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.)

con't.

So this is a continuation of last time's post on memories and nostalgia.
Anyway, so I'll just quickly inform you on the use and workings of our brain in order to help us process memory.
These are the three types of memory: long-term, short-term, and sensory.
Sensory memory is memorization. It is perceiving something through one of your five senses. When one is trying to memorize something that is visual, or uses taste, etc., usually the FULL memory only lasts for 200-500 milliseconds. Sensory memory was first experimented on by George Sperling, who used the "partial report paradigm", where the experimentees were given a grid of three rows of four letters. With this experiment, Sperling showed that immediate sensory memory was all 12 items, but within a couple hundred milliseconds, the memory faded away. This is possibly why when I look at a rose, when I see dust motes, I try to commit them to memory, but I cannot because it grows fainter so easy.

This shall be continued next time! :)
Thanks for reading, lovelies.