hard’ 　　What should Ethan’s parents have done? Research shows a simple solution. Rather than praising him for being smart, they should have praised him for working hard. On the successful completion of a test, they should not have said,“I’m so proud of you. You’re so smart. They should have said, “I’m so proud of you. You must have really studied hard”. This appeals to controllable effort rather than to unchangeable talent. It’s called “growth mindset” praise.

The modern educational system teaches children how to obey authority. People are not being educated; they're being tested for levels of obedience. School is about memorizing what you are told short-term and repeating it. Children are taught that truth comes from authority, that intelligence is the ability to remember and repeat, that accurate memory and repetition are rewarded, that noncompliance is punished, and that they need to conform both intellectually and socially. The sad truth is, our educational system is flawed. It does not properly educate the people; it teaches them how to be good workers.

Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and one of the wealthiest men in the world, has used exactly the attributes we’ve explored in this chapter—intellectual persistence, prudent thinking, and the ability to see and act on warning signs—to make billions of dollars for himself and the shareholders in his company, Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett is known for thinking carefully when those around him lose their heads. “Success in investing doesn’t correlate with IQ,” he has said. “Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.

Those women, who have been admitted to the center of intellectual activity of their day and especially in the past hundred years, academically trained women, have first had to learn “how to think like a man.” In the process, many of them have so internalized that learning that they have lost the ability to conceive of alternatives. The way to think abstractly is to define precisely, to create models in the mind and generalize from them. Such thought, men have taught us, must be based on the exclusion of feelings. Women, like the poor, the subordinate, the marginals, have close knowledge of ambiguity, of feelings mixed with thought, of value judgments coloring abstractions. Women have always experienced the reality of self and community, known it, and shared it with each other. Yet, living in a world in which they are devalued, their experience bears the stigma of insignificance. Thus they have learned to mistrust their own experience and devalue it. What wisdom can there be in menses? What source of knowledge in the milk-filled breast? What food for abstraction in the daily routine of feeding and cleaning? Patriarchal thought has relegated such gender-defined experiences to the realm of the “natural,” the non-transcendent.

Learning how to do psychotherapy is a complex process, much of which is transacted in the relationship between the beginning therapists and experienced supervisors. When the beginning therapists encounter problems that are beyond their range of experience, the supervisors usually assist in several ways. First, the supervisors offer an intellectual framework in which to understand the problem. References to the professional literature are often suggested. Second, the supervisors offer practical, problem-solving help with the strategies of therapy. Third and most important, the supervisors help the less experienced therapists to deal with feelings of their own that have been evoked by the patients. With the support of competent supervisors, the therapists are usually able to master their own troubled feelings and put them in perspective. This done, the therapists are better able to attend to patients with empathy, and with a confidence in their ability to offer help.

The Sunday Tidings, which had for some years been pursing a policy of intellectual sensationalism, had never found it easy to maintain its supply of material. The stuff of mere emotional sensationalism, as used by its cheaper and less dignified contemporaries, lay thickly all around, easily malleable into shapes attractive to the constant human passions. Intellectual sensationalism, however, was a much more tricky business. In addition to avoiding the suggestion of sensationalism for sensationalism's sake, it required knowledge, research, careful timing, and, if possible, some literary ability. Inevitably, therefore, its policy was subject to lamentable gaps during which it could find nothing topical on its chosen level to disclose.

Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens. He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he was in no danger of succumbing to it. He realized, nevertheless, that it ought never to have occurred to him. The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak. He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions -- 'the Party says the earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than water' -- and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as 'two and two make five' were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.

Many of us get anxious in test-taking situations regardless of our intelligence, preparation, or familiarity with the material. One of the reasons test anxiety is so common is that it is relatively easy to trigger. Even one episode of heightened anxiety is sufficient for us to feel intensely anxious when facing a similar situation in the future. Test anxiety is especially problematic because it causes massive disruptions to our concentration, our focus, and our ability to think clearly, all of which have a huge impact on our performance. As a rule, anxiety tends to be extremely greedy when it comes to our concentration and attention. The visceral discomfort it creates can be so distracting, and the intellectual resources it hogs so critical, that we might struggle to comprehend the nuances of questions, retrieve the relevant information from our memory, formulate answers coherently, or choose the best option from a multiple-choice list. As an illustration of how dramatic its effects are, anxiety can cause us to score fifteen points lower than we would otherwise on a basic IQ test—a hugely significant margin that can drop a score from the Superior to the Average range.

Matter can transcend itself at any moment in bringing forth life and ever new forms of species. This idea, Rahner suggests, is the secret of life. It offers one more intellectual explanation that supports belief in God as Creator while appreciating science’s finding that matter has evolved in the direction of life and then consciousness under its own steam. Nature’s capacity for active self-transcendence is the key. In the realm of biological evolution, natural selection’s work on spontaneously arising variations gets that key turning to throw open the door to ever-new forms of life. Novelty comes about by the self-organizing dynamism inherent in creatures themselves. Evolution over deep time is so creative because the material of the world itself has the God-given inner ability to become ever more.

The “IQ fundamentalist” Arthur Jensen put it thusly in his 1980 book Bias in Mental Testing (p. 113): “The four socially and personally most important threshold regions on the IQ scale are those that differentiate with high probability between persons who, because of their level of general mental ability, can or cannot attend a regular school (about IQ 50), can or cannot master the traditional subject matter of elementary school (about IQ 75), can or cannot succeed in the academic or college preparatory curriculum through high school (about IQ 105), can or cannot graduate from an accredited four-year college with grades that would qualify for admission to a professional or graduate school (about IQ 115). Beyond this, the IQ level becomes relatively unimportant in terms of ordinary occupational aspirations and criteria of success. That is not to say that there are not real differences between the intellectual capabilities represented by IQs of 115 and 150 or even between IQs of 150 and 180. But IQ differences in this upper part of the scale have far less personal implications than the thresholds just described and are generally of lesser importance for success in the popular sense than are certain traits of personality and character.

If you are one of those people who can’t hold a lot in mind at once—you lose focus and start daydreaming in lectures, and have to get to someplace quiet to focus so you can use your working memory to its maximum—well, welcome to the clan of the creative. Having a somewhat smaller working memory means you can more easily generalize your learning into new, more creative combinations. Because you’re learning new, more creative combinations. Having a somewhat smaller working memory, which grows from the focusing abilities of the prefrontal cortex, doesn’t lock everything up so tightly, you can more easily get input from other parts of your brain. These other areas, which include the sensory cortex, not only are more in tune with what’s going on in the environment, but also are the source of dreams, not to mention creative ideas. You may have to work harder sometimes (or even much of the time) to understand what’s going on, but once you’ve got something chunked, you can take that chunk and turn it outside in and inside round—putting it through creative paces even you didn’t think you were capable of! Here’s another point to put into your mental chunker: Chess, that bastion of intellectuals, has some elite players with roughly average IQs. These seemingly middling intellects are able to do better than some more intelligent players because they practice more. That’s the key idea. Every chess player, whether average or elite, grows talent by practicing. It is the practice—particularly deliberate practice on the toughest aspects of the material—that can help lift average brains into the realm of those with more “natural” gifts. Just as you can practice lifting weights and get bigger muscles over time, you can also practice certain mental patterns that deepen and enlarge in your mind.

My four things I care about are truth, meaning, fitness and grace. [...] Sam [Harris] would like to make an argument that the better and more rational our thinking is, the more it can do everything that religion once did. [...] I think about my personal physics hero, Dirac – who was the guy who came up with the equation for the electron, less well-known than the Einstein equations but arguably even more beautiful...in order to predict that, he needed a positively-charged and a negatively-charged particle, and the only two known at the time were the electron and the proton to make up, let's say, a hydrogen atom. Well, the proton is quite a bit heavier than the electron and so he told the story that wasn't really true, where the proton was the anti-particle of the electron, and Heisenberg pointed out that that couldn't be because the masses are too far off and they have to be equal. Well, a short time later, the anti-electron -- the positron, that is -- was found, I guess by Anderson at Caltech in the early 30s and then an anti-proton was created some time later. So it turned out that the story had more meaning than the exact version of the story...so the story was sort of more true than the version of the story that was originally told. And I could tell you a similar story with Einstein, I could tell it to you with Darwin, who, you know, didn't fully understand the implications of his theory, as is evidenced by his screwing up a particular kind of orchid in his later work...not understanding that his theory completely explained that orchid! So there's all sorts of ways in which we get the...the truth wrong the first several times we try it, but the meaning of the story that we tell somehow remains intact. And I think that that's a very difficult lesson for people who just want to say, 'Look, I want to'...you know, Feynman would say, "If an experiment disagrees with you, then you're wrong' and it's a very appealing story to tell to people – but it's also worth noting that Feynman never got a physical law of nature and it may be that he was too wedded to this kind of rude judgment of the unforgiving. Imagine you were innovating in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The first few times might not actually work. But if you told yourself the story, 'No, no, no – this is actually genius and it's working; no, you just lost three consecutive bouts' -- well, that may give you the ability to eventually perfect the move, perfect the technique, even though you were lying to yourself during the period in which it was being set up. It's a little bit like the difference between scaffolding and a building. And too often, people who are crazy about truth reject scaffolding, which is an intermediate stage in getting to the final truth.

Given our socialization into dependency, women are also poor risk takers. (...) We avoid new situations, job changes, moves to different parts of the country. Women are afraid that if they should make a mistake, or do "the wrong thing", they'll be punished. Women are less confident than men in their ability to make judgments, and in relationships will often hand over the decision-making duties to their mates, a situation which only ensures that they will become less confident in their powers of judgment as time goes by. Most shockingly of all, women are less likely than men to fulfill their intellectual potential. (...) In fact, as women proceed into adulthood, they get lower and lower scores on "total intelligence", owing to the fact that they tend to use their intelligence less and less the longer they're away from school. Other studies show that the intellect's ability to function may actually be impaired by dependent personality traits. (...) Confidence and self-esteem are primary issues in women's difficulties with achievement. Lack of confidence leads us into the dark waters of envy. (...) envy must be recognized, seen, and fully comprehended; it can too easily be used as a cover-up for something that is far mroe crucial to women's independence - our own inner feelings of incompetence. These must be dealt with - directly - if we are ever to achieve confidence and strength.

Today, partly because many “conservative” schools have borrowed discriminatingly from progressive innovations, we may easily forget how dismal and self-satisfied the older conservative pedagogy often was, how it accepted, or even exploited, the child’s classroom passivity, how much scope it afforded to excessively domineering teachers, how heavily it depended on rote learning. The main strength of progressivism came from its freshness in method. It tried to mobilize the interests of the child, to make good use of his need for activity, to concern the minds of teachers and educators with a more adequate sense of his nature, to set up pedagogical rules that would put the burden on the teacher not to be arbitrarily authoritative, and to develop the child’s capacity for expression as well as his ability to learn. It had the great merit of being experimental in a field in which too many people thought that all the truths had been established.

I never went to college. I don’t believe in college for writers. I think too many professors are too opinionated and too snobbish and too intellectual. And the intellect is a great danger to creativity because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things instead of staying with your own basic truth--- who you are, what you are, what you wanna be. I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for twenty-five years now which reads, “Don’t think.” You must never think at the typewriter--- you must feel, and your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. You collect up a lot of data, you do a lot of thinking away from the typewriter, but at the typewriter you should be living. It should be a living experience. The worst thing you do when you think is lie — you can make up reasons that are not true for the things that you did, and what you’re trying to do as a creative person is surprise yourself — find out who you really are, and try not to lie, try to tell the truth all the time. And the only way to do this is by being very active and very emotional, and get it out of yourself — making things that you hate and things that you love, you write about these then, intensely. When it’s over, then you can think about it; then you can look, it works or it doesn’t work, something is missing here. And, if something is missing, then you go back and reemotionalize that part, so it’s all of a piece. But thinking is to be a corrective in our life. It’s not supposed to be a center of our life. Living is supposed to be the center of our life, being is supposed to be the center, with correctives around, which hold us like the skin holds our blood and our flesh in. But our skin is not a way of life. The way of living is the blood pumping through our veins, the ability to sense and to feel and to know, and the intellect doesn’t help you very much there. You should get on with the business of living. Everything of mine is intuitive. All the poetry I’ve written, I couldn’t possibly tell you how I did it. I don’t know anything about the rhythms or the schemes or the inner rhymes or any of these sorts of thing. It comes from 40 years of reading poetry and having heroes that I loved. I love Shakespeare, I don’t Intellectualize about him. I love Gerard Manley Hopkins, I don’t intellectualize about him. I love Dylan Thomas, I don’t know what the hell he’s writing about half the time, but he sounds good, he rings well. Let me give you an example on this sort of thing: I walked into my living room twenty years ago, when one of my daughters was about four years old, and a Dylan Thomas record was on the set. I thought that my wife had put the record on; come to find out my four-year-old had put on his record. I came into the room, she pointed to the record and said, ‘He knows what he’s doing.’ Now, that’s great. See, that’s not intellectualizing, it’s an emotional reaction. If there is no feeling, there cannot be great art.” 

As a woman of color who is interested in these issues of democracy and who wants to enact social change, Pilaf sees the Internet as a tool that perpetuates the corporate, white, middle-class hegemony of American consumer culture rather than a tool for revolution. Instead of viewing the Internet as a new outlet for activism and that opens up a world of communication, Pilaf sees the online communication and activism as an escape valve, a way to remove oneself from interactions with people. Although I disagree with her on this point, I’m very much aware that my ability to see the Internet as revolutionary comes from a place of privilege, in which I can think of the Internet as a sexual, political, and intellectual arena because I’m in a place (geographically and economically) where these are the very things that are my primary focus and concern. Although some of Pilaf’s criticisms overlap with those technophobes who view the Internet as the devil’s playground, her observations come from a very real, intense place of political and personal discomfort with forging ahead of digital culture and the casualties this ‘progress’ may leave.

THE TEN MOST COMMON PROBLEMS Here are the ten most common problems in communications. Read the list. If any of them apply to you, the principles in this book will help you solve them. 1. Lack of initial rapport with listeners 2. Stiffness or woodenness in use of body 3. Presentation of material is intellectually oriented; speaker forgets to involve the audience emotionally 4. Speaker seems uncomfortable because of fear of failure 5. Poor use of eye contact and facial expression 6. Lack of humor 7. Speech direction and intent unclear due to improper  preparation 8. Inability to use silence for impact 9. Lack of energy, causing inappropriate pitch pattern, speech  rate, and volume 10. Use of boring language and lack of interesting material Various polls show that the ability to communicate well is ranked the number-one key to success by leaders in business, politics, and the professions. If you don’t communicate effectively, you may not die, like some POWs or neglected babies we mentioned earlier, but you also won’t live as fully as you should, nor will you achieve personal goals. This was a lesson drummed into me at a very early age.

Marxism cannot, even on the grounds of political expediency or party solidarity, be reduced to a rigid formalism like mathematics. Nor can it be treated as a standard technique such as work on an automatic lathe. The material, when it is present in human society, has endless variations; the observer is himself part of the observed population, with which he interacts strongly and reciprocally. This means that the successful application of the theory needs the development of analytical power, the ability to pick out the essential factors in a given situation. This cannot be learned from books alone. The one way to learn it is by constant contact with the major sections of the people. For an intellectual, this means at least a few months spent in manual labour, to earn his livelihood as a member of the working class; not as a superior being, nor as a reformist, nor as a sentimental "progressive" visitor to the slums. The experience gained from living with worker and peasant, as one of them, has then to be consistently refreshed and regularly evaluated in the light of one's reading. For those who are prepared to do this, these essays might provide some encouragement, and food for thought.

What I have said about the newspapers and the movies applies equally to the radio, to television, and even to bookselling. Thus we are in an age where the enormous per capita bulk of communication is met by an ever-thinning stream of total bulk of communication. More and more we must accept a standardized inoffensive and insignificant product which, like the white bread of the bakeries, is made rather for its keeping and selling properties than for its food value. This is fundamentally an external handicap of modern communication, but it is paralleled by another which gnaws from within. This is the cancer of creative narrowness and feebleness. In the old days, the young man who wished to enter the creative arts might either have plunged in directly or prepared himself by a general schooling, perhaps irrelevant to the specific tasks he finally undertook, but which was at least a searching discipline of his abilities and taste. Now the channels of apprenticeship are largely silted up. Our elementary and secondary schools are more interested in formal classroom discipline than in the intellectual discipline of learning something thoroughly, and a great deal of the serious preparation for a scientific or a literary course is relegated to some sort of graduate school or other.

Making another effort to be paradoxical, Williams decides to identify Orwell as an instance of ‘the paradox of the exile’. This, which he also identified with D. H. Lawrence, constituted an actual ‘tradition’, which, in England: attracts to itself many of the liberal virtues: empiricism, a certain integrity, frankness. It has also, as the normally contingent virtue of exile, certain qualities of perception: in particular, the ability to distinguish inadequacies in the groups which have been rejected. It gives, also, an appearance of strength, although this is largely illusory. The qualities, though salutary, are largely negative; there is an appearance of hardness (the austere criticism of hypocrisy, complacency, self-deceit), but this is usually brittle, and at times hysterical: the substance of community is lacking, and the tension, in men of high quality, is very great. This is quite a fine passage, even when Williams is engaged in giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Orwell’s working title for Nineteen Eighty-Four was ‘The Last Man in Europe,’ and there are traces of a kind of solipsistic nobility elsewhere in his work, the attitude of the flinty and solitary loner. May he not be valued, however, as the outstanding English example of the dissident intellectual who preferred above all other allegiances the loyalty to truth? Self-evidently, Williams does not believe this and the clue is in the one word, so seemingly innocuous in itself, ‘community.

The greatest moral appeal of the doctrine of the Blank Slate comes from a simple mathematical fact: zero equals zero. This allows the Blank Slate to serve as a guarantor of political equality...[I]f we are all blank slates, the reasoning goes, we must all be equal. But if the slate of a newborn is not blank, different babies could have different things inscribed on their slates. Individuals, sexes, classes, and races might differ innately in their talents, abilities, interests, and inclinations. And that, it is thought, could lead to three evils. The first is prejudice: if groups of people are biologically different, it could be rational to discriminate against the members of some of the groups. The second is Social Darwinism: if differences among groups in their station in life...come from their innate constitutions, the differences cannot be blamed on discrimination, and that makes it easy to blame the victim and tolerate inequality. The third is eugenics: if people differ biologically in ways that other people value or dislike, it would invite them to try to improve society by intervening biologically -by encouraging or discouraging people's decisions to have children...or by killing them outright. The Nazis carried out the final solution because they thought Jews and other ethnic groups were biologically inferior. The fear of the terrible consequences that might arise from a discovery of innate differences has thus led many intellectuals to insist that such differences do not exist...

Let us, in our character of knowers, not be ungrateful towards such determined reversals of the ordinary perspectives and values, with which the mind had for too long raged against itself with an apparently futile sacrilege! In the same way the very seeing of another vista, the very wishing to see another vista, is no little training and preparation of the intellect for its eternal "Objectivity" — objectivity being understood not as "contemplation without interest" (for that is inconceivable and nonsensical), but as the ability to have the pros and cons in one's power and to switch them on and off, so as to get to know how to utilise, for the advancement of knowledge, the difference in the perspective and in the emotional interpretations. But let us, forsooth, my philosophic colleagues, henceforward guard ourselves more carefully against this mythology of dangerous ancient ideas, which has set up a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge"; let us guard ourselves from the tentacles of such contradictory ideas as "pure reason," "absolute spirituality," "knowledge-in-itself": — in these theories an eye that cannot be thought of is required to think, an eye which ex hypothesi has no direction at all, an eye in which the active and interpreting functions are cramped, are absent; those functions, I say, by means of which "abstract" seeing first became seeing something; in these theories consequently the absurd and the nonsensical is always demanded of the eye. There is only a seeing from a perspective, only a "knowing" from a perspective, and the more emotions we express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we train on the same thing, the more complete will be our "idea" of that thing, our "objectivity." But the elimination of the will altogether, the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, granted that we could do so, what! would not that be called intellectual castration?

Instead of concentrating on how we can include the “other,” too often in American Christianity the focus becomes on when, how, and finding the right justifications for excluding the “other.” When I truly begin to appreciate the inclusive nature of Jesus, my heart laments at all the exclusiveness I see and experience. I think of my female friends; women of wisdom, peace, discernment, and character who should be emulated by the rest of us. When I listen and learn from these women, I realize what an amazing leaders they would be in church—but many never will be leaders in that way because they are lacking one thing: male genitals. Wise and godly women have been excluded, not because of a lack of gifting, education, or ability, but because they were born with the wrong private parts. I also think of a man who attended my former church who has an intellectual disability. He was friendly, faithful, and could always be counted on for a good laugh because he had absolutely no filter— yelling out at least six times during each sermon. One time in church my daughter quietly leaned over to tell me she had to go to the bathroom—and, in true form so that everyone heard, he shouted out, “Hey! Pipe it down back there!” It was hilarious. However, our friend has been asked to leave several churches because of his “disruptiveness.” Instead of being loved and embraced for who he is, he has been repeatedly excluded from the people of God because of a disability. We find plenty of other reasons to exclude people. We exclude because people have been divorced, exclude them for not signing on to our 18-page statements of faith, exclude them because of their mode of baptism, exclude them because of their sexual orientation, exclude them for rejecting predestination…we have become a religious culture focused on exclusion of the “other,” instead of following the example of Jesus that focuses on finding ways for the radical inclusion of the “other.” Every day I drive by churches that proudly have “All Are Welcome” plastered across their signs; however, I rarely believe it—and I don’t think others believe it either. Far too often, instead of church being something that exists for the “other,” church becomes something that exists for the “like us” and the “willing to become like us.” And so, Christianity in America is dying.

To understand how shame is influenced by culture, we need to think back to when we were children or young adults, and we first learned how important it is to be liked, to fit in, and to please others. The lessons were often taught by shame; sometimes overtly, other times covertly. Regardless of how they happened, we can all recall experiences of feeling rejected, diminished and ridiculed. Eventually, we learned to fear these feelings. We learned how to change our behaviors, thinking and feelings to avoid feeling shame. In the process, we changed who we were and, in many instances, who we are now. Our culture teaches us about shame—it dictates what is acceptable and what is not. We weren’t born craving perfect bodies. We weren’t born afraid to tell our stories. We weren’t born with a fear of getting too old to feel valuable. We weren’t born with a Pottery Barn catalog in one hand and heartbreaking debt in the other. Shame comes from outside of us—from the messages and expectations of our culture. What comes from the inside of us is a very human need to belong, to relate. We are wired for connection. It’s in our biology. As infants, our need for connection is about survival. As we grow older, connection means thriving—emotionally, physically, spiritually and intellectually. Connection is critical because we all have the basic need to feel accepted and to believe that we belong and are valued for who we are. Shame unravels our connection to others. In fact, I often refer to shame as the fear of disconnection—the fear of being perceived as flawed and unworthy of acceptance or belonging. Shame keeps us from telling our own stories and prevents us from listening to others tell their stories. We silence our voices and keep our secrets out of the fear of disconnection. When we hear others talk about their shame, we often blame them as a way to protect ourselves from feeling uncomfortable. Hearing someone talk about a shaming experience can sometimes be as painful as actually experiencing it for ourselves. Like courage, empathy and compassion are critical components of shame resilience. Practicing compassion allows us to hear shame. Empathy, the most powerful tool of compassion, is an emotional skill that allows us to respond to others in a meaningful, caring way. Empathy is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes—to understand what someone is experiencing and to reflect back that understanding. When we share a difficult experience with someone, and that person responds in an open, deeply connected way—that’s empathy. Developing empathy can enrich the relationships we have with our partners, colleagues, family members and children. In Chapter 2, I’ll discuss the concept of empathy in great detail. You’ll learn how it works, how we can learn to be empathic and why the opposite of experiencing shame is experiencing empathy. The prerequisite for empathy is compassion. We can only respond empathically if we are willing to hear someone’s pain. We sometimes think of compassion as a saintlike virtue. It’s not. In fact, compassion is possible for anyone who can accept the struggles that make us human—our fears, imperfections, losses and shame. We can only respond compassionately to someone telling her story if we have embraced our own story—shame and all. Compassion is not a virtue—it is a commitment.