In most meetings, pride or caution still forbids one to say what one feels most deeply.
– Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History Of Humanity
I think he’s talking about ‘meetings’ in the sense of everyday human encounters, but it’s probably at least as true about business meetings.
… freedom is not just a matter of rights, to be expressed in law. The right to express yourself still leaves you with the need to decide what to say, to find someone to listen, and to make your words sound beautiful; these are skills which need to be acquired.
– Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity
This is the book I’m reading at the moment, and I highly recommend it. Zeldin has an amazing talent for creating profound aphorisms – sometimes two or three to a page!
Very few animals can recognise their own image in a mirror – a crucial test of how self-aware they are. It used to be thought that this ability was only possessed by humans and the great apes. More recently dolphins have been found to recognise themselves. Now we find that elephants can do it too.
In the video attached to this New Scientist article, an elephant tries to touch a mark painted on its head (where it can only be seen in the mirror). Previous experiments to measure the self-awareness of elephants have failed because the mirrors weren’t big enough.
