Are we still a country of poets and thinkers or has greed and stupidity taken over

Looking at the media, at the number of students in the "hard sciences" like physic or biology and on the sometimes incredible stupid readers letters in some newspapers (How dare this teacher try to teach his students about evolution ? I would not send my kids to him, cause we all know god is the creator.. Yeahr right, hush, hush back dear dark middleage person) I do not know if germany is still that intellectual a country it once was. You just have to turn on TV during the day for an experiment and it is astonishing how stupid some tv shows actually are. And I know of colleagues in my company who haven't read a book in years !

I sometimes get the impression that today the biggest luxury is to have a brain of your own, to care about more than money and profit and the career. To be interested in culture, in history, in the sciences.... We seem to fall back to pre humanist ages in some areas of our society.

Or maybe I am just another culture pessimist ???

Well then lets see when the first "I am an intellectual, get me out of here" show starts for me to watch... ;)

Thinking about thinking

Watching an interesting feature about the power of music I wonder if we should focus more on the trivial when researching the functioning of the brain. Why is it, that we can understand non native speakers even if theyr grammar is real bad ? What are the reasons behind such things as different as enjoying music, painting or doing smalltalk ? Maybe we focus way to much on the rational aspects of the brain and should focus more on the irrational, the emotional parts. To me, intelligence is nothing without emotions. But how much influence is there from emotions in the development of the brain. How much influence is there in the correlation of dreaming and intelligence? I deeply believe that dreaming is sort of a repair and learning mechanism, sort of a way to adopt to new experiences by trying out alternatives.