Stephen Henderson

“Speech has only one dimension—its extension in time; writing has two dimensions; models have three; but only signed languages have at their disposal four dimensions—the three spatial dimensions accessible to a signer’s body, as well as the dimension of time. And Sign fully exploits the syntactic possibilities in its four-dimensional channel of expression.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“Nuclear weapons were a discontinuous change in human power. At Hiroshima, a single bomb did the damage of thousands. And six years later, a single thermonuclear bomb held more energy than every explosive used in the entire course of the Second World War.43”
― Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

“The controls of a skilled activity generally function below the level of consciousness on which that activity takes place. The code is a hidden persuader. This applies not only to our visceral activities and muscular skills, but also to the skill of perceiving the world around us in a coherent and meaningful manner.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“This innate structure, this latent structure, is not fully developed at birth, nor is it too obvious at the age of eighteen months. But then, suddenly, and in the most dramatic way, the developing child becomes open to language, becomes able to construct a grammar from the utterances of his parents. He shows a spectacular ability, a genius for language, between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six months”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices