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Even animals need predictive powers. To see into the future,
simple creatures like the frog have a pre-wired model of the world.
The frog is built with a set of neural trip-lines between his eye, the
visual processors in his brain, and his tongue. These nerve cells are
constructed to follow a set of simple instructions: erratically moving
object? Flick tongue. Motionless object: don't bother. It works. The
frog ends up with food. His nerves embody a model of a planet in
which objects flitting by are usually delicious.
But the frog's pre-wired picture of the world will not change with
circumstances. Offer a starving frog an immobilized fly and he simply
will not touch it. His built-in portrait of the universe tells him that only
objects which dart around are fit for dinner. If a captive frog goes on
long enough ignoring the torpid bits of nourishment offered him, the
flaws in his unbending world-model could kill him.68
More complex animals, on the other hand, build parts of their
models on experience. Their pictures of the invisible world are
changeable. A dog is capable of quickly developing a model of things
it's never seen before. Lock the hound in a room it's never visited, and
the beast will immediately check out all the details, building up an
image of the place, searching for an exit it's never even glimpsed.
Thanks to an ability to imagine walls and doorways it has never seen,
the curious canine is able to predict the existence of an escape route.69
Albert Einstein used the mathematical model provided by
Bernhard Riemann to predict everything from the energy in the atom
to the motion of light. But instead of employing math to construct
models, our minds most often use metaphors.70 Our brains are
picture-making machines. Every culture has a worldview, not an
algebraic set of cosmic calculations. Uneducated medieval Christians
pictured the earth as a flat disk which ended somewhere over the
watery horizon. They predicted that small boats which sailed too far
from the Atlantic shore would never be seen again. Renaissance
intellectuals, on the other hand, revived the old Greek image of the
terrestrial surface as a sphere. To Columbus, this meant that he might
sail off into the western sunset and emerge with the sunrise on the
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