Quite a few of the people I've interacted with throughout my life have nicknamed me a lot of things. The ones relating to the topic of this piece is "The Master of unnecessary information", "The human encyclopedia" and so on. While I have from childhood been blessed with a very good memory it didn't get to where it is today by accident, it did so with a technique called a "memory palace".
What the memory palace does is that it lets me associate certain locations with things I need to remember. This location can be anything that you want, in my case its my grandmother's house. I have her house completely committed to my memory and as I imagine myself walking through it, I have made certain things into "reminders" of things. Each room of her house represents a different kind of knowledge. If I walk into the kitchen there is a white sink with a blue rubber covering around the edge. There is the door to the bedroom with red and blue trimmings. The kitchen table with te narrow bench around it. The flower pot at teh center of the table, the clock on the wall. The microwave on top of a cabinet section, the first drawer holding her rarely used kitchen utensils. Under that a larger cabinet for her biggest pots and pans.
While I'm not going to describe my entire memory palace the sections I've explained so far will serve to illustrate the technique. The sink lets me remember that most household bacteria will die at temperatures between 70 and 100 degrees Celsius. The red and blue door reminds me of the signing of the Norwegian constitution at Eidsvoll in 1814. The Microwave oven reminds me that microwaves are short electrical waves with a length ranging from a few millimeters to a meter.So it goes on from item to item from room to room.
The book "Natt og Tåke" written by Trygve Bratteli about his time spent as a prisoner in concentration camps during WW2, is a reminder of that Natzweiler Strufhof was a concentration camp for NN prisoners, about 50km from Strasbourg.
All the different objects represents something I need to remember.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Confidence
Confidence is at the root of everything you do and everything you are. It's what drives on us, what makes us capable of what we do. A lack of confidence on the other hand can turn a Genius into sobbing sack of bones, and a performer into a ball of crippling self-doubt in the shower.
How does one gain confidence though? Success breeds confidence, belief in your own abilities, in all aspects of yourself or that at the very least if someone did a Pro/Con list of you, they would at the very least have more Pro's than Con's.
How does one gain confidence though? Success breeds confidence, belief in your own abilities, in all aspects of yourself or that at the very least if someone did a Pro/Con list of you, they would at the very least have more Pro's than Con's.
Self-preservation
It's rather interesting how Anti-social personality disorder, I'll say psychopath, psychopathy or ASPD mainly in this text even though they aren't 100% correct in describing what I'm speaking of. What I'm thinking of is the human urge of self preservation, or rather preservatation of our genetic code. As the old people used to call it "passing on their legacy" or in an almost poetically literal sense; Their blood.
Whenever a new serial killer or spree killer pops onto the headlines people are shocked and appalled at what went on, they can't believe that a person could commit such atrocious acts. To me its as simple as self preservation at all costs combined with a predisposition of having no empathy.
Most of us have wanted to take "unethical" steps to get that promotion, that girl, the car or whatever we were after in that moment, but few of us act on those impulses. Sure we might want to put sugar in a gas tank, or kill that bloody mutt that keeps barking when you need to get up in 3 hours. The question is, what holds us back? What stops Jane and John from Acting on their impulses is it Law, a sense of right and wrong, empathy or is it fear?
Whenever a new serial killer or spree killer pops onto the headlines people are shocked and appalled at what went on, they can't believe that a person could commit such atrocious acts. To me its as simple as self preservation at all costs combined with a predisposition of having no empathy.
Most of us have wanted to take "unethical" steps to get that promotion, that girl, the car or whatever we were after in that moment, but few of us act on those impulses. Sure we might want to put sugar in a gas tank, or kill that bloody mutt that keeps barking when you need to get up in 3 hours. The question is, what holds us back? What stops Jane and John from Acting on their impulses is it Law, a sense of right and wrong, empathy or is it fear?
Sunday, December 13, 2009
We are all evil, we are all good. What side we end up walking on is a result of so many things that listing them would be exhausting. We are all victims or beneficiaries of our nature, our surroundings, our dna and our own minds.
Some people are born with urges that makes them do evil acts, some are trained to be evil, some are so evil that they desperately fight to do good regardless of what it costs them. We have laws to protect, to deter, to punish, but our laws are tainted by the people who wrote them.
We allow murders in certain situations, self defense and war comes to mind first, we allow a whole host of evil acts in the name of protecting our communities way of life. Just because we no longer live in little tribes consisting of a few families, doesn't mean that we are not just larger versions of what was.
We have prison's to punish the guilty, yet what does prison do, what does locking criminals up with other criminals accomplish? How many prisoners come out of prison rehabilitated as valued members of society and how many end up right back in prison after a time?
One of the more interesting statements I've heard was that "Your normal soldier will not aim to kill an enemy unless ordered to do so by a superior officer, a sociopath will aim to kill." This means that sociopaths do make better soldiers in wartime purely because of their ability to kill other human beings without facing any psychological or physical backlash from their actions.
This made me take a look back at history, at men and women who are deemed great by history and take a look at their actions. Olaf Haraldson, also known as "Olaf the holy" after his sainthood, the patron saint of Norway was a massmurderer who made Norway a Christian country by force.
"Olaf, a rather stubborn and rash ruler, prone to rough treatment of his enemies, ironically became Norway's patron saint. His canonization was performed only a year after his death by the bishop of Nidaros. The cult of Olaf not only unified the country, it also fulfilled the conversion of the nation, something for which the king had fought so hard." From Wikipedia.
More to follow
Some people are born with urges that makes them do evil acts, some are trained to be evil, some are so evil that they desperately fight to do good regardless of what it costs them. We have laws to protect, to deter, to punish, but our laws are tainted by the people who wrote them.
We allow murders in certain situations, self defense and war comes to mind first, we allow a whole host of evil acts in the name of protecting our communities way of life. Just because we no longer live in little tribes consisting of a few families, doesn't mean that we are not just larger versions of what was.
We have prison's to punish the guilty, yet what does prison do, what does locking criminals up with other criminals accomplish? How many prisoners come out of prison rehabilitated as valued members of society and how many end up right back in prison after a time?
One of the more interesting statements I've heard was that "Your normal soldier will not aim to kill an enemy unless ordered to do so by a superior officer, a sociopath will aim to kill." This means that sociopaths do make better soldiers in wartime purely because of their ability to kill other human beings without facing any psychological or physical backlash from their actions.
This made me take a look back at history, at men and women who are deemed great by history and take a look at their actions. Olaf Haraldson, also known as "Olaf the holy" after his sainthood, the patron saint of Norway was a massmurderer who made Norway a Christian country by force.
"Olaf, a rather stubborn and rash ruler, prone to rough treatment of his enemies, ironically became Norway's patron saint. His canonization was performed only a year after his death by the bishop of Nidaros. The cult of Olaf not only unified the country, it also fulfilled the conversion of the nation, something for which the king had fought so hard." From Wikipedia.
More to follow
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