“You’ll never understand because you weren’t there.” One frequently hears that sentiment in one form or another, ironically reminding us that at least some experiences are universal. Our constant connection to what others are doing breeds FoMO, or the fear of missing out. Of course, no one has the time to do everything. But what if you could have the memories of being there without the bother of actually having to be there?
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memory
Science Corner: Seeing is Remembering
My mom tells a story of the day she believes she watched me learn object permanence. I was playing with a farm set; I’d drop all of the people and farm animals out of sight behind the barn, then gleefully move it to prove my toys were all still there. We all figure out at a very early age that our moms, our dads, our toys and everything else are persistent objects that we can see again and again. We learn this feature of reality well before we are aware of our own thought process, so most of us never a chance to reflect on how fundamental this concept is to our cognition, or what life might be like if our minds worked differently.
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Book Review: The First Thanksgiving
McKenzie, Robert Tracy. The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History. Downers Grove, IL:Â IVPÂ Academic, 2013.
Review by Joshua Shiver
“Ours is a present-tense society,†historian Robert Tracy McKenzie notes, “We live in a time and place in which thinking deeply about the past is a countercultural and even a radical act.†Twenty-four hour news channels, instant status updates, and communication with the click of a mouse or tap of a finger have made ours a world of the here-and-now. This myopic focus on the present has blinded us to the importance of our past—even as modern Americans grope for answers to societal woes in a post 9/11 world. As a graduate student, the question I am most often asked now is what I intend to do with a degree in history. I’ve realized that behind this less-than-subtle jab at my life choices, friends and acquaintances are really asking me “What’s the point?†[Read more…] about Book Review: The First Thanksgiving
What Shall We Remember?
For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to take my girlfriend for a date through the Pulitzer Prize photography exhibition in Philadelphia. She is much more artistically-minded than I and we had talked before about visiting a gallery or museum sometime. I love photography and thought that the exhibit would be a classy and apt hybrid between our interests. What I had forgotten was that the Pulitzer Prize is awarded for photojournalism, which meant that though each shot was notable for composition and technique, they primarily represented the biggest (and often most tragic) news events of each year. This meant that our “date” consisted mainly of silently studying the most graphic, gut-wrenching photos of every major war, famine, and natural disaster from 1940 and onwards. There were photographs of Iwo Jima, of mass graves in Rwanda, of the World Trade Center exploding, of soldiers in Vietnam and Aleppo and Syria and Zimbabwe and Cambodia, of funerals and caskets. There were photographs of assassinations, of executions and prisoners, of burning and bloodied bodies, of race riots and shootings, of lynchings and genocide, of women buried under mudslides and earthquakes, of children with mangled limbs and gaunt skeletons and napalm-seared flesh and in body bags. In essence, it was a collection of the world’s most provocative and inarticulably dense depictions of human emotion.
It was not the most romantic of venues.
We are both “internal processors” of emotion, so we took a break partway through to get some coffee and decompress. Sitting quietly in the cafeteria, we talked absently about the photographs. “It reminded me of Ecclesiastes,” she said, and I thought about all the futility and sorrow and frustration encompassed in that book: [Read more…] about What Shall We Remember?