{"id":8496,"date":"2019-10-16T11:37:14","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T16:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=8496"},"modified":"2019-10-16T11:37:14","modified_gmt":"2019-10-16T16:37:14","slug":"delight-in-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=8496","title":{"rendered":"DELIGHT IN LEARNING"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>From my forthcoming book on history, <em>Making Connections: Discovering the Riches of the Past<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>According to neuroscientist, Daniel Levitin, we are hardwired (he thinks due to evolution, I think due to God) to name our world. Not only are we hardwired to do so, but we delight in doing so:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>This innate passion for naming and categorizing can be brought into stark relief by the fact that <em>most<\/em> of the naming we do in the plant world might be considered strictly unnecessary. Out of the 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye. Yet our brains evolved to receive a pleasant shot of dopamine when we learn something new and again when we classify it systematically into an ordered structure.<a href=\"#_ftn1\" name=\"_ftnref1\">[1]<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>With respect to history, it is easy to see that classification (knowing some of the differences between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment) provides a necessary scaffolding to keep learning <em>and<\/em> delighting in one\u2019s understanding of the world.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ftnref1\" name=\"_ftn1\">[1]<\/a><strong> Daniel J. Levitin, <em>The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in an Age of Information Overload<\/em> (New York, NY: Dutton, 2014), 32.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From my forthcoming book on history, Making Connections: Discovering the Riches of the Past: According to neuroscientist, Daniel Levitin, we are hardwired (he thinks due to evolution, I think due to God) to name our world. Not only are we hardwired to do so, but we delight in doing so: This innate passion for naming [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[120,37,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brain-research","category-learningeducation","category-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8496"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8497,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8496\/revisions\/8497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}