A little detour!

Instead of updating everyone who reads this little train trip into my mind on the psychology of language, which I will be coming back to, in my next few posts, I will talk today, about what I learned from my road trips up north as a kid.

I used to go on road trips up north a lot, and every single time we'd pass a visitor's site, we'd pile out of the car to get a glimpse of the view. Sometimes, we'd see these, and I'd always press my parents to give me a couple dollars to pop into the viewing machine to see what truly lurked in the forests, or along the horizon. They always shook their heads and said that it wasn't even worth it, that it would be better just to really see for myself why it was so special. One time, they gave me the amount of money needed to look into these, and I ran away to push the dollars into the machine. But once I looked through, it was somewhat of a disappointment. Sure, it let me get a close-up view, but I couldn't see everything. I could only see out-of-focus details, not what made up the beauty that was in front of me. So yes, seeing the big picture, seeing how everything melted fantastically in front of me, was worth so much more than just seeing the little things, than just magnifying the tiny details and getting them out of focus anyway.
What I mean to say by this, is, that sometimes we should just look up, get out from under these machines, and just look at a situation, or just look at our world around us, for ourselves. For the sake of our happiness, for the sake of stopping and smelling the roses. To just straighten up and view something for what it is, and to stop poring over the slightest detail, when perhaps it is nothing but trivial. To fully appreciate what we have, and to look at the full picture before immediately judging others or ourselves, or instantaneously feeling the need to prove and solve a problem ourselves. Maybe we just need a tiny step back... Maybe we need to stop and smell these roses.

Words.

All my life, I have been intrigued with words. They beguile me, enchant me, hypnotize me. All words derive from the same alphabet, same coding, same strokes of a pen. They express needs, wishes, desires, delight, frustration - essentially, emotion.
We are told stories every day - on the phone, perhaps about one's day; through the Internet, about one's life or idiosyncrasies; in real life, about events or ideas; on paper, through supporting arguments and theses.
We were taught, in grade school, that there are four types of sentences: to persuade one to take action, to exclaim one's thoughts, to explain one's ideas, and to ask what one wishes to know. Are these like the multiplication, division, subtraction and addition that we memorized, that build up the foundation upon which we construct our mathematical formulas and hypotheses? It is beautiful to see that whatever we have learned, we can always build upon.
It is also beautiful that through reading one's writing, I can always experience what they experience; learn what they learn; see, perhaps feel, how they feel. It is an amazing feeling to get pulled into a piece of fantastic fiction, and to worry for the protagonist's state. It is empowering to read about a journey for someone else, about said person overcoming an obstacle, because through their memoir, one can relate and make connections to oneself. It feels relieving to form one's opinion of the events stated in a news article and to perhaps sign one's name on a petition.
Perhaps that is why I will always be an advocate for education and literacy everywhere.
But enough gushing about the beauty of words; in my next post, I will talk about the psychology of language (or what I know of it.)

A Lament for the Winter.

these lonely streets both wistful and indulgent;
neglectful, tolerant. effervescent, rollicking.
soft whispers that resonate.
frozen to perfection: every droplet manipulated,
every shivering leaf gently placed,
every quivering tree deliberately silenced.
the muted air disorienting.

Le Chateau de Versailles.

I really want to start educating myself on things I love. I want to start developing my interests again, and to start thinking for myself. To start catching up on news again, and formulating my own opinions. I want to know more about everything, so I did a little research. Did you know that originally, Chateau de Versailles was originally a hunting lodge built by King Louis XIII of France? However, Louis XIV built the palace on this site, including the Grand Apartments of the King and Queen. Louis XV then built the Chapel and Opera.

The courts of Versailles were actually the place of ultimate political power, from 1682 to 1789. However, with the start of the French Revolution, the royal family had to go back to the capital, Paris. Originally, the names of the rooms for the Grande Appartement du Roi were based after Roman gods and goddesses as follows:
-Salon de Diane (for the goddess of the hunt)
-Salon de Mars (for the god of war)
-Salon de Mercure (god of trade, commerce and Liberal Arts)
-Salon d'Apollon (for the god of Fine Arts)
-Salon de Jupiter (god of law and order)
-Salon de Saturne (god of agriculture and harvest)
and -Salon de Venus (goddess of love and beauty)

the world is a beautiful thing--a life philosophy.

Just because I haven't posted in a long time, I'll just post a little thought of mine, about life and what I've learned about it.

the world is yours for the taking,
because we belong to the world, and the world belongs to us.
everything is a divine creation, and yet
everything was once a star.

the world is beautiful and bright and dark and hard and firm and strict and soft and pretty and dim and quiet and loud and ugly and perfect and whimsical and tacky and elegant and boasting and arrogant and contradictory and hypocritical and controversy-inducing and high and low and weird and normal and comical and sad and happy and breathtaking and painful and amazing and filthy and despicable and horrible and everything good, bad and in between.
so take it and hate it and love it and know it and ignore it and do everything you want in it
because this world is yours and mine and theirs.

it’s life, it’s everything;
it’s only life. it’s nothing.

Nostalgia, con't con't con't.

Long term memory can store large chunks of information for an extremely long duration. A long-term memory stored, has the potential to be remembered for perhaps all of one's life. Through repetition, information like telephone numbers, or your childhood home phone number, can be stored in the long-term memory.

Short-term memory uses audio to store information, as I mentioned earlier; long-term memory stores ideas and information by association/meaning. In 1966, Baddeley realized that his test subjects in general had more difficulty remembering words with similar meanings, even after they had been repeated several times.

While short-term memory is controlled by regions of the frontal and parietal lobe, long-term memory is stored with the help of the hippocampus. Without the hippocampus (I love this name), new memories cannot be stored as long-term memory, and the individual has a short attention span.

One little fact: SLEEP is important when trying to consolidate information. Numerous studies have shown that memory has a link to getting sleep between the time in which the information is absorbed, and the actual test in which the information is retracted.