> I like understanding systems by what happens when they break. Same, though I am not an engineer, more a denizen of the adjacent service and repair field, but

> I like understanding systems by what happens when they break. Same, though I am not an engineer, more a denizen of the adjacent service and repair field, but I have been dabbling in development, lately. Fixing broken things because I grew up in a household that was too poor to think of anything as disposable is how I learned probably 90% of what I know, providing me with an understanding of the fragility of systems and the importance of anticipating maintenance the design process. I see the forward was written by Oliver Sacks, whom I've read and enjoyed in the past, but from more of a pop-Psychology angle. But what you say about language being related to how we think of time and forming memories strikes me. I once heard that Indigenous Australian cultures had a different concept of time than Western culture does, passed down through the language used in their folklore. I posit that we can some evidence for proof of this happening in Western cultures currently with the way that we talk about decades. With the advent of the year 2000, we lost the ability colloquially refer to the decade we were presently in. Prior to that, we were living in "the 90's," perhaps being born in "the 60's, 70's or 80's." Each of those decades even evokes a certain composite memory of the styles of clothing people may have worn, or the music we listened to, popular automobiles, etc. The character of the decade coalesced around the colloquial name. 2000 hit, and we didn't know how to refer to it. Some folks tried to make the "aughts" happen, which felt awkward or "the 2000's" which seemed to generalized and not specific enough to be referring to the current decade. Then 2010's, which we didn't really even bother calling "the Teens" as I recall, because by then we'd fallen out of the habit of referring to time by decade. The result is seeing a movie from 2005 and feeling like that was so very long ago, versus when I watched Star Wars for the billionth time in 1997 and the 20 years that had passed since it's release didn't seem like much time at all; only two decades. Anyway, getting a ramble on to show agreement, but you get the idea. I might have to look for some science fiction authors who have tried to tackle this, see what sort of thought-experiments we can do when we strip language as we know it from the development of the human mind.