p. 15-16

Many consider learning to be a hallmark of intelligence. It turns out that almost all of the known nine thousand species of birds have a song, but about half of them have to learn how to sing. If they lack the opportunity to learn, they develop songs different from those heard in nature. Young birds must listen to adults, then practice on their own. Birds even appear to practice singing in their dreams. Research shows that sleeping songbirds fire their neurons in intricate patterns similar to those they produce when singing. Some songbirds, like Canaries, change repertoires every year. Scientists correlated this to changes in the birds' brains and went on to find that adult canaries generate a steady stream of new neurons. This overturned a century of scientific theory which held that brains in adult animals do not change. Now it appears that all animals including humans grow neurons throughout their adult lives. On this count, our brains are not so different from those of birds-fortunately.

~Narby, Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge

p. 43

Ottabah Cugoano was about thirteen years old when he was kidnapped from his home on the Gold Coast in present-day Ghana. He and some eighteen or twenty boys and girls were playing in a field "when several great ruffians came upon us" with pistols and swords. Distraught after his abduction, young Ottobah refused to eat or drink for several days. The horrors he saw and felt, he later wrote, "cannot be well described; I saw many of my miserable countrymen chained two and two, some handcuffed and some with their hands tied behind." When the slave ship arrived off the coast to take them away to the New World, "it was a most horrible scene; there was nothing to be heard but rattling of chains, smacking of whips, and the groans and cries of our fellow men." Aboard the vessel, there was an aborted attempt at a revolt. "Death", Ottobah wrote, seemed more preferable than life", and the boys and women, who were not shackled, plotted to "burn and blow up" the ship "and to perish all together in the flames".

~Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood

p. 50

Who are we? Except in dreams of an abstract world, the self does not exist in isolation. This phenomenon is in every way a symbiotic creature. At the moment of my birth I learned to breath. The air that filled my lungs became me. Months later my breath found a voice, the names I learned were for all that surrounded me. The sounds I formed were tailored to the capacities of a tongue, palate, ear that had evolved in tandem with the rest of life over billions of years. The shape of my psyche, how I see, even what I think of as my needs, certainly my desires have come to me through the complex and refined processes of a particular culture.

~Griffin, Eros of Everyday Life