Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Monday, January 14, 2013

Denial Makes the Memory Grow Stronger

1. 

I have previously discussed the analogy of a bucket for our mental faculty of storing information, that is, our memory. In that analogy, I likened the size of the bucket to the sum of our understanding, or conceptual knowledge. Whereas the filling of the bucket itself, I compared to bits of information, or factual knowledge. 

So I concluded that in order to be able to remember more (and forget less), we'd have to get a bigger bucket.  In other words, we'd have to understand more concepts - and avoid overloading our memory with meaningless information, which could overfill the bucket and cause a lot of spillage. 

Now I'm interested in thinking about why our memory does not always work - at least not for our sake - and why we remember certain things and not others. And this has lead me to reflect on the paradox that we remember best those things we try hardest to forget. In other words, denial makes the memory grow stronger. (Pun intended. That famous phrase "distance makes the heart grow fonder" is actually quite relevant here.)*


2. 

If one of your friends had promised to get you a birthday present, and when the day came, he didn't give you any, there are two possibilities why this had happened. It could be that his memory has failed him and he'd totally forgotten it (either his promise, or, your birthday); or it could be that he remembered his promise, but for any reason (like being broke, or too busy) he couldn't afford to fulfill it. 

Of course, if you were to ask him about it, even when he remembered but was not able to do it, your friend would have still told you that he has forgotten about giving you a birthday present. So from this scenario we can look at the two ways to interpret the word 'forget': either as a lapse of memory ("Oh sorry I forgot!"); or, a denial ("Ah, just forget it!").

We could also look at this dichotomy of meaning, as between the passive verb ("I always forget.."); and the active verb ("I must forget it!"). Interestingly, we can be in totally opposite situations and still use the same word. In one situation, we regret not to remember something; whereas in the another, we regret remembering too much.


3.

Maybe we can trick ourselves into remembering any useful information by trying hard - not to remember it, but - to actually forget it. To put it simply: try hard to forget something, and it will stick in your memory. 


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* When a loved one is not around us, we'd have to try hard to forget that person. Or else it would be too depressing to be constantly aware of that person's absence. Ironically as we found earlier, what happens when we try hard to forget something, is that we remember it even more. Hence, distance makes the heart grow fonder.

Monday, January 7, 2013

Of Games and The Illusion of Control

As a part-time gamer, I admit to sometimes losing myself to computer games. In fact, I have just spent the holidays getting totally absorbed in some of them. And of course, it was only because they were so much fun - especially to play online games with friends.

I have also reflected on the gaming experience itself, and I thought, perhaps what is fun about it is not that gaming is an effortless activity. Games are fun not simply because they let you be lazy. They can actually be quite demanding - even if not physically so - as they require our time, energy and concentration. Easy games can quickly bore us. And despite how much a gamer can be lazy in real life, he often does give his best while playing his favourite games. 

However, we are not that far mistaken when we think playing games are fun because they are easy to do. But what is really so absorbing about them is that they let us believe that we can achieve great things with only a little amount of effort. So the lazy hypothesis is not that far off after all.

For all kinds of games that we play - on the computer, boards, cards  - we may have the illusion that we are in full control of how we want to play these games. Whether to move the pawn or the horse in a game of chess, for example, we think is our decision. But it is not.

As the saying "The house always wins" has always reminded gamblers, never mind how good you are at playing cards, and no matter how lucky on the slot machines, the casino will always get your money eventually. That is because card games and slot machines are designed to let you believe that you can win a lot of money for very little effort - even if you never do.

We might also unashamedly generalize our thoughts on gaming here to other sports - I mean the really physical ones like football, or tennis. Of course, we have always regarded sportsmen to be the shining exemplars of hard work. Footballers and tennis players must train hard for extensive periods of time, that we can never mistake them for average video gamers.
 
 But looking beyond the physical aspect, perhaps we can compare sportsmen to gamers.  After all, don't all sportsmen also believe that they can achieve great things with little effort. Of course it is not easy to actually play professional football, but in the end doesn't it all comes down to kicking the ball past the goal posts? You score a goal, you win the match, money and fame.

Scoring a goal gives such a rush of great feeling, even for the spectators. But after all those manic celebration, can someone remind us what a ball kicked into a net has achieved for all of us?

Alright, don't let me spoil your party. Even so I think my point is still valid. It is our nature to find the easiest way to get the most valuable things in life - be it picking the right number in the lottery to win some money, placing the pieces in chess to win some honor, or kicking a ball past the goal posts to win both money and honor.

The irony is that we end up spending more time and effort than how much we thought we would in playing these games and sports, only because of the illusion of how easy it would be to achieve the things we wanted through these activities in the first place. I can run a business, kill enemy troops, and build an empire, only with a few clicks of my mouse. But all I have done was to waste the time and energy, that I could have used to achieve those things in real life, in front of a laptop screen.


Well, borrowing Nietzsche's words, I'm only human, all too human.

About Me

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Medical practitioner. Amateur philosopher, pianist and composer.