Words Are the Most Powerful Drug | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

less than 1m read

·Nov 11, 2024

Humans stand alone in the animal kingdom. Our power over nature is unparalleled. What separates us? What is it that makes us human? The answer lies in our mastery of communication: the power to express complex thoughts and ideas; to organize and think collectively. These are the engines of our success, driving our ascent from hunter-gatherers to a global civilization.

Communication is everywhere. Our technology has propelled us to a new age of interconnectedness. Waves of data pass through us at the speed of light. Music, language, art, the written word—through these tools, the boundless human imagination has been given a voice. They give us self-expression and collective knowledge.

But they have a dark side. These tools are so powerful that they distort our very perception of reality. They can subvert and corrupt, and even manipulate entire populations. Communication is what makes us, us. How did it emerge? How did it transform us into a creature that could dream, into a creature that could imagine, where millions could eventually learn to cooperate, to overcome, to transcend?

This is the story of how our world came to be; how communication defined our species and created the modern age. How it connected humanity and sent our voice on a course for the stars. This is Origins.

15 Mistakes Smart People Don't Make Twice

Make Plasma With Grapes In The Microwave!

View All

How Scientists and Citizens Are Protecting Ancient Ruins in Peru | National Geographic

(Slow guitar music) In Peru, it is very common that archaeological sites are surrounded by local communities, villages, towns, where people live usually in the most traditional ways. Pachacamac is a huge archaeological site south of Lima. Around it, we ha…

Visualizing Fourier expansion of square wave

So we started with a square wave that had a period of two pi. Then we said, “Hmm, can we represent it as an infinite series of weighted sines and cosines?” Working from that idea, we were actually able to find expressions for the coefficients for a sub 0…

Organization of multicellular organisms | High school biology | Khan Academy

In this video, we’re going to take a journey in life and we’re going to start with the smallest scale of life that is indisputably life, and that is the cell. Now, the reason why I qualified that a little bit is some people debate whether viruses are livi…

Identifying Unknown Soldiers | Ghosts of Pearl Harbor

[music playing] NARRATOR: Of the 429 men who died on the battleship “USS Oklahoma,” only 35 were identified in the years immediately following the attack. The rest were buried in graves marked “Unknown.” But almost 75 years later, one of these unknown me…

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) | Biomolecules | MCAT | Khan Academy

I’m here with Emily, our biology content fellow, to talk about PCR or polymerase chain reaction, which you’ve actually done a lot of. Why have you done PCR? PCR was kind of the mainstay of my graduate project, where I built all sorts of different recomb…

Would You Bite Into a Raw Bison Liver? | Expedition Raw

What am I supposed to do with this? I am a white kid from Brooklyn, and I’d never been to an Indian Reservation before. Is this the liver? Take a bite. The bite like this. I’ll never… just like this. You all have to now. It’s completely sterile. There you…

Words Are the Most Powerful Drug | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

More Articles