There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe.
Interpretation
The quote explores whether kissing is a natural human instinct or a learned behavior that has become widespread.
Joshua Foer's quote raises the intriguing question of the origin of the kiss, suggesting it could either be an innate behavior that is common to all humans, similar to language and laughter, or a cultural invention, akin to fire and clothing. This duality highlights how certain actions may either be biologically driven or socially constructed, prompting deeper reflection on human connection and communication.
In practice
During a wedding speech, one might refer to the quote to highlight the significance of the kiss in the ceremony.
We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.
Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear.
I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.
If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.
To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.
As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently an knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.
If you see me as just the princess then you misunderstand who I am and what I have been through.
I sang with my father for over 50 years, and now all of a sudden he's gone, and I just dropped out.
Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
Those with dementia are still people and they still have stories and they still have character and they're all individuals and they're all unique. And they just need to be interacted with on a human level.
There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.
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