Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Another time

As I immerse myself into this world I'm trying to create I see the reflection of things absorbed in the real world.  One that keeps coming up is that of correlations.

I guess it comes with the environment.

I reading a book called "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin, and this book is amazing for the one fact of correlation.  Mr. Darwin developed a theory you may have heard of and spent his entire life collecting data he saw correlated to supporting it.  Now this act would not be much celebrated if the theory he proposed was say - popcorn and peanuts belong to the same family of food; but his theory did end up changing the course of history and it could easily be chalked up to his ability to see connections where no one else could. (which is what I propose as the true form of art, but that is a topic left to another time).

I am convinced that the power of correlation is much more important than is assumed.

Here is one I have made.

Mr. Darwin's book is not an easy read.  I don't think many people would disagree.  I'm certain the majority of people who buy his book do so for reference or for simple pompinuity; it just requires a lot of mental activity to - UNDERSTAND <------- the correlation I made.

Understanding.  The section of the brain (at least for me) that encompasses understanding is............

Back in school while I was under the illusion that what I was learning would help me with my economic future, I did learn something that helped me now.  My major was Japanese and part of my studies was to indulge my professor's attempts to mostrar us his accomplishments by reading the many books he wrote (in Japanese as he is/was Japanese) on the topic of Japanese politics.  Suffice it to say that I was lost for much of the course.  His books were not an easy read!!!!
But I learned something - to grasp the contents of a paragraph, you must first have in the back of your mind WHY the paragraph exists; you must understand what the author is trying to express.  This is usually summarized in the beginning of the paragraph (in the case of Japanese grammatics - the end).  

So when I wanted to understand what the hell my Japanese professor was trying to say in his book, I would first wrap my head around the last sentences of each paragraph and use that information to guide me as I backtracked.

I find myself doing the same thing with Mr. Darwin's book.

There are many times when I have no idea what he is talking about and at those times I just backtrack, find out what he says at the beginning of the paragraph and use it as a guide for understanding the remainder.

The brain is not be frightened by the codex of language - it just needs a framework to work with and it can do the rest.