16 quotes
We may learn everything about something, and we may learn something about everything, but we're never going to learn everything about everything.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
In the 1930s an anthropologist named Paul Radin first described it as "shamans being half mad," shamans being "healed madmen." This fits exactly.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
There is no reason to be less moved by nature around us simply because it's revealed to have more layers of complexity than we first observed.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
When you look at traditional human society, they all have shamans.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Western religions, all the leading religions, have this schizotypalism shot through them from top to bottom.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
In order to have a couple of shamans on hand in your group, you're willing to put up with the occasional third cousin who's schizophrenic.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
I am a reasonably emotional person, and I see no reason why that's incompatible with being a scientist.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
When you study science, and especially these realms of the biology of what makes us human, what's clear is that every time you find out something, that brings up ten new questions, and half of those are better questions than you started with.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
There is a need for this subtype — but not too many.
The critical thing with schizotypal shamanism is, it is not uncontrolled the way it is in the schizophrenic.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Shamans are not evolutionarily unfit.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common?
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Why do we have schizophrenia in every culture on this planet? From an evolutionary perspective, schizophrenia is not a cool thing to have. ... Schizophrenia is not an adaptive trait.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
The amazing thing is, nobody knows what the rules are! Talmudic rabbis have been scratching each others' eyes out for centuries arguing over which rules go into the 613. The numbers are more important than the content.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
The purpose of science in understanding who we are as humans is not to rob us of our sense of mystery, not to cure us of our sense of mystery. The purpose of science is to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate that mystery.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)