Does Philosophy Hold Crucial Insights for the Neuroscience of Inspiration?
How Charles Taylor's Exploration of Language is Shedding Light on the Link Between Reading and Big Ideas
In a passage in Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert wrote one of history’s most beautiful descriptions of language: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” As a cognitive neuroscientist, I study how we read this sentence: How we decode it, analyze it, and importantly, infer its meanings and create new ones from it. Philosopher Charles Taylor’s work sheds light on the mystery of why we persist, epoch after epoch, …
