Metaphors of the day

It's honestly strange that I've only recently realised this recently...
I guess it is very easy to fall in to the trap of believing that we are processesors of words as symbols with intrinsic meaning, rather than embodied organisms thinking using our bodies! When one is speaking in their native tongue, you could so easily make sense of the words you speak by resorting to abstract concepts. Why not, everybody does it. But it ultimately conceals the truth.
You could forget that your brain actually developed out of scratch, and that it primarily relied on its early visual, auditory, olfactory and tactile senses to make sense of the world, before your "abstract thinking" regions even developed.

Here are some nice ones that prove we think with our bodies :)

INTIMACY IS CLOSENESS: "We're close"
AFFECTION IS WARMTH: "She greeted me warmly"
IMPORTANT IS BIG: "It was an big day for me"
ORGANISATION IS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE: "How do these theories fit together?"
HELP IS PHYSICAL SUPPORT - "Support your local charity" etc etc

THINKING IS MOVING:
"I'm stuck thinking about yesterday". "My mind was racing".
"I've been pursuing this topic for a while now". "I follow what you're saying". "How did you reach that conclusion?" --or sight-- "I see what you mean"

EMOTIONAL STATES (or responsibilities) ARE LOCATIONS / WEIGHTS:
"I'm bordering on depression"
"She's weighed down"

THOUGHTS HAVE A PHYSICAL STRUCTURE:
"That idea has many sides to it". "That is a sweet idea" (is it an accident that we eat lots of sugary food, and say that things are 'sweet' today?)
"Something doesn't smell right about that theory"
"He swallowed that idea whole"
"That idea is too much for me to digest"


Another interesting, related fact
** People who have been moving forward in a queue are more likely to interpret "Wednesday's meeting has been moved forward two days" to mean that the meeting is now to be held on Friday, while those who have not been waiting in a queue are more likely to think that the meeting will now be held on Monday. Weirdness.

Banana Smell Everywhere!

Can somebody explain this???

I ate a banana 4 nights ago, and I've been smelling banana ever since. Everywhere. Not only at home. It's a strong smell, and it's ALWAYS there. When I go to sleep and wake up and when I'm at uni and at the movies and even when I'm eating other foods, I'm smelling banana. All the time.

This is the third time this ever-present-smell thing has happened, and each time, it has involved banana - last time it lasted for about 6 days.
It's doing strange things for my memory too - am constantly remembering things that I did during the last 'episode' of all-present banana smell. I'm busy trying to enjoy myself now so that I'll have good memories for next time...
Btw, I've not had any traumatic events occur in my life involving a banana

Disorders and DSM IV

A 'disorder' is meant to not only make you weird/unnormal within a social group, but to reduce your ability to survive. (A friend put it that "weirdness" of character is usually a phenomenon which arises from analysing an individual relative to a SMALL group. That is, in amongst a group of 80, somebody might appear "weird", but in a larger population, say 20 million, there may be 50,000 others like that person. A humorous way to see this is that if a genius is a 1-in-a-million person, there are at least 6,000 geniuses in this world.). Once we've measured averages, we could construct Bell curves in many dimensions, and determine an overall "weirdness" factor for any given person.

As always, things which under many circumstances help people survive (but don't necessarily earn the affections of others in their social group) such as aggression/cunning/lying or even a compulsion to steal are characterised negatively, as disorders. Such a classification is understandable from the point of view of society. [We have an uneasy relationship with social manipulation, finding it at times funny and, usually, a flavour intelligence, which we like, but then, it is also exploitative, and we don't like things which threaten ourselves...so socially awkward people would be more likely to condemn socially exploitative behaviour]

But looking at DSM IV (Diagnostics and Statistics Manual, what psychologists use to diagnose their patients), it seems that a ridiculous number of normal behavioural traits are being called 'disorders'.
What DSM IV contains is nothing more than a moral straitjacket being put on the normal spectrum of human behaviour.
Often, the 'disorders' that it describes are HIGHLY adaptive, or useful under many circumstances. In other areas, its criteria are at times absurd, mutually re-inforcing or contradictory, self-fulfilling, or otherwise useless.

Rationality & Empathy

There's something wrong with how our brains work

Consider that somebody who couldn't kill somebody from a distance of 1m can pick off dots using a machine gun mounted on a helicopter and see it more as a game. It's indicative that the brain is able to deal with images without processing what it rationally knows about reality and allowing the empathetic part of the brain to register this event.
Now consider all the other problems that this aspect of our brain activity creates.

Now hear this joke about what it is like to be rational:
"A lot of people imagine astronauts would be quite sick at the thought of drinking their own recycled urine. But if you don't mind being launched in to space, you probably won't mind drinking water obtained from your urine"

Brains

The human brain must be a raw computer, because of the remarkable things that autistic savants can achieve with numbers...eg calculate the square root of 83534251 to 10 decimal places.
They must be accessing a lower-level structure in the brain that is a number-crunching machine. With normal human experiences such as recognising your mum's face, or the sound of her voice being a representation of those number patterns.

Glasses

I watched a documentary on smell a while ago. As 90% of taste comes from the olfactory receptors rather than the tongue, even 'experts' can't tell the difference between coffee and tea when their noses are plugged. This guy that completely lost his sense of smell started losing much of his memory too, due to the interconnectedness of the brain parts and the way that his was wired. He claimed he has started hating eating too, and was highly depressed.

This got me wondering how not having the best eyesight might change your brain. If one has better eyesight, presumably, the brain would need to expend more resources to give a the clearer picture of what you see (Cognitive load theory). Just as a man who goes blind compensates for this as his brain re-wires itself so that his sense of touch and hearing are more sensitive, varying degrees of blindness, or even short-sightedness, must alter the brain’s workings quite profoundly. Perhaps even affecting your skills in maths, science, languages etc. Who knows in what way. Maybe having great eyesight improves your art skills.

The Search Function

1] We are unaware about HOW we recall things….the process seems to occur completely outside our control, as does the beating of the heart. So how does memory recall work? You don't think very hard; you more hope your brain fetches the memory for you. And yet you're happy when you remember something. I guess the pride is that you stored that memory to retrieve in the first place! Is the brain scanning for associations? To what could the brain’s “search mechanism” be compared? A computer searching for files? What is the “method of storage”? -------- When you get the feeling that you are "getting close" to remembering the answer, or if you get the feeling it starts with an M, are you literally searching somewhere near the information required and have briefly scanned over it, or a part of it? Somebody help me out with this one!

2] For memory scientists. I figured out something while playing Memory Blocks (where you flip blocks, trying to find matching pairs). Which you should investigate. I only ever set the record the first time I play, so the short-term memory must confuse itself, the map of which block is where the second time I play must interfere with the map from the first game. Etc

3] If somebody asks you “What do you think about X” you often realise during your response, mid-sentence, that you are wrong (or that you have not given the matter adequate thought). This is because different parts of the brain work at different speeds. (On a slightly different but related note, nobody says “I hear a ball dropping now” – you know the event will be finished by the time you’ve completed the sentence, yet you say “I’m in Love” because the parts of the brain making you feel love are active for much longer periods). After somebody asks a question, our auditory systems often start responding before our brains have been able to recall ideas we learnt before and stored, and ideas we no longer actually believe in start to stream out. Then the other systems of the brain catch up, and we realise that we’ve been talking bullshit. Goddamn

***

An atheist says, hey, let's not spend our time and money building a church, let's build a hospital instead.

Evolution of abilities

Logical, mathematical and verbal skills augment a person’s other abilities...They don't detract from one's creativity...which, by the way, is about thinking repeatedly about something [NOT lightbulb moments]. The regions of the brain responsible for our higher-order logical and verbal capacities evolved after our amygdala did. So, if there is any behaviour that is likely to be unevenly distributed amongst the population...it is the capacity for structured, logical thought.
This is not to say that logical skills are only found in Maths, the sciences, Philosophy, or essay and speech writing!! One can take a logical approach to studying history, to analysing the law, to baking a cake, to understanding another person, or to the architect’s process of design. But mathematicians have their own aesthetic ideals, and could ultimately create artworks that other mathematicians think are beautiful, but which attract critical scorn from artsy types. But the artsy type couldn’t necessarily solve equations, with any amount of practise.

The reason why we can’t get computers to do certain things is that we don't EXACTLY know how we ourselves get the ‘inspiration’ to produce music, to write poetry or to paint vividly and creatively. I think its a numbers game, about risk-taking, and coming up with thousands of ideas, many of them bad. And rhuminating on them - as in when you wake up, and things are clear. Or in those experiments where, although you have no idea how you work out which word compliments each word from a list, you eventually blurt it out as your brain has been processing it all along. Sharing ideas with others like you but also getting input from very different brains has got to help too.