Tag: psychology

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Posted July 30, 2012 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Book of the Month, Literary Fiction / 0 Comments

Title: Life of Pi (Goodreads)
Author: Yann Martel
Published: Knopf Doubleday, 2001
Pages: 356
Genres: Literary Fiction
My Copy: Personal Copy

Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle (or visit your local Indie bookstore)

This month’s book club book was Life of Pi by Yann Martel and it seems to be one of those books that is hyped up so much that you don’t know whether to believe it or just groan at the thought of reading it. The book tells the story of Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, an Indian boy growing up and exploring spirituality at a very young age. Pi finds himself in a shipwreck which leads him to be stranded on a boat with a Bengal tiger.

The book starts off with Pi’s early years; with his dad working at a zoo, Pi discovers a lot to do with zoology and animal psychology. This aspect of the book would really appeal to animal lovers and people interested in the animal behaviour in general. Then we see Pi exploring religion and deciding he was Hindu, Christian and Islamic, which really bugged me. I really never understood why he would embrace all religions apart from the fact that he “just wants to love god.” This took up the first half of the book and I personally wanted to get past this and really get into the core part of this book; the part involving the boat and the tiger.

When the shipwreck finally came, I was expecting the book to pick up but it decided to focus more on philosophy and while I’m interested in this aspect of the book, I felt the Life of Pi had already tried to do too much already and adding this to the book was the last straw for me. There were plenty of aspects in the book that were interesting but as a whole it tried to do so much and I never felt like it achieved anything.

This book reminds me so much of The Alchemist in the sense it was very basic and it tries to talk about religion and philosophy but turns out to be incredibly overrated. I know a lot of people like both books (Life of Pi and The Alchemist) but I never connected with either, I was expecting a lot more from this but I was left waiting. It’s interesting to see books like this that seem to be either well-loved or well hated but not much in the middle. Life of Pi won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2002 and a string of other awards but for me, I felt the literary aspects were minimal, the religious and philosophical parts overdone and the book in its entirety, over hyped. I know many people love this book and if you do decide to read it, I hope you enjoy it more than I did.

Question Tuesday: What made you start studying again?

Posted July 24, 2012 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Question Tuesday / 0 Comments

When I was in school I wasn’t interested in studying and I didn’t do well in school. I didn’t really have much interest in anything, except computers and music. It wasn’t until 2009 when I discovered my mind crush Craig Schuftan did I really start reading and wanting to learn. I started Knowledge Lost because I found my passion and I wanted to write what I’d learned while learning. I know I don’t write on that blog as much as I should but I still love it and want to keep it there to write anything that I learn. When I started Literary Exploration (the blog) it was because in my love for learning I found a love of literature and I wanted a place to document my literary journey without overcrowding Knowledge Lost with book rants. The idea was to have Knowledge Lost to be educational and Literary Exploration to be about literature.

I decided at the beginning of the year that while I was having fun being an autodidact, I wanted to learn more and enrolled in university. I’ve never been to a higher learning facility to learn something I was passionate about but I wanted to explore my passion and hopefully one day land a job in a field relevant to it. I decided a Bachelor of Arts would be a good place to start. It will give me a good overview of the topics I’m interested in and also I can get a degree in English Literature.

I’ve discovered that my love for learning and the arts has been growing and I (not so) secretly want to get so many degrees it’s not funny. While I will focus on the English Literature degree, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to take some classes in other discipline to get an idea about what they are like. Now I’m only doing this part time while working full time which is a shame because at my rate the first degree will take me about ten to twelve years. But if I had the time I would want to dive into some of these disciplines as well (not for a full degree but to have some more information about them);

Art History
Criminology
Journalism
New Media Studies
Philosophy
Psychology
Screen Studies
Sociology

And the list will probably expand. I know my love for literature will increase with my studies but I wanted to also share my passion of learning and the humanities with you as well. I hope to experience a taste in all these subjects and who knows, maybe one day I might get a chance to share about them over at Knowledge Lost.

I would love people to share about their passions and experiences with studying their passion in the comments below.

The Measure of Intelligence

Posted February 10, 2011 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Education / 3 Comments

In 1904, the French psychologist Alfred Binet created the Binet Scale which became the basis of what is now the IQ Test. Originally it was created to measure a child’s strengths and weakness so the teacher knew which areas would require special attention for each individual student. The Binet Scale become a revolutionary approach to the assessment of individual mental ability, but it was never designed to test someone’s intelligence. Binet himself cautioned against misuse of the Binet Scale and has been quoted in saying “the scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.” He also feared that the test would be used to condemn a child rather than assist their education.

The Binet Scale had a profound effect on educational development but they failed to listen to Alfred Binet’s warnings and as a result of Lewis M. Terman’s revisions to the Binet Scale (now known as the Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale of Intelligence) we now has a standardised intelligence test. This IQ Test became a standard practise and a multimillion dollar business; even resulting in the American Academy for the Advancement of Science listing the IQ test among the twenty most significant scientific discoveries of the twentieth century along with nuclear fission, DNA, the transistor and flight (in 1989).

If the IQ test was meant to monitor a person’s intelligence I have some questions that need answering;

How are they defining intelligence?

The ability to do well in school?
The ability to read well and spell correctly
Or the ability to following an intelligent person?

When did a person’s intelligence become linear?

The problem I found is that standardised testing is trying to make everyone the same, when we should be using the test on the young for its original purpose. Maybe we should just scrap the whole thing. I’ve also think other tests like the SAT’s are been misused as well. Let me know your thoughts.

Twin Peaks and Dream Interpretations

Posted February 5, 2010 by Michael @ Knowledge Lost in Film & Television, Psychology / 7 Comments

Culture is all around us, especially in the music and the media, but we tend to miss it. I missed this one because I missed the show entirely but this bit of insight makes me want to watch the show.

David Lynch’s cult classic Twin Peaks has a few great examples culture. Mainly the use of dream-analysis; Dale Cooper solved the death of Laura Palmer in his sleep, literally. But he doesn’t remember, he knows that he knows but it’s been kept from him. He states in the show ‘My dream is a code waiting to be cracked – break the code, solve the crime’

Interestingly enough Lynch didn’t have an interpretation of the dream, it was an after thought; he had a ‘waking dream’ of this whole dream sequence and decided to add it into the show.

I’m sure The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud would have come in handy in solving the crime. But what is the book really about? Freud description is;

In the following pages, I shall demonstrate that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that on the application of this technique, every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state. Further, I shall endeavour to elucidate the processes which underlie the strangeness and obscurity of dreams, and to deduce from these processes the nature of the psychic forces whose conflict or co-operation is responsible for our dreams.

Though the book is widely considered to be his most important contribution to psychology, I have serious doubts about this book. For starters, people think differently and I suspect that they would dream differently as well. I don’t pretend to understand the whole Dream Interpretation theories; I just don’t think every dream would fit neatly into these interpretations.