Story Processors Quotes

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode. The brain creates a world for us to live in and populates it with allies and villains. It turns the chaos and bleakness of reality into a simple, hopeful tale, and at the centre it places its star – wonderful, precious me – who it sets on a series of goals that become the plots of our lives. Story is what brain does. It is a ‘story processor’, writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘not a logic processor’. Story emerges from human minds as naturally as breath emerges from between human lips.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. Everyone loves a good story; every culture bathes its children in stories. Among the most important stories we know are stories about ourselves, and these “life narratives” are McAdams’s third level of personality.

There were absolutely amazing photographs everywhere, on everyone's Facebook page and everyone's iPhone and Instagram, just floating around in cyberspace for eternity. People took hundreds and thousands of digital pictures; one or two, even twenty or a hundred, were bound to be great. All anyone had to do was click through them all and post the ones they liked, deleting the rest. But using film meant you never knew what was going to be a good picture, let alone a great one, until you were standing there looking at a contact sheet with a magnifying glass and deciding which to print. Maybe nobody cared anymore, but then again, writers probably felt the same way when word processors were invented. Anyone with a story and a keyboard could write their memoir now, write the great American novel, or tweet a 140-character trope that gets retweeted and it read by hundreds of people every hour of every day.

Food processors, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and clothes-washing machines have substancially lessened the physical activity required to cook and clean. Air conditioners and central heating have decreased how much energy our bodies spend to maintain a stable body temperature. Countless other devices, such as electric can openers, remote controls, electric razors and suitcases on wheels, have reduced, calorie by calorie, the amount of energy we expend to exist.

As he looked around the computer, he realized the PC was acting as the back-end system for the point-of-sale terminals at the restaurant—it collected the day’s credit card transactions and sent them in a single batch every night to the credit card processor. Max found that day’s batch stored as a plain text file, with the full magstripe of every customer card recorded inside. Even better, the system was still storing all the previous batch files, dating back to when the pizza parlor had installed the system about three years earlier.

Thus three conclusions emerge from the eye story: (1) it is easier to inherit a ‘vision acquisition device’ than a full-blown hard-wired visual analyser; (2) the visual analyser, once ‘set up’, is refractory to radical restructuring—hence the existence of a critical period in its development in cats; (3) the eye seems to have evolved in steps from a light-sensitive, innervated cell to our complex organ by common evolutionary mechanisms. Something similar may have been taking place in evolution of the language organ, and may be occurring during individual development. An argument, put forward forcefully by Noam Chomsky and his followers, refers to the ‘poverty of stimulus’. Most permutations of word order and grammatical items in a sentence leads to incomprehensible gibberish. There is no way that children could learn without some internal ‘guide’ which sentence is grammatical and which is not, only on the basis of heard examples. To make matters worse, many parents do not correct their children’s grammatical mistakes (they seem to be much more worried about the utterance of four-letter words). Recent investigations clearly confirm that children’s ‘instinctive’ understanding of grammatical intricacies, between the ages 2 and 4, is far better than one would expect from a conventional learning mechanism. Thus there seems to be a ‘language acquisition device’ (LAD) in the brain, which must be triggered by linguistic input so that its working ultimately leads to proper language. It is the LAD, and not a fully developed linguistic processor, which seems to be innate.

The market's second wild trait-almost-cycles-is prefigured in the story of Joseph. Pharaoh dreamed that seven fat cattle were feeding in the meadows, when seven lean kine rose out of the Nile and ate them. Likewise, seven scraggly ears of corn consumed seven plump ears. Joseph, a Hebrew slave, called the dreams prophetic: Seven years of famine would follow seven years of prosperity. He advised Pharaoh to stockpile grain for bad times to come. And when all passed as prophesied, "Joseph opened all the storehouses, and sold unto the Egyptians...And all countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn; because that the famine was so sore in all lands." Given the profits he and Pharaoh must have made, one might call Joseph the first international arbitrageur. That pattern, familiar from Hurst's work on the Nile, also appears in markets. A big 3 percent change in IBM's stock one day might precede a 2 percent jump another day, then a 1.5 percent change, then a 3.5 percent move-as if the first big jumps were continuing to echo down the succeeding days' trading. Of course, this is not a regular or predictable pattern. But the appearance of one is strong. Behind it is the influence of long-range dependence in an otherwise random process-or, put another way, a long-term memory through which the past continues to influence the random fluctuations of the present.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. Everyone loves a good story; every culture bathes its children in stories.

Truth is bits and bytes flying at the speed of light work most efficiently for those with the fastest processors and smartest artificial intelligence heuristics. Throw enough AI into the mix, just enough to spice things up, and no amount of fact-checking will be able to keep up with the relentless barrage under which you submerge it. The fact checkers will drown and soon move to the next story.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor,

Only years later would scientists again need to harness the power of multiple processors at once, when massively parallel processing would become an integral part of supercomputing. Years later, too, the genealogy of Shoch’s worm would come full circle. Soon after he published a paper about the worm citing The Shockwave Rider, he received a letter from John Brunner himself. It seemed that most science fiction writers harbored an unspoken ambition to write a book that actually predicted the future. Their model was Arthur C. Clarke, the prolific author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, who had become world-famous for forecasting the invention of the geosynchronous communications satellite in an earlier short story. “Apparently they’re all jealous of Arthur Clarke,” Shoch reflected. “Brunner wrote that his editor had sent him my paper. He said he was ‘really delighted to learn, that like Arthur C. Clarke, I predicted an event of the future.’” Shoch briefly considered replying that he had only borrowed the tapeworm’s name but that the concept was his own and that, unfortunately, Brunner did not really invent the worm. But he let it pass.

Embrace Efficiency, Elevate Flavor: Smart Kitchen Tools for Culinary Adventurers The kitchen, once a realm of necessity, has morphed into a playground of possibility. Gone are the days of clunky appliances and tedious prep work. Enter the age of the smart kitchen tool, a revolution that whispers efficiency and shouts culinary liberation. For the modern gastronome, these tech-infused gadgets are not mere conveniences, but allies in crafting delectable adventures, freeing us to savor the journey as much as the destination. Imagine mornings when your smart coffee maker greets you with the perfect brew, prepped by the whispers of your phone while you dream. Your fridge, stocked like a digital oracle, suggests recipes based on its ever-evolving inventory, and even automatically orders groceries you've run low on. The multi-cooker, your multitasking superhero, whips up a gourmet chili while you conquer emails, and by dinnertime, your smart oven roasts a succulent chicken to golden perfection, its progress monitored remotely as you sip a glass of wine. But efficiency is merely the prologue. Smart kitchen tools unlock a pandora's box of culinary precision. Smart scales, meticulous to the milligram, banish recipe guesswork and ensure perfect balance in every dish. Food processors and blenders, armed with pre-programmed settings and self-cleaning prowess, transform tedious chopping into a mere blip on the culinary radar. And for the aspiring chef, a sous vide machine becomes a magic wand, coaxing impossible tenderness from the toughest cuts of meat. Yet, technology alone is not the recipe for culinary bliss. For those who yearn to paint with flavors, smart kitchen tools are the brushes on their canvas. A connected recipe platform becomes your digital sous chef, guiding you through each step with expert instructions and voice-activated ease. Spice racks, infused with artificial intelligence, suggest unexpected pairings, urging you to venture beyond the familiar. And for the ultimate expression of your inner master chef, a custom knife, forged from heirloom steel and lovingly honed, becomes an extension of your hand, slicing through ingredients with laser focus and lyrical grace. But amidst the symphony of gadgets and apps, let us not forget the heart of the kitchen: the human touch. Smart tools are not meant to replace our intuition but to augment it. They free us from the drudgery, allowing us to focus on the artistry, the love, the joy of creation. Imagine kneading dough, the rhythm of your hands mirroring the gentle whirring of a smart bread machine, then shaping a loaf that holds the warmth of both technology and your own spirit. Or picture yourself plating a dish, using smart portion scales for precision but garnishing with edible flowers chosen simply because they spark joy. This, my friends, is the symphony of the smart kitchen: a harmonious blend of tech and humanity, where efficiency becomes the brushstroke that illuminates the vibrant canvas of culinary passion. Of course, every adventure, even one fueled by smart tools, has its caveats. Interoperability between gadgets can be a tangled web, and data privacy concerns linger like unwanted guests. But these challenges are mere bumps on the culinary road, hurdles to be overcome by informed choices and responsible data management. After all, we wouldn't embark on a mountain trek without checking the weather, would we? So, embrace the smart kitchen, dear foodies! Let technology be your sous chef, your precision tool, your culinary muse. But never forget the magic of your own hands, the wisdom of your palate, and the joy of a meal shared with loved ones. For in the end, it's not about the gadgets, but the memories we create around them, the stories whispered over simmering pots, and the laughter echoing through a kitchen filled with the aroma of possibility.

Story is what brain does. It is a ‘story processor’, writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘not a logic processor’. Story emerges from human minds as naturally as breath emerges from between human lips. You don’t have to be a genius to master it. You’re already doing it. Becoming better at telling stories is simply a matter of peering inwards, at the mind itself, and asking how it does it.

food processors had long insisted that their cookies wouldn’t crumble properly if they made them with vegetable oil, and that unsaturated vegetable fats did not meet the requirements for high-volume fast-food frying. Then, all of a sudden, these major technical difficulties appeared to be licked; suddenly, we could relax and dine on fatty cookies and french fries, our blood gushing freely through our clean arteries. Well, we shouldn’t have allowed ourselves to relax quite so fast. While the food-processing industry did, for the most part, switch from saturated to unsaturated fat, we must bear in mind that all unsaturated fats are not the same. Some actually behave like saturated fats in the body. Here’s the story. We can solidify an unsaturated vegetable oil so that it will behave more like a saturated fat — that is, we can “partially hydrogenate” it. Treatment with hydrogen gas allows some hydrogen atoms to be inserted into the molecule. Unfortunately, not only does this process make the fat more saturated, but it also converts some of the unsaturated fat molecules into a slightly different, although still unsaturated, form. These so-called trans-fatty acids have had the “molecular kink” taken out of them, and their long straight chains can now cluster together, behaving just like the infamous saturated fats we use in cookies and fried foods. So, in a sense, we have leapt out of the frying pan and into the fire. Consumers may gain confidence by reading labels assuring them that a food contains no saturated fats, but that confidence wavers when they are confronted with the issue of trans-fatty acids. The bottom line is that trans-fatty acids, which on a product label can fall under the “unsaturated” umbrella, may be just as damaging to arteries as the notorious saturated fats. They may have taken the kink out of the molecule, but the hype about reduced saturated fats is still pretty kinky.

Modern brain and cognitive sciences have since evolved away from the logical processor model towards the broader notion of computation, thus framing the mind as a system that performs input-output signal transformations through its ever-changing internal states.

Such stories occurred all over India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia, according to witnesses like Boyce and Hartmann. Latin America saw them, too. The increase in yields made farmland more valuable, which made it worth seizing. Rich landowners, seeing an opportunity for advancement, evicted sharecroppers and renters and went into business for themselves, monopolizing local access to seeds and fertilizer. Increased harvests made prices fall. Big estate-holders could more than make up for the decline with volume; smallholders were immiserated. All of this had begun in Mexico. In the name of increasing yields, Borlaug had shifted the program from the poor in the Bajío to a few prosperous landowners in Sonora. Those landowning farmers had worked hard, but they had reaped almost all the gains. The other big winners were corporate middlemen: grain processors like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill and agrichemical suppliers like Monsanto and DuPont.

is a ‘story processor’, writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘not a logic processor’.

So which is more probable: That today's atheist apocalyptans are unique and right? Or that they are like their many predecessors—at the very least, in their motivations? If anything, the vehemence with which the believers in emergent complexity debunk all religion may betray their own creeping awareness of the religious underpinnings and precedents for their declarations. In fact, the concept of Armageddon first emerged in response to the invention of monotheism by the ancient Persian priest Zoroaster, around the tenth or eleventh century BCE. Until that time, the dominant religions maintained a pantheon of gods reigning in a cyclical precession along with the heavens, so there was little need for absolutes. As religions began focusing on a single god, things got a bit trickier. For if there is only one god, and that god has absolute power, then why do bad things happen? Why does evil still exist? If one's god is fighting for control of the universe against the gods of other people, then there's no problem. Just as in polytheism, the great achievements of one god can be undermined by the destructive acts of another. But what if a religion, such as Judaism of the First and Second Temple era, calls for one god and one god alone? How do its priests and followers explain the persistence of evil and suffering? They do it the same way Zoroaster did: by introducing time into the equation. The imperfection of the universe is a product of its incompleteness. There's only one true god, but he's not done yet. In the monotheist version, the precession of the gods was no longer a continuous cycle of seasonal deities or metaphors. It was nor a linear story with a clear endpoint in the victory of the one true and literal god. Once this happens, time can end. Creation is the Alpha, and the Return is the Omega. It's all good. This worked well enough to assuage the anxieties of both the civilization of the calendar and that of the clock. But what about us? Without time, without a future, how to we contend with the lingering imperfections in our reality? As members of a monotheist culture—however reluctant—we can't help but seek to apply its foundational framework to our current dilemma. The less aware we are of this process—or the more we refuse to admit its legacy in our construction of new models—the more vulnerable we become to its excesses. Repression and extremism are two sides of the same coin. In spite of their determination to avoid such constructs, even the most scientifically minded futurists apply the Alpha-Omega framework of messianic time to their upgraded apocalypse narratives. Emergence takes the place of the hand of God, mysteriously transforming a chaotic system into a self-organized one, with coherence and cooperation. Nobody seems able to explain how this actually happens.

In the handheld world, however, simplicity ruled. Pressing one button on the Palm III instantly showed the day's schedule-processor power had nothing to do with it. Windows CE, they pointed out, just meant "the complexity of Windows in the palm of your hand.

As NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt observes, “The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.