8. Text-free cultures think differently, they’re concrete “image-thinkers,” with situational (vs abstract), aggregative (vs analytic), and participatory (vs objective) thinking patterns. We all start similarly, then learn text-centric thinking. 9. Plato felt poetry was “crippling [to] the mind”—"Our eros for this kind of poetry” (meaning epic and drama) is a perilous “immature passion.” 10. Poetry’s effects were “the exact opposite of rational objectivity.” It transformed you by “mimesis”—you “became Achilles,” absorbing his ethos. This mimesis was “essential to education,” but dangerous. 11. Plato saw how art could manipulate behaviorally dominant unreasoned emotions. Art usually glamorizes or ghettoizes something, even if unwittingly (see beauty vs duty). Plato grasped better than many now how emotions and reason interact. 12. Plato knew “the gods... have the character that the poets… give them” (Gass), so he “waged the first media war" (McLuhan). Philosophy needed “exotic new skills of abstract thought and objectivity,” which meant breaking oral-poetic thinking patterns. 13. Plato’s writing, often a “morass of interpretive confusion” (Goldstein), about writing is ambiguous—it weakened memory, couldn’t defend itself, but its “restructuring of thought” was needed. - http://bigthink.com/errors-we-live-by/our-minds-were-once-shaped-by-poetry