But I choose not live my life like that. Not now, not ever. Can you? I honestly prefer to lead a life in search for information, further knowledge, and culture, while having the possibility of changing my mood, thoughts, and actions based on this data, instead of living a “normal” life in the safety and comfort of ignorance.

A friend of mine once spoke to me about three kinds of events that open your mind to new ideas, possibilities and information:

• Meeting someone from another country.
• Travelling to another country.
• Learning another language.

In my own opinion, having passed through those three events, I concur with him. They really change your perspective and view of the world, society, and culture.

I would like to add another three mind-opening stages that help you form a sense of identity:

• Adolescence & friendship
• Literature & philosophical talks
• Having a partner

Why do I consider these stages/events as meaningful components of identity, maturity and knowledge?

Adolescence, at least in many cultures, is considered a stage of rebellion, change, transition, problems, questions, and overall madness. But it is in this stage where many of the strong lifelong ideas are formed. It is also in this stage when true friends are found, friendships that may last a lifetime. These are vital components of identity. And even if many of the ideas you have while going through this stage may be wrong, it is a necessary step to have these wrong ideas in order to clearly define them and change them further on.

Literature opens your mind to understand how others think, and allows you to develop critical thinking. This paves the way to formulating opinions based on facts instead of biased assumptions. The more you learn, the more you know, the more you can speak about, the more you can teach about, and so on.

This also brings me to the point of philosophy, and philosophical talks. These types of talks seem like endless debates about this and that. However, the actual discussion may open your mind to search for more information about specific topics and formulate a better opinion. These talks can then lead to better structured debates, and finally to an idea which may spark a change. That is why I consider the basis of all this, these philosophical talks, such an important issue.

Finally, a partner, may keep you centred on reality. While adolescence many times includes biased opinions and self centeredness, literature and philosophy allow you to form an opinion, and having a partner many times concretes that opinion, removing the egoism from self-centred thoughts formed during adolescence. That is why people who are successful in relationships are often people who stop thinking solely about themselves but think in greater proportion of other people, specifically their partners.

One must be somewhat selfish to succeed in today’s world, but you must never put aside your partner or loved ones, the same way you must never put aside striving for a common good instead of personal satisfaction. There must be a sense of equilibrium, as this allows an easier flow of knowledge, clarity and understanding. Are you ready to open you eyes, ears, heart and mind?

Related posts:

1. About Our Limits and Barriers
2. Cooooontinue…
3. Are we becoming Robots?

According to Wikipedia, Francis Galton was the first scientist to propose a theory of general intelligence; that intelligence is a true, biologically-based mental faculty that can be studied by measuring a person’s reaction times to cognitive tasks.

Alfred Binet, in contrast, believed intelligence was a median average of dissimilar abilities, not a unitary entity with specific, identifiable properties.

Over the course of my life I have heard different things about intelligence. I’ve heard a couple of times that we are all equally intelligent beings. Then again, we all have heard typical phrases such as “He is more intelligent than you”, or “she must be really intelligent”. These usually refer to the fact that an individual may have a higher or lower level of IQ, which after all is just a figure of determining capacity based on results.

What really got me going about looking for information on brain use was the memory of people telling me that we use different percentages of our brain. Then in school I was taught that the several sections of our brain process different functions. How then can we use only a fraction of it if studies have been performed that claim that we do use different parts at the same time?

PET scans (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) clearly show that the vast majority of the brain does not lie fallow. The nature of claims such as the one which describes that psychic powers may be obtained if we master the percentage of unused brain have been proven wrong, but it is the mass media, literature, and shows performed by different personalities which has ensured the endurance of the claims. More information about that may be obtained at this page at snopes.com, which details an investigation performed by Benjamin Radford.

I have a theory

It is not that we do not fully use our brain. I believe, instead, that it is the capacity of interpreting messages that varies. We may be able to interpret more signals as we train our brain to do so, therefore increasing our ability to integrate more thoughts together, reason them, and process more results, in a faster and more accurate manner.

Clearly we use different sections of our brain to process different signals. Your innate reaction to things such as getting burned is processed in one area. Memories are stored in another area. Likewise, vision is also computed by another section of your brain. However, some people manage to understand things faster than others, just as some people are better with creative issues than others. We have Math geeks, Computer wizards, Programming geniuses, Scientists, Artists, etc. All of them have a certain facility for some areas.

I believe the clue to this lies in the speed, the accuracy, and the depth of the processing of signals from each area of the brain.

The frontal lobe is in charge of recognizing future consequences resulting from current actions, choosing between good and bad actions, overriding and suppressing unacceptable social responses, and determining similarities and differences between things or events.

Now, for example, when you read a book and don’t understand a word, many times you skip it. Then you might hear it a few times in movies. There might come a time when you ask someone what it means, or you hear or read the definition for it somewhere. Then you start noticing it much more commonly, in places where it might have always been but you were unaware of its presence.

Likewise, my theory is that the brain’s sections can process so many things that you are not able to understand, or to grasp entirely, but as you become aware of how to understand that information, then you begin to actually use it more thoroughly and exploit that new ability.

An example of this would be painting. You may have seen many pieces of art, and your brain processes how the shadows and mixtures of colours look like. Then you see a painter actually perform the job. You might then try painting yourself and you are not successful at it the first few times. Your friend, Jack, has not been to many art galleries, nor has he seen a painter do his job, but the first time he grabs a brush he seems naturally talented.

I would explain this by his ability to process those signals in a better way. He may not know precisely how an artist mixes his colours, but he knows how the colours of a face should look like, and he tests mixing the colours until he achieves the one he is looking for. You may be trying too hard to find a scientific approach to it, a perfect balance, but he may be doing it by actually understanding these brainwaves, or what others would call “by heart”.

I do not fully understand how capable we will ever be in certain areas. It may be that some people are just “blocked” in certain area, psychologically, and therefore can’t achieve the understanding of those signals. However, I believe it more to be a matter of really wanting to do so. Someone may want to play guitar, but when he grabs it he thinks he is rubbish, then he claims that he has no ability to play and blocks his creative path. This, however, is a matter of psychologically blocking his ability to understand the patterns that are naturally forming in his brain.

I could say the same for myself. It could chose not to publish this post because I may not fully understand the patterns that form in my brain, I may choose to stay behind and keep my thoughts to myself, but the act of letting it out improves me a bit every day. I believe if anyone tries hard enough at something, the patterns will emerge, and sooner or later he/she will be able to understand those patterns and to exercise the knowledge to deliver a product, action or thought.

It’s all about using it. Don’t you think?

Related posts:

1. The Dream of A.I. and the Elixir of Life
2. Science goes back to basics on AI (BBC News)
3. About Our Limits and Barriers

You see it everywhere. People locked within their social barriers. I am not talking about total loss of social control, nonetheless, I am talking about freedom of speech, and freedom of action, within respectable values, moral, and behaviour.

Us humans set limits for everything. For our thoughts, for our actions, for our writing, our drinking, our eating, and all sorts of things. While some of these limits are clearly good for our bodies, some of them do not exactly create a benefit for us. They create limitations as to how far we are willing to go, how to deal with certain situations, how to run our lives.

More than once I have seen people fall into imaginary illness, thinking they have all kinds of problems, all kinds of stress, and everything is going down for them. I’ve heard very good advice for two people in the past concerning getting rid of these annoying barriers. One person once told me that we can cope with everything in life, every little ‘problem’, as long as we take the right attitude towards it.

The fact is that there is no real reason to keep putting yourself down over stupid situations. As long as you are alive, you are breathing, and you are striving for the best for you, your loved ones, and society, then there should be nothing more to worry about. Illness comes, and goes. Work issues come and go. You might have made mistakes in the past, but don’t judge yourself too hard, as you’ll only get bitter, grow older, and fail to progress in what could have been a wonderful life.

But we certainly are free to think beyond the walls we self-build around our brain. We certainly are free to go far beyond traditional human thought, in the search for what is it that makes us live, breathe, think, talk and communicate, interact socially. We certainly are free to create the pathways for our lives, to explore our cities, to explore our minds, to explore society, and to live freely and act accordingly. That’s the beauty of life, we can do whatever we want, whatever we pursue.

So if you have been in a situation similar to this one, as I certainly have been before, remove the stigma of what others may think of you, and do what you really want to do, as this is the only way to truly open barriers in your mind and in your life. Do not let yourself be put down by the behaviour or thought of others, as this only creates more barriers for you. First of all , be sure of what you want to accomplish. Then accomplish it. And if this stands in the way of others, do not hesitate and take the appropiate action.

You can only do as much in life, and if you waste time thinking about the consecuences of well-funded, well-behaved, and well-thought actions you may want to strive for, then what is the point of creating a life plan? what is the point of striving for things if you hesitate? Do not hesitate.

It may sound cliché, and I am aware that it is only a tag-line for a brand, but just do it.

Related posts:

1. Are there any limits on our freedom of expression?
2. Are we becoming Robots?
3. Films and their effect on Society.

Obviously this is such an extensive topic, and I can not board it completely throughout this blog post, nonetheless, I will try to address some of the issues that I have been thinking about lately.

According to Wikipedia, a Film is considered to be the following:

“Film encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the motion picture industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or special effects.

Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Film is considered to be an important artform, a source of popular entertainment and a powerful method for educating — or indoctrinating — citizens.“

Now, we can logically infer that when speaking about movies we are talking about all it’s genres and sub-genres, all it’s different forms including B&W film, speechless, etc.

I can logically deduce that humans create films to express feelings they have, feelings we all have. But have we gone too far? I’m not going as far as to call Film stupid, or not an art, but I think we have to make a clear distinction to what is fake and what is real, and to what is tolerable or bearable and what is simply going over the limit.

By typing Violence in Films in Google I get 224,000,000 results. It is obviously a matter of great concern for the public.

“By the time the average U.S. child starts elementary school he or she will have seen 8,000 murders and 100,00 acts of violence on TV.” - New Scientist, 2007

So how exactly does violence, rape, murder, sex, and verbal offence contribute to violence and indecent acts in our society?

This website cites quite a few facts that have studied concerning this topic.  It says: Researchers followed 329 subjects over 15 years. They found that those who as children were exposed to violent TV shows were much more likely to later be convicted of crime. Researchers said that, “Media violence can affect any child from any family,” regardless of social class or parenting.

So we can clearly see it has an effect on our lives. What intrigues me the most is why can’t we, as rational human beings, make a distinction between what clearly is supposed to be an art form, and reality. Why do we let a motion picture inflict damage on the progress of our own lives?

“Because ours is a puritanically-based society and we have problems with depictions of sex, we tend to eroticize violence. For many people this creates an unfortunate, often even unconscious, link between sex and violence.” – from “Sex Research, Censorship, and the Law”

I come to think of this as true up to the extent that all our actions are based on what we learn and what we know, and we as human beings learn by seeing and imitating. Following this trend of thought we can infer that as we see from movies, we tend to act accordingly, by the means of learning and practicing.

Therefore I come to the conclusion that we, as a society, are not ready to create our own art forms, and expression, and really understand and act independently to so. In painting, we often let our minds wander off based on the expression, colours and objects depicted in the artist’s creation. May people have commited murder based on this? Indeed it is possible, just as it was also possible to commit murder after reading “The Catcher and the Rye”, so why not?

We, as a society, must first learn to control our bodies, our minds, and our actions before putting ourselves to the test and searching for a medium for expression, and searching for alternate art forms. After all, there is a lot to be learned about murder. Watching crime films, and different genres of films gives a lot of insight as to how the world works, what we are made of, why we do the things we do. Nonetheless, we must learn to control ourselves before being exposed to such material, as the untrained mind will not only obtain knowledge from the good parts of movies, but also will learn from the bad parts, the inmoral parts, the violent parts, etc.

I think we still have a long way, to really learn to think.

Related posts:

1. Further Reading: Violence in Films
2. The definitive meaning of Art
3. Alice In Wonderland