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lectures > lectures spring 1999

The Axemaker's Gift

Dr. Robert Ornstein
April 17 1999

'Western thought' is often characterised as rational and linear. Its triumphs are logic and science, both of which we hold to have roots in Greece. One unrecognised stimulus of this kind of thinking came, not in the formal inventions of Aristotle nor in the dialogues of Plato, but simply in the Greek development of an alphabet. Once the myriad of sounds and signs, so common in previous civilisations, could be reduced to a few dozen, the ability to link sound and sign took off, and literacy was possible for the many. The way language was written, too, influenced the way in which our brains can handle language, since the style of Greek writing now fitted into the way the two halves of the brain process information. It isn't that language determines thought, but rather that some languages 'whisper' to us to move in certain directions. This lecture will consider these and other points raised in The Axemaker's Gift.

Dr. Robert Ornstein received his PhD at Stanford University in 1968. His thesis, On the Experience of Time, received the American Institute for Research Creative Talent Award and is still in print as a book. Since then he has written some 20 books on the nature of the human mind and brain and their relationship to thought, health and individual and social consciousness. He won the American Psychological Association's Master Lecture Award and has received commendations from UNESCO, UNICEF and others. His most recent books are The Evolution of Human Consciousness, The Axemaker's Gift (with James Burke) and The Right Mind, a re-evaluation of the research into the functions of the two sides of the brain, the area with which Dr. Ornstein is most associated.