Quote of the Day

Imagine you're training a rat to discriminate a square from a rectangle by giving it a piece of cheese every time it sees a particular rectangle. When it sees a square it receives nothing. Very soon it learns that the rectangle means food; it starts liking the rectaingle--although a behaviorist wouldn't put it that way. Let's just say it starts going toward the rectangle because it prefers the rectangle to the square.

But if you take a longer, thinner rectangle and show it to the rat, it actually prefers the second rectangle to the first. This is because the rat is learning a rule--rectangularity. Longer and thinner equals more rectangular and, so far as the rat is concerned, the more rectangular, the better.

--A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness by V. S. Ramachandran, Chapter 3, p. 43.