Vinayak Hegde

“Over the past few millennia, we’ve co-opted brain circuits already in use to scan the world for food or danger, in a sense fooling ourselves into paying attention to the inert little symbols on the page. Brain scans have shown that areas once used exclusively for scanning the horizon—for recognizing animal tracks, ripe berries, and snakes in trees—became the region that allowed us to quickly recognize letters and words. We’ve trained our brain to read by modifying the structures we once used to sense danger and movement and odd shapes in the grass. Dehaene and other researchers have found that most of our letter shapes are actually transpositions of key shapes from nature to which we’ve learned pay attention: a “Y” resembles the crook of tree branches, a “T” (on its side) the shape formed whenever one object masks another—imagine a telephone pole breaking the line of the horizon. “T-detector” neurons help us determine which object is in front, Dehaene wrote. “We did not invent most of our letter shapes: they lay dormant in our brain for millions of years, and were merely rediscovered when our species invented writing and the alphabet.”
― Greg Toppo, The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter

“I don't remember the last day of the war.

But I remember the first time you could take a shower.”
― Zeina Abirached, I Remember Beirut

“Maybe that is why we are all interested in the stories of others, especially the drastic ones. So we can vicariously experience what could very well have been our own story but for a quirk of fate.”
― Ajit Harsinghani, The Living Road

“If you look at the vast majority of the games—and there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them—you don’t learn much, but you practice what you’ve already learned.” They reminded him of the first early motion pictures. When people first started making movies, they essentially just filmed stage plays because that’s what they knew how to do. “But then they realized that making a movie meant something very different from doing a play on the stage.”
― Greg Toppo, The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter