Sleep, The Elixir Of Health?

摘要

Are we humans hard-wired to keep making a very distinctive kind of mistake, namely, to think that the "figure" is always more important than the "ground"? I allude here to the capacity of animal visual systems to differentiate individual objects from their backgrounds, thus enabling attention to be paid to significant things - food, predators - in an environment. Natural camouflage, such as the leopard's spots and the zebra's stripes, exists to combat figure-ground differentiation, making the struggle for survival an incidentally decorative matter.rnI'm using the figure-ground concept figuratively, to draw attention to what we miss because of our propensity to think that what dominates our attention is necessarily the most important. Familiarity breeds invisibility. This is why Wittgenstein insisted that philosophy must include reminding ourselves of what we know so well that we ignore it.rnThink of your skin. It is the largest organ in the body, and it performs a variety of functions crucial to health and indeed lifernitself. It breathes, combats would-be invasive organisms, absorbs nutrients, senses the environment, lubricates itself, excretes, and stops us from exploding, leaking, drying up and getting too hot or cold.