I was reading The Lord of the rings the other week and I realised just how amazing the human mind is – again!
Why? because my mind had seamlessly collected all of the voices from the films that I’ve seen since reading the books many years ago and transplanted them over the words I was reading. Let me explain, maybe you’ve experienced something similar, have you ever read a book that has then been turned into a film?
Did the characters sound as you’d imagined them?
Were their accents ‘right’?
When ever I read Aragon’s dialogue I hear Viggo Mortensen’s voice, my brain has associated the two things together, built a model of how ‘Aragon’ sounds which now get’s applied whenever (Generalised) the character pops up. This is true for all of the other characters in the story also.
Of course I was not aware consciously that I had updated (generalised) the vocal qualities within the book until I re-read/re -visited it.
You may already be aware of the archival nature of your own mind, how it stacks learning/discovery on top of each other, modifies and enriches your experience automatically.
Human beings are learning machines.
Learning in this context is not the education system. Think about it now, you make decisions every day based on what you know now, tomorrow you’ll have the opportunity to do something the same or differently (it will be now then too!)and both of these options contain a learning process. Keep things the same and you learn how to keep things the same, do something different and you may learn an entirely new approach that serves you well into the future.
One of the great things is that you will learn either way. You’ll reinforce a belief or bust one. You may not even know exactly which until you do it.
If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got and for some people that’s exactly what they want, for others this seems like a sign to make some changes.
What would you change if anything?
Enjoy
Andy
