Rumon Carter | Found

Adding to the (must) reading list: Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

We are living in the eye of a great storm of extinction, on a planet hemorrhaging living things so fast that half of its nine million species could be gone by the end of the century. At my place, the teddy bears and giggling penguins kept coming. But I didn’t realize the lengths to which humankind now has to go to keep some semblance of actual wildlife in the world. As our own species has taken over, we’ve tried to retain space for at least some of the others being pushed aside, shoring up their chances of survival. But the threats against them keep multiplying and escalating. Gradually, America’s management of its wild animals has evolved, or maybe devolved, into a surreal kind of performance art.

[…]

For me, wildlife has always been a reminder of all the mystery that exists outside my own experience — out there, beyond the suburban rec room I felt trapped in as a kid, watching Wild America on PBS. There’s a special amazement that comes from watching a grizzly smack a salmon out of a river, or even from seeing just how hideous certain bottom-dwelling fish look. It enlarges your sense of the world, the way looking out from the top of a tall hill does.

via: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/16/wild-ones-jon-mooallem/

On the functional value of forgetting

From a Globe & Mail article about the right to be forgotten in the digital age come these observations regarding the role of forgetting in cognition:

“For almost all of human history, collecting information and storing information was time-consuming and costly, and therefore we stored as little as possible,” says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor at Oxford University and the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the New Digital Age. “Even the stuff we stored we rarely made use of, because retrieval was so expensive.”

[…]

“Human forgetting actually performs a very important function for us individually as well as for society,” Prof. Mayer-Schönberger says. “It lets us act and think in the present rather than be tethered to an ever-more-comprehensive past. The beauty of the human mind and human forgetting is that, as we forget, we’re able to generalize, to abstract, to see the forest rather than the individual tree. And if we cannot forget, then all we will have are the individual trees to go by.”

[…]

To further illustrate the value of forgetting, Prof. Mayer-Schönberger points to Funes the Memorious, a short story by the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The title character, a boy who suffered a horse-riding accident, is incapable of forgetting and becomes lost in specificity: the creation of a new numeric system, the classification of his every childhood memory.

“To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions,” Borges writes. “In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.”

The source article, published in the Globe & Mail Newspaper, can be found here.