3rd Beloved

via Everyday Health So during the earlier chapters of Beloved, I was taken aback by the scene during which Sethe suddenly recalls her mother’s death. Although I don’t really know much about psychology and have never taken a psychology class before, I still found this incident to be quite strange. At face value, the mind’s ability to forget traumatic memories when faced with post-traumatic stress disorder seems intuitive and even functional, as it is still a way, although not necessarily a healthy one, for someone to move on from their past. It turns out that Toni Morrison’s depiction of memory issues related to PTSD is surprisingly representative of those suffering from the same afflictions in real life. It’s often an unconscious change that’s intended for individuals to cope with trauma, with the potential to extend into permanent repression.  Memory dysfunction associated with PTSD often targets specific regions of the brain that regulate memory in some way. Take for example th...

      Take a second to look at the world right now. From the computer you are reading this blog post on, the bed or chair you are sitting on, all the furniture around you, the house you are living in, to even the government and system you are living under. Everything around you is just the culmination of individual dreams parsed together, and as you will see, dreams have proved to be very powerful in moving people and changing the world. Humans have a skill that is unique to them: they can imagine a world that does not exist anywhere in the present but may exist in the future. Humans are able to present these ideas to the world, and the result can be beautiful. At times, if enough people are moved by the idea of such a world coming to fruition, the world might as well become real.      One of the most influential speeches to communicate a dream comes from Martin Luther King Jr. In front of a huge audience in front of the Lincoln Memorial, he iconically imme...

  Sahana Narayan - Week 15: This Time in My Life – 4/27 [7:50 PM ] Spring of junior year is known as one of the worst times of a highschooler’s life. There’s obviously the grades, the AP exams, and the extracurriculars, but I think for me, one thing has stood out the most: watching the seniors move on. I can’t even count the amount of times I have said, “God, I wish I was a second semester senior.” To be done with high school, done with the pressure and the stress of all of it, seems freeing.  A part of that envy of a senior comes from me wanting an end to the struggle. I want to be at a period in my life where I can look back on these tough times and laugh at how unnecessary the constant anxiety felt was. I can laugh at the time when I couldn't listen to music for a week because I was worried it would distract me from studying for a grade breaking calc exam. I can shake my head in disbelief at the continuous prayer I did leading up to an admission decision from a summer in...

Brent Kavanaugh // Unsplash A couple days ago I found an iceberg chart of some interesting theories and thought experiments, starting from some more popular concepts like Roko's Basilisk to what incited my blog post this week, quantum immortality. As most things with "quantum" proceeding it tend to be, I didn't really understand much of it, but I reread the Wikipedia page a couple times and understood I was way out of my depth, and that my lack of brain power outweighed my curiosity. However, while looking into some related topics, I found my discussion point for this weeks post: Quantum Amnesia. Unlike quantum immortality, this idea seems to have stemmed from a singular study in 2008 by Lorenzo Maccone, and is a lot easier and simpler to follow.  The basis of this topic is the concept of an "arrow of time," or the idea that time is asymmetrical and flows in a one way direction. The "issue" in this is that the laws of physics and thermodynamics ar...

Holodomor Victims Image Credits: themorningsun.com/2017/03/08/walker-spotlight-on-the-holodomor/ The words “we will never forget” are repeated endlessly after any type of tragedy or autocracy from 9/11 to the Holocaust to slavery. But do we actually fulfill this promise to always remember, when it comes togenocides?   According to Kit Ramgopa , “1 in 10 respondents . . . did not recall ever having heard the word ‘ Holocaust ’ before." Furthermore, “sixty-three percent of those surveyed did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust , and over half of those thought the death toll was fewer than 2 million.” These statistics are alarming and reveal that most Americans do not remember the Holocaust.  This is especially devastating because the Holocaust is actually one of the most well-known genocides. There were many other genocides that people are even less aware of. For example, the Holodomor Genocide has been largely forgotten. In 1922, Ukraine became...

    Lakshmi Manasa Maddi - Week 15: Authoritative Control Have you ever imagined how you your life would be if you were forced to follow a certain set of guidelines that were enforced on you by the government and political officials surrounding you? We often hear the word authoritative have connotations of meaning having a centralized arena of power or the “opposition of liberal politics” where ones freedom of speech and expression are limited to the government’s control. However, this sense of control that politicians have over citizens is dependent on acts they decide to impose on others (Sud) .  For instance, the Prime Minister of India, enacted the formation of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, a time period at which cities and villages were to be cleaned out of dirt and litter in the hopes of preventing the problem of ‘open defecation’ from becoming a larger problem in the nation (Sud) . This particular doing alertly positively impacts the country since it was a result of...

Sahana Narayan - Week 14: A Connection to Prayer – 4/6 [7:40 PM ] The first “passage” I ever had to memorize was in a language I had never spoken before. Sanskrit. A language no one around me spoke, and a language that I had no interest in ever learning. My dad told me it was important to memorize it, however, so I did.  Three year old me struggled to sound out the vowels and tiny little marks that accompanied the alien words. Having just gained a somewhat rocky understanding of the English language, it didn’t seem fair that I also had to memorize something in a language no one uses anymore. But my dad told me it was important, so I continued.  When I hit elementary school, I learnt that there was not only one passage, but multiple. A total of 11 passages. My dad and I worked every day after I took my bath. He chanted the passage out loud, and I would sit there slowly repeating it. He would always tell me to sit up straight because prayer can only be done that way, but some...

Craft // Unsplash I'm sure we've all heard of the infamous academic drug Adderall, a medication prescribed to treat disorders like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and narcolepsy. Popular knowledge even seems to associate the drug with academic performances and usages, such as in strenuous times necessitating high productivity, like in the days before a major test or project. However, Adderall seems to have a different effect on the minds of users than expected, especially when compared to popular belief.  To start, Adderall is a medication composed of amphetamines and dextroamphetamines, which are common stimulants of the nervous system known to impact hyperactivity and impulsivity. While typically used only in cases of ADHD and other mental disorders, even those unafflicted with such disorders have been know to take the drug itself, for various reasons. For example, many claim there are several benefits from the drug, like increased focus and attention. However, for i...

Image Credits: https://barexamblog.net/2019/05/31/how-am-i-supposed-to-know-all-of-this-material-advice-and-tips-on-memorization-for-the-bar-exam/ Albert Einstein once said, “Never memorize something that you can look up.” However, our educational system certainly does not agree with Einstein in this regard, and I bet that most of us can relate to staying up late at night cramming information before a test, only to have all of that information miraculously evaporate from our brains seconds after leaving the testing room.  Although the actual usefulness of memorization is questionable, memorization is certainly a necessary skill to succeed in school, whether one has to memorize POAS presentations for English, complex integral formulas for AP Calculus, or dates of battles and names of dead people for History. Thus, for this week’s blog, I decided to research some effective memorization techniques.  One technique is to use mnemonics. This technique requires you to create “ memor...

      One of the things I like the most about my APUSH class is that we are constantly reminded about how politicians try to control how an idea is perceived or remembered. One such situation is Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson was looking to expand American democracy into other countries, and so he announced that America would get involved in World War I. However, this announcement got a lot of opposition from citizens; they believed that this was not America's war to fight and that they should stay neutral. Woodrow Wilson's solution to this opposition was the Espionage Act; the act would punish all sorts of opposition to the war. On top of that, Woodrow Wilson started an agency with tons of members that constantly pushed out propaganda to the American public. Let's put this into perspective. Millions of Americans were risking their lives to fight in the war. Citizens were doing the right thing by being skeptical about our decision going into the war, but Woodrow Wilson de...

via Colby College Community Web Eyewitness accounts are traditionally considered to be some of the most convincing forms of evidence in criminal trials. I’m sure we’ve all seen dramatized uses of eyewitnesses in popular movies and shows, where the testifying witness accuses the defendant or identifies a weapon that results in a surefire conviction. Even though such testimony is heavily dependent on the infallibility of human memory, it’s often still offered in court to reveal the truth behind a crime, recount its exact events, and detail all necessary information from the crime to the day of the trial. There seems to be so much trust put into a form of testimony that’s likely overvalued for its accuracy. The Innocence Project details a countless number of cases in which people have been wrongly convicted, often due to faulty witness testimony. For death sentences alone, there’s been a recorded 46 cases in which eyewitness testimony has falsely sent innocent people to death row. And t...

Perfect Memory Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory is the scientific definition for what most people know and consider to be the "perfect memory": those people that can remember things from the day they were born and those that can read a book and recall every single word, number, and punctuation mark on the page. Having such a memory was always both a superpower and a curse to me. With such a remarkable and powerful memory, the normal loss to time can not occur, which is both helpful and hurtful. Imagine not being able to repress some of the worst memories you have, not being able to forget even the smallest of insults, not being able to forget the things you would rather leave out of your head. Traumatizing events would last a lifetime and the idea of "healing with time" would mean nothing to somebody with a genuine photographic memory. While it may fade with time for others, no such luxury would be given to those both blessed and cursed with such a boon and a...

Avery Sun Week 14 Remembering Dreams                  I think I can say with confidence that I dream a lot. Or, maybe I don’t. Maybe I dream the same amount as anyone else, I can just recall them better. I still remember my first ever nightmare where all the furniture in my house turned into huge spiders. In fact, one of my first memories was a dream, but I’ll get to that later. Often, I wake up with the feeling that I had just gone through an otherworldly experience (my dreams are quite wild), but I can’t remember exactly what. However, this has happened to me so many times, that I’ve learned that if I don’t brood on it and wait patiently, the contents of my dream will come back to me during the evening, and its usually worth the wait.                    So why am I able to remember so many of my dreams? The act of dreaming is associated with REM sleep (rapid eye movement), a p...

            Lakshmi Manasa Maddi - Week 14: Meeting with Memories Imagine yourself being able to jump onto a time machine and travel back to 2005 and be able to make all the changes you wanted to make to your past with a breeze. Would you have been able to bring back all those emotions of yours and change your life for the better? What if you were able to stop the occurrence of the pandemic? A paradox and argument that has been fought over for years about the effect changing the past has on the future has been roaming within the minds of millions of physicists (Neilson) . Germain Tobar, an author who resides in a dorm at University of Queensland, suggested that with the application of theoretical physics in a real-life scenario, events that have occurred in the past could easily be altered with things that will happen subsequently in your upcoming life ahead of you (Neilson) . He brought a really interesting analogy that I must agree with being, “It’s theor...