À la lumière de ce que nous savons

A wise man once said to me –a psychiatrist, but to say more would be to get ahead of myself –that I had placed too much faith in trying to understand her. I was trying to understand her because . . . well, because understanding is what we set so much store in, understanding others, ourselves, understanding the world; because of that, but also because understanding is a mode of control, it subdues the unruliness of people in one’s head, it brings order and confers control where it is most sought, in that theatre in the mind in which the avatars of people we know stand as actors, resisting direction.

Most human disputes, one might speculate, ask us to choose not between arguments proceeding from empirical observations about the world but between competing sets of bare assumptions.

...cognitive load is when you give someone a task to occupy his cognitive functions and then ask him questions while he’s performing the task.It’s a way of getting past conscious censors.
(La charge cognitive est lorsqu'on donne à quelqu'un une tâche à accomplir, qui occupe ses fonctions cognitives et pendant son accomplissement on lui pose des questions.C'est une méthode pour supprimer les censeurs conscients.)

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend. –William Blake
( Il est plus facile de pardonner un ennemi qu'un ami ).

You know the joke? What do you call five hundred lawyers at the bottom of a lake?
I don’t know, he replied.
A good start.

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem. –W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

My father tells a story about Richard Feynman, who’d been dubbed the Great Explainer because of his talent for explaining theoretical physics. When a journalist asked him to describe in three minutes what he’d won the Nobel Prize for, Feynman replied that if he could explain it in three minutes, it wouldn’t be worth a Nobel Prize.

I had a friend at Princeton, a Russian graduate student. He had a cute message on his answering machine, delivered in his thick Russian accent: Who are you and what do you want? Some people spend a lifetime trying to answer these questions. You, however, have thirty seconds.

According to the science, it seems that during stress, groups of neurons known as amygdalae are engaged into activity. Associated with this is a spiked increase in the number of memories recorded by the brain in every tiny interval of time –in every instant, you might say. The sensation of how much time passed during an event is dependent on the number of memories associated with the event by the brain; the more memories, however instantaneous, the greater the length of time that is perceived to have passed. That is why we think time slowed down, when in fact we captured an album of photographs in the blink of an eye.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said: When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.
(L'archevêque Desmond Tutu disait: Quand les missionnaires sont arrivés en Afrique,ils avaient la Bible et nous la terre.Ils nous ont dit,"Prions ensemble". Nous avons fermé les yeux.Quand nous les avons réouverts, nous avions la Bible,ils avaient la terre.)