Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Meanings Through Free Association
At first, this assignment did not mean very much to me. I have never given very much thought to how important certain words are in every day life. To be honest, I thought that this assignment was pointless, until I began to complete my assignment. Words have a way of connecting your mind to certain images, experiences and memories. Words, especially those of the English language, have very unique and specialized meanings. These different words can mean very different things, and can make the difference between what you mean and what you say. For example, if someone were to say, "the girl is pretty", in relation to, "the woman is beautiful", this makes an extremely big difference in the way the sentence is communicated. In certain societies throughout the world, much simpler languages exist. These languages have much fewer words to describe the same situations. I am now very aware of this importance. This is especially interesting to me because of the fact that I enrolled in the pre-medical sciences. The way the mind works using different chemicals is very interesting to me, especially since I never thought of science to explain the way the brain associates words, in relation to English and literature.
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There are some interesting studies being done about how people write as well--particularly about how people write on computers. People tend to associate microsoft word with writing, and the sections of their brain connected to writing will light up on an EEG as if they were writing by hand.
On the other hand, if people are "talking" online, then their speech centers are more active (so if they were using instant messaging software they might not have writer's block as badly in writing about a topic because they assume that they are "talking" about it instead).
I did a project a few years ago that suggested students could conference online about papers they were stuck on to break through that sort of block--it was kind of cool, and it's been neat to see that more scientific work is being done to back up that theory.
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