Arrival is a film which delves into the concept of learning as a way to alter your mind. Here at Cornell I had the pleasure of taking an introductory linguistics course and the hypothesis that learning a language can change the way you think was brought up. It has not been well studied, but a real life example brought up was color perception. Some languages have names for colors which english does not, i.e. the hue of color between orange and yellow doesn’t have an english name (other than yellow-orange) but some cultures do have a unique name for this. The people in these cultures also see these colors “better”, that is they notice them and distinguish them easily. If you lack the vocabulary, or alternatively have a wider selection of words to choose from, the way you sense the world changes. Newspeak, the official language in Orwell’s novel 1984, is perhaps similar in this regard. By limiting vocabulary and losing your ability to express yourself, you thus lack the conceptual ability to even think for yourself. I only know one language (my Cornell transcript shows I have mastered 3 semesters of Latin but that dubious at best) so I don’t fully understand how this works in real life. I do have friends who are bilingual, and they mention all the time that “this sentence is so much better in the original French”. I have to take their word for it, but this sentiment is again more evidence that languages force you to consider the world in different ways. The traditional hypothesis of human development says that once people had brains large enough, language followed. However, scientists have learned today that its not just the size of brain, but also the way the brain is internally structured that leads to human’s greater intellect. So maybe instead of better brains creating language, language rewired our brains to change the way we viewed the world.
Author Archives: Michael Zelko
Running in Circles
This week’s film was a documentary on the Barkley Marathons. I have never heard of the event, or for that matter the entire sport of extreme marathon running. The point of these ridiculously long, arduous races seems to be to challenge yourself. Your goal is to push yourself to your limits and learn how to accept defeat. The Barkley Marathons in particular highlight the futility of mankind. So far only 15 people have ever finished the race since its inception in the mid 1980s. It is a life lesson, you can try your hardest but ultimately fail. Even if you finish the race you get nothing but the pride of completing. The Marathons are organized by Lazarus Lake, an eccentric fellow who has wrapped up his philosophy of life into one fun foot race. The race stacks almost everything against the competitors, puts them through the worst possible conditions. Competitors face harsh weather, physical and emotional pain as they run. Like the race, life is no easy task and merely successfully completing the either the race or life is prize enough.
Conservation, American-Style
Only in America can we find a way to develop a business model around conservation. Don’t get me wrong, the work and the goals of land trusts are noble. And land trusts are vital to preserving America’s natural areas. Dr. Andy Zepp explained in his Rose Cafe how in Europe the government regulates natural lands. While this governmental model is perhaps more efficient, American culture would never allow it. The fact that America invested in National Parks as early as it did is amazing. Land trusts use money that the acquire through donations to essentially “hold onto” land until better things can be done with it. An example is when the land trust buys development rights to farmland to protect it from urbanization. Their main weapon is time, they wait until conditions are right to act or they wear down land owners until they are willing to sell. Although European countries may have a system which streamlines conservation, the American system has a more communal feel to it. Dr. Zepp told us about how he develops relationships with the land owners and convinces them that selling their land is in the best interest of not only themselves, but also in the best interest of the community. Land trusts are an interesting American invention, and I was glad to learn about it.
Building Better Vaccines
For this Rose Cafe GRF Tyler Moeller discussed how he was working on understanding and building new vaccines. I think a lot of people don’t understand how difficult, time consuming, and the amount of money required to develop a new vaccine. I think it is interesting (and perhaps a bit sad) that at least in the lab Tyler works in, an easy way to obtain funding for research is through the Defense Department’s fear of a biological weapon.
The complexity in which the human immune system works was amazing to learn about, and we only had a very basic overview of the entire biological mechanism. Most mechanisms in biology, like Protein synthesis or the body’s stress response, have so many “moving” parts. From a knowledge standpoint this makes it hard to fully understand how these mechanisms work in the first place. But from an engineering standpoint, these essentially over-engineered systems proved multiple access points from which we can alter and modify. Finally, we are beginning to know enough about how biological systems, such as the immune response, work mechanistically. Now we can start to move forward by engineering solutions to problems like diseases which we could only hope to treat symptoms, never fix at the source. Biomedical engineering is hopefully going to take us into the future.
Monday Blues
What Happened to Monday is a film which proposes a world in which the government takes control of the lives of common citizens. We see the struggle of average individuals attempt to take back control and independence from their oppressors. The film follows the story of 7 identical siblings all named after a day of the week as they attempt to hide from the government. Siblings have been banned so as to regulate the world population so the 7 siblings are living the life of one shared identity.
When watching this film I couldn’t help but think about a fairly similar movie called Soylent Green. Both of these movies depict a future with an overpopulated world and a lack of food. Also in both movies the hero takes back the people’s freedom, or at least saves the population from the tyrannical government, by revealing the truth. People in power usually can only stay in power by altering and controlling the information that the population is told. Ironically, in our age of computers it has become increasingly difficult for the average person to obtain high unbiased information and increasingly easy for those in power to control what we hear. It is by hiding the truth that the powerful find a place to thrive, and we must work to avert the possible future portrayed in What Happened to Monday.
Forrest Gump on Destiny
The film Forrest Gump contemplates the meaning of life; is there a purpose to our struggles, or do we just float along as things happen to us life a feather in the wind. I think that evidence from the film points to a combination of both theories of thought. Gump throughout his narration mentions the famous people who he had met, such as JFK and John Lennon, and how “somebody shot him for some reason”. Repeatedly, assassinations and assassination attempts are used not only to show the passage of time but also as a metaphor for the complex relationship of destiny and randomness in life. Assassinations are unique events as the assassin spends hours or days preparing what he or she will do, creating detailed plans, and essentially creating a destiny for the victim. However, at the same time these assassinations seem random and senseless, the murder of John Lennon has no logic behind it. The assassins are often paranoid or believe in grand conspiracy theories which lack any shred of reason. Assassinations are a paradox in which an event shares a well calculated identity with a random quality. In an odd, and perhaps macabre way, assassinations are prime examples of the film maker’s claim that our lives can be both entirely random, yet also planned out for destiny.
A Step Toward Unity
This week I watched the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games in South Korea. Perhaps the biggest event of the night was the parade of nations, with a united Korean team composed of both South and North athletes drawing the most attention. It is difficult to determine if the show of friendship and camaraderie is meaningful, or just a ploy by the North to reduce the sanctions which have been leveled against them. A cynic would say that the latter is the reality, and I tend to agree with that sentiment. However, regardless of the true intentions of the North Korean delegation it is a definite step in the right direction. I was unaware of this, but during the Cold War East and West Germany would occasionally send unified teams to the Olympics. And it was through American and Western athletes interacting with the people of the Soviet Union which arguably initiated the end of Cold War tensions. The North Koreans have been dedicated to building nuclear weapons so that they will be “safe” from outside aggression, and similarly this fear of invasion is what fueled the arms race between the USSR and US. What is key to remember is that the Cold War ended only when the people of the USSR learned about America, and decided for themselves that the outside world wasn’t as bad as what propaganda had portrayed. It is difficult to win a war with force, but Coca Cola has never lost. The unified Korean team is probably just a PR stunt put on by the North Korean government. But it may inadvertently lead to real change.
Finding What Matters in Friday Night Lights
The film Friday Night Lights covers the real-life story of a high school football team from a small Texas town as they attempt to win the state championship. As can be expected from a movie of this type, themes of never giving up, courage, perseverance, etc abound throughout the film with everything culminating in the “big game”. In perhaps a mildly unique twist from the usual plot of a sports movie, (stop reading now if you are bothered by spoilers) our high school team fails to secure the coveted state title, but rather learns that perfection can be found within themselves. The team takes to heart their coach’s words, “perfection means looking your neighbors in the eye with the knowledge you did everything you could”. This is a good message, and I agree with it. However, I feel like the actual story line of the film provides little supporting evidence as one player proves to his father that he is capable of being good at football…..by being good at football for one play, another player ruins his future career with an injury….and his story essentially ends there, and another player is worried about leaving his sick mother alone….until he goes to college hundreds of miles away anyway. We should be proud of simply knowing that we tried our best to make things right, particularly today when it seems like fixing the world’s problems is a Herculean task. The “best” result shouldn’t be what we focus on. We are going to lose at some point and we need to be ready to face that. I just think that a movie whose main thesis is “be proud that you tried” should at least show some evidence that the players tried to be something greater than a high school football player for four years.