Theos-Talk Archives (November 2001 Message tt00251)

Hi nos,

Friday, 16 November, 2001, you wrote:

> A lecturer at Uni was giving us a lesson on the visual centres of the
> brain and he used an example - which I suppose is racist unless of
> course it's true - he said that african races have been shown to have -

Yeah, had the same sort of lecture, but I dont think it was racist. It
was about perceptual differences of people in different enviroments.
People who live in Euclidian worlds are familiar with squares,
triangles, solids, sharp edges etc and easily differentiate one from
the other. A person from a deep rural environment (of whatever race,
South American Indian, African, Papua New Gueanean or whatever)
without a tradition of a geometrical world would be used to the shapes
of nature - leaf clusters, clouds, rock formations, animal shapes etc
and if suddenly confronted with a geometrical world would find it
difficult, until they had adapted, to distinguish the squares,
triangles, solids, sharp edges etc... On the other hand, such a person
could easily orientate themself in a jungle or forest and thread their
way through seeming thickets in which a westerner would be completely
lost.



Best regards,
Alan

mailto:alwilli@iafrica.com