Applying ancient divination to modern intuition | Peter Struck | TEDxPenn

Most ancient people were in the habit of imagining that messages from their gods were built into the world around them: in the oracles they consulted, in their dreams, and in the animals they sacrificed. They drew on them to sort out their thinking on knotty issues they faced in their lives, seeing more deeply into the past, present, or future. This talk explores the similarities between these ancient habits of mind and our own modern fascination, attested to in the discoveries of the cognitive sciences that lay behind books like Malcolm Gladwell's.

Peter Struck is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research engages with the history of the construction of meaning, in divination and in ancient notions of the organism. In 2004, he won Penn's Lindback Award, the university's highest award for teaching. Currently, he is writing about the applications of Greek and Roman divination in "Divine Signs and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Divination in Antiquity".

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

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