محمد الخواص

“Whenever a noise exceeds our processing abilities—we can’t
decipher all the different sound waves hitting our hair cells—
the mind . . . stops trying to understand the individual notes
and seeks instead to understand the relationships between the
notes. The human auditory cortex pulls off this feat by using
it's short- term memory for sound (in the left posterior hemisphere) to uncover patterns at the large level of the phrase,
motif, and movement. This new approximation lets us extract order from all those notes haphazardly ͒flying through
space, and the brain is obsessed with order . . .
It is this psychological instinct—this desperate neuronal
search for a pattern, any pattern, that is the source of music . . . We continually abstract on our own inputs, inventing
patterns in order to keep pace with the onrush of noise. And
once the brain ͒finds a pattern, it immediately starts to make
predictions . . . It projects imaginary order into the future . . .
The structure of music reflects the human brain’s penchant for patterns . . . But before a pattern can be desired by
the brain, that pattern must play hard to get”
― Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction

“العقل لا يكون عقلا إلا إذا كان ناقداً”
― جورج طرابيشي

“إن ليلة الصيف تمتدّ في تقدير عقارب الساعة ١٠ ساعات، سواء ذلك ليل العاشق الناعم بالوصال، وليل السجين المكبل بالأغلال، مع أن ليلة الوصال لحظة، ولحظة العذاب دهر طويل؛ أليست هذه هي النظرية النسبية؟
لقد سرقها (أينشتاين) من ابن زيدون حين قال:
إن يطل بعدك ليلي فلَكَم
بتّ أشكو قِصر الليل معك”
― علي الطنطاوي

“humans are a strange lot. We have the power to analyze and explore the world around us, yet panic as soon as the evidence threatens to violate our expectations”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?