What education teaches us!!!

I feel Rahul Gandhi should step down as the congress president. He doesn’t seem to be worthy of that. Listening to him, I feel like he is a clueless politician who is speaking just for the sake of doing that! He seems like the unfortunate victim of nepotism who could never grow into his family ‘business’. I am sure it’s not just me who thinks like that, I have met people who say that, out loud, in public. And why shouldn’t they? The party has declined in pretty much everything since he has held that position. The number of votes have decreased, the popularity, congress chief ministers have decreased and much more. Well, I am sure it’s definitely not one man’s inabilities in doing his job properly. Several other things like the opposition’s drastic gain in fame and other internal complexities also played their part. But despite all that I think the man is not the right custodian to the riches and responsibilities he is born with…

…....or is he?

 See, I don’t hold particular views with regard to a particular political party. I even don’t have the in-depth and personal knowledge about the man I am writing this blog on. My resources are limited to social media, mass media and what I gather from people around me. I am just debating with myself and understanding the situation as an educated person should.

So, what does education teach us? Apart from general studies and social studies, education is just a record of previous experiences of people. My qualification as a literate is the measure of me remembering other people’s experiences. I am educated because I know my weight increases or decreases in an elevator because someone experienced that and made a theory on it. Same goes for the function of pancreas or escape velocity for a rocket. So my study of these ‘theories’ makes me ‘educated’…….or blind to similar experiences that will happen in my life as well, as they happened in the lives of the ‘scientists’.

Elephants are quite clever animals. In fact, they have one of the largest brain of all animals and are good at learning, communicating, mimicking, and using tools and a lot of other things. I used to wonder how such an intelligent animal with strength of hulk falls for baits and never runs away. Well here’s how they do it. When an elephant is born, they tie it using heavy steel chains. The young elephant tries a lot to break it but is never able to do that! It tries that for days but finally, gives up, no, learns from its experiences, that it’s not possible to break the chains. So when the elephant grows adult, the owner ties it with a thin, weak thread that looks like the ones with which it used to be once tied, knowing that it won’t run away. Why, because it’s an intelligent animal? Try that with a buffalo. The dumbass will make a mockery of the intelligent one!

So, will understanding someone’s past experiences or your own will result in your victory in the present? Or will it simply make you give up? Should Rahul Gandhi give up, after studying his past experiences he’s had in politics? Nobody would have believed the Wright brothers when they would have iterated their ambitious plan to anyone, because no one had experienced it before. Even they hadn’t. And the failed flights at first should have been enough to give up, but they didn’t. The result is, nobody sails to the US from here.

There’s another aspect of this though. Education isn’t worthless in most cases. In fact, it is quite useful in most normal cases. Only the most bizarre ones, whether the highly successful or the worst failed ones seem to defy the education laws. So basically, it teaches us to ……give up in situations where others failed and keep going on where others did well, to never think different and become like others, to have role models and try to become like them. It is quite good for a successful life though!

Definition of colours.

There are thousands of scripted and non- scripted languages in the world. Not only these languages have different words for different colors,
but also different number of basic colour categories. For example, an English speaker would categorize the following colors as blue, purple and brown respectively.













But if your native language is wobé, you probably would use only one word for all these – Kpe.

In English we have 11 color categories, Russian has 12, but some languages like wobé have only three.

Categories in wobe are only three. – Kyp [meaning dark], pluu [meaning light] and sain [meaning red].

Researchers have found that if a language has three or four color categories, they can easily predict what they would be.

It’s a question that which color will be named at all.

Color doesn’t exist in categories but in a spectrum and earlier it was believed that cultures world just randomly choose from spectrum and name them.

In 1969 two researchers Paul Kay and Brent Berlin asked 20 people from different cultures to look at a spectrum and name the colors.

If a language had 6 color terms (like mandarin), the terms were for black, white, red, green, yellow and blue.

If there were 4 terms (like Ibibio), the terms were for black, white, red, green.

If there were 3 terms (like pomo or wobe), the terms were for black, white and red.

Turns out the languages always named color categories in a particular order.

First black and white> than red> than green and yellow> than blue> brown >others like purple/grey/orange/pink.

Ancient Greek writing do not have referances to some colors like purple and orange. This was used by some societies to wrongly speculate that ancient people were colorblind. Some explorers claimed that, the less the no. of color categories defined shows the ‘less intellectual and cultural development’ of the people of that culture.

These claims were however wrong. For example, in the yele language in Papua New Guinea, though there are only three basic color terms for black, white and red but there is a broad vocabulary of everyday objects like ash, sky and tree bark to signify different coloured objects.

BRA.........

When women started wearing bras? History suggests that, bras were an important part of undergarments of wealthier women in the west. But it became common in women after the         world war 1. So how did world war 1 started the trend of bras?

          metal corset

Earlier bras were made of metal(iron) and were heavier. So during world war 1, the American government urged women to stop wearing bras, so as to collect metal that could help their men to fight the war. This in turn helped the government to save 28 thousand tons of steel that would have otherwise gone in making the bras.





Similarly in world war 2, pre-sliced bread were stopped selling in the US to reduce the metal wastage in making blades.

World war also saw the increase in women workers since the men had to go and fight the war.Women soon found them working  in industries. It simply wasn't possible to work in such places wearing body tight corsets. So to provide support, the bra became the main undergarment for women.

After the war most designers started working on bras to increase their popularity. The bras were made permanent also because earlier corsets were made to extentuate the 'curvy victorian ideal of beauty' by pressing the waist and boosting the breasts. This would generally cause many breathing problems and in some cases would press the organs down and displace them causing certain internal problems.

  
                 Victorian definition of beauty




The use of a silk or linen cloth to cover the breasts and push them up by making them more prominent dates back to 14th century BC.




    wall paintings depicting the earliest bras.

The reason of coincidence!!

What does coincident mean? Is it just something that happens without any planning and calculation? Or it refers to something that your subconscious mind has already planned?



Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Few years earlier to that he had addressed a speech defending ‘the fair play for cuba committee’, of which he was a member. After he killed the president, some investigators reversed his speech. Turns out that when he says, ’and the fair play for cuba’ becomes, ‘I wish to kill president’. Some people call it, his subconscious confession of the crime he was going to commit. Well, it’s not that. If anybody says ‘and the fair play for cuba’ and reverses it, it sounds like ‘I wish to kill president’ to some extent. Similarly the sentence said by Neil Armstrong ‘a small step for man’, sounds like ‘man will spacewalk’ when heard in reverse.

These are mere coincidences. There are many sentences which make literal sense when spoken forwards and also reversing the sound of it. One of that is, ‘Ooh! you sniff turkey fat’, which on reversing sounds like, ’happy birthday to you’. Words or sentences that sound the same when pronounced forwards and reversing its sound are called phonetic palindrome, e.g. ‘say yes’.

There’s a poem by Karsten Johansson which in itself is a palindrome. 

It goes like:

                    

                                                              When I wonder why

                                                  What’s never been’s never been so 

                                                         We would lie when we say,

                                                     “Yes you know we all love you”

                                                    What’s never been’s never been so

                                                           Hell we are nowhere now.

Phonetic Palindrome Poem


phonetic pallindrome

One of the daily life coincidence things is hearing your name being called when it actually is not. Like hearing it in the sound of tap water, or phone’s ringtone, or hearing English words in songs that actually aren’t there. This is called ‘paridolia’. Check out this Bollywood song which sounds so ’english’ to someone knowing only English- May he poop(Bollywood song)

Paridolia is also seeing human faces when actually there aren’t any. 

Our brain understands patterns so well that it makes everything relatable. That’s the reason that we differentiate people’s faces even though all have same number of eyes, nose, etc. just by seeing once, whereas it becomes quite hard for us to do that for dogs, cats and other animals.

Our pattern loving mind finds patterns even in actual random things. When ‘Apple’ launched their shuffle feature in iPod, users often complained that the songs are not that random. So what apple did, they created a mathematical algorithm using pattern to recreate randomness. As Steve Jobs said, ”We are making it less random to make it feel it more random”.

This dancing spiderman image will sync up with any song you play simply because your brain wants it to sync up.

dancing spiderman

The reason behind our brain’s such behavior to make things comes because of ‘selection bias’ and ‘confirmation bias’.We select those things which we like. In dancing Spiderman’s case, we tend to neglect its moves where it doesn’t sync up and tend to get excited where it syncs. Also, two things seem linked when we want them to be linked often neglecting things against it.

These can be used to explain the coincident relations between famous movies and famous albums have. Like the one, syncing of ‘the wizard of oz ’ and ‘the dark side of moon’. Coincidences between famous people can also be explained by this. One famous coincidence is between President John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. It is pretty cool in itself but it you are given large information about any two people, you can quite easily find 15-20 coincidences between them.

There are things that are rare in average but may not be rare on individuals considering their large number. One such thing is the fact that Walter Summerford was struck by lightning three times in his life and four years after his death, his gravestone was also struck by lightning. Well, chances of lightning striking humans is very low but the fact that lightning strikes earth 40-50 times every second, having an event like Summerford’s in 1000 years, among billions of people is not that unusual. Rather, it would be unusual to not have such an event (mathematically speaking).

Well, coincidences are our perception. They are an important feature of our pattern loving minds. So don’t get spooked out next time you hit a coincidence, because you reading this article is also a coincidence. 

 

This is not red!!

I see this red, and most probably you do too. But do you see what I see? Let's talk about it.

Colour is felt. We do not and cannot communicate the feeling of colour through our language. The above shown colour is defined red no matter how someone sees it. But anyone seeing it can be seeing something different but is bound to call it 'red'.

Suppose the first time when you could differentiate between colours, a person comes to you and says the above shown colour is red because it's been defined red by some great guy with some scientist-ish looks.He saw 'something different ' and named it red. Then somebody came who might have seen a different thing than that the scientist-ish guy might have seen but since he was told that it is called 'red', he began calling it red too. Similarly you saw this color, called it red because someone taught you that it is called red. But there's a complete possibility that all three people might have seen three different colours.

The difference in what we see and what we feel is called 'qualia'. Our inability to explain feelings in our language is called 'explanatory gap'. For example, we can tell someone that pain is caused due to firing of C-fibers, to someone who has never felt pain (suppose an alien). But still he cannot understand pain or feel it. 

Some philosophers say that the reason for an explanatory gap is our 'week' language. May be there's an alien race which communicates in such a language that allows them to feel colours without actually seeing them. May be some day our language will also be developed enough to do that. But for now there's no way to know what colour does each of us see.

I know it’s  frustrating to not find an answer but it’s okay. There are many animals that can be taught. Some  apes are even taught to use sign language. They can even communicate to  humans, but there's one thing no animal has ever done - asked a question. Asking is important. It lets us know about each other. So keep asking because it’s important.  

Ben Franklin law

                         Benjamin Franklin, known as the father of United states of America was a scientist, thinker,author, printer,political theorist, politician, freemason, postmaster and a person with many more titles.It was his 'left brain guided by his right brain' that made him do that. He gave a psychology law that's known as Ben Franklin effect. But before moving to the law it is important to know about the right guided left brain. 
Actually,I consider such a guy an ultimate guy. Another such guy is Elon Musk. The right brain has ideas, a crave to do many things and on the other hand the left brain has the focus to take it to perfection. Such people are happy and successful. 

Well here're the Ben Franklin laws,

 "A person who has performed a favor for someone is more likely to do another favor for that person than they would be if they had received a favor from that person".

As David McRaney explains in lis book "You are now less dumb",

 'Many psychologists would explain the Benjamin Franklin effect through the lens of cognitive dissonance, a giant theory made up of thousands of studies which have pinpointed a menagerie of mental stumbling blocks including confirmation bias, hindsight bias, the backfire effect, the sunk cost fallacy, and many more, but as a general theory it describes something you experience every day.'





  

Think some more!!

In the previous post I talked about the different actions governed by different parts of the brain. Now, in some people one part of the brain is more active and in others the other part is more active . There are certain pros and cons to that .Now , why am I even discussing that ? You might think that ,okey , my 'this' part of brain is more active , and I do this ,I will be governed by my brain only . Than what's the point of discussing the goodness of other part ,which I can't achieve?

Well read this post till the end to know what you can , what you can't !


Scenarios where , right brained people are in advantage:-

Since right brained people think more of others than themselves , and prioritize their choices keeping in mind others' comfort , the other way to say this statement is that they are very alert!. What exactly right brained people do is that ,they keep thinking about their surroundings.They are very aware of what's happening. These are the kind of people who don't like to be surprised .
A right brained person is never hated or loved to the extreme , he/she is always liked since the actions of such kind of people are relative.
Such people have a control over their emotions and feelings . They hide their feelings and try to mould them according to the scenario in which they are in which makes them very less predictable .
Right brained people are craftsmen . They improvise instead of working hard .

On the other hand talking about left brained people , these kind of people are self-centered . Their priority is never relative to others .  They are always focussed to themselves and their stuff . They generally don't plan (think)rather they work, hard .As mentioned before , left brain-ies have a sense of actual choice .Whatever they do , they do it with full interest ,and rock it ! If a perfect right brainy is very alert , a left brainy is very hard worker . They are perfectionists .Since external factors don't influence left brain-ies ,they always are confident , about their skills , considering the amount of hard  work they have put into furnishing their shills .

Side note : Underconfidence and over-confidence are the traits of right brain .
When someone is overconfident , its the exaggeration of skills done by the right brain . Overconfidence is simply the virtual reality created by your right brain that makes you feel that you possess a certain skill which actually you don't ,since its virtual.
Similarly under-confidence is the understatement of your skills . It makes you nervous , make you feel something you don't know but you actually do .
In both cases a virtual brain is being created that governs your body . And its the right brain that's doing something extra over the work done by the left brain .Its improvising it ,(in two different ways though) and doing something creative out of that.
Now overconfidence is not actually bad all the time unlike as generally said.Sometimes it eases life in situations where actually only a person's confidence is required . Yup ,I am talking about the importance of shoeing off and yes its right brain that is responsible for 'show off'.`

Left brained people don't think before acting . This makes them loudly reveal about what they're thinking .They speak anything that comes to their mind,anything they feel .

In my last post I talked about the two types of left brained people . One is the category of those who can't afford to go out and mix with the outer world,and the situation makes them self-centered and left brained . The other category is of those who choose to be self-centered ,thanks to their upbringing and the kind of atmosphere they have been living in .Here ,the first kind of left brain-ies are situation driven . And they are the most vulnerable to get into wrong companies once their environment changes .


























Now at the beginning , I mentioned whether it was possible to switch or change the thinking styles or not .The answer is 'no' if you want the switch to be instantaneous and yes if the switch time is long,and by long I mean few years.
But yeah , there are different methods to exercise different parts of the brain which help in ensuring proper functioning of the brain .One can not 'switch ' brains in order to get everything going perfectly . One can not simply 'gain' every time .To gain something , one has to loose other thing .
For a moment , just think of the 'brain' switch.Now , it can be thought to be of two types -auto and manual. The manual switch is simply thinking of 'switching ' and where you think before acting ,the job becomes an issue of the right brain . 
The other switch in the picture is the auto-switch .It's not machine type auto,but it generally happens when over the course of time your thinking changes due to the change in your society , friends , economic condition and many other factors.

Actually the switch is not important . Life is in itself an infinite source of knowledge which teaches us ,literally anything that we want to learn . When someone learns something ,he just takes a handful amount from the infinite source.Living left brained life provides you just a handful amount of knowledge and so does living right brained life. The two handfuls ,though different are just 'handful' and are equally important in life.
So , one never waste your time in switching your brains and live your life with the most comfortable way you find of living it.

Well , that's all in this post . Thank you for reading .The other post will be coming soon.