Quotes from Edward Slingerland

In fact, one of Gopnik's most important arguments is that this cognitive flexibility and creativity is a design feature of youth. She and her colleagues review evidence that suggests that when it comes to novel learning tasks, the young of many species often outperform their elders.20 This is certainly true of humans.

The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar represents one exception to the otherwise typical neglect of intoxication. Dunbar and his colleagues see the physiological effects of alcohol, in particular, as a crucial component in social rituals. Specifically, they point to the endorphin release triggered by booze, especially when drinking is combined with music, dance, and ritual, as a crucial factor allowing humans to cooperate on a scale unattainable by our monkey or ape relatives.

It should puzzle us more than it does that one of the greatest foci of human ingenuity and concentrated effort over the past millennia has been the problem of how to get drunk.

Innovations are always necessarily gradual and incremental, building on the accumulated insights of past humans. We are the cultural animal par excellence, and our ability to share the products of our individual creativity and pass them on to future generations is the key to our ecological dominance.30

We also have to reevaluate the historic benefits of intoxication, at both the individual and group level, in light of the unprecedented threats that intoxicants pose in the modern world. The relatively recent innovations of distillation and social isolation entirely change intoxicants' balance on the razor's edge between order and chaos, creating novel dangers that we only dimly appreciate.

cultures—people are spontaneously generous if forced to make instant decisions but begin to gravitate toward more selfish strategies if given time to think. All of this suggests that honest behavior is governed by automatic mental processes, whereas controlled processes are involved in lying or faking. In other words, effortless, unselfconscious behavior—behavior that is wu-wei—acts like a window into our true character.

My central argument is that getting drunk, high, or otherwise cognitively

O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil!… O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance, revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!

Our desire for alcohol is not an evolutionary mistake. There are good reasons for why we get drunk.

We cannot properly grasp the dynamics of human social life unless we understand the role that intoxicants have played in making civilization possible.

we are simply not well adapted, evolutionarily, to be able to consume alcohol safety outside of the traditional context of ritual and social controls.

It must grace the festivity of the wedding; it must enliven the gloom of the funeral. It must cheer the intercourse of friends and enlighten the fatigue of labor. Success deserves a treat and disappointment needs it. The busy drink because they are busy; the idle because they have nothing else to do. The farmer must drink because his work is hard; the mechanic because his employment is sedentary and dull. It is warm, men drink to be cool; it is cool, they drink to be warm.27

A substantial literature on "verbal overshadowing," for instance, suggests that consciously reflecting on our perceptions or evaluations of taste, and then being forced to put them into words, actually impairs our judgment.

are spontaneously generous if forced to make instant decisions but begin to gravitate toward more selfish strategies if given time to think.

are spontaneously generous if forced to make instant decisions but begin to gravitate toward more selfish strategies if given time to think. All of this suggests that honest behavior is governed by automatic mental processes, whereas controlled processes are involved in lying or faking. In other words, effortless, unselfconscious behavior—behavior that is wu-wei—acts like a window into our true character.

No single person could hope to reproduce this inherited wisom on his own. As Confucius puts it, "I once engaged in thought for an entire day without eating and an entire night without sleeping., but it did no good. It would have been better for me to have spent that time learning." Thinking on one's own might be compared to randomly banging on a piano: a million monkeys given a million years might produce something, but its better to start with Mozart.

work in social psychology has made it clear that cognitive control is a limited resource. When a teacher taps on a dozing student's desk and says: "Pay attention!" it turns out that this is not a metaphor: attention is costly, and if it is "spent" on one task there is less available to spend on another. This phenomenon is known as "ego depletion". ... The moral? Effort is effort, mental or physical.