Jessica Sede

I recently began teaching writing classes to 7th, 8th, and 9th grade. I began by starting a lesson on the importance of the written word. We rely so much on the ability to write today. I had never really thought of how many things would disappear if we were to lose the ability to write. Things like television, movies, comic books ( those with thought bubbles,anyway), video games, books, and education would cease to exist. Our vocabulary would become so limited that it would be very difficult for us to express ourselves. This made me think about consciousness.

The more words we know the more options we have to express ourselves. If we speak several languages, then we have even more ways to express feelings and thoughts. This would mean that we have more ways to describe the experience of consiousness. If our consciousness is based on our ability to be aware of our thoughts then the more ways you can label your thoughts the more consciousness you have ( ????). I think in the words that I know, when I learn new words they become incorporated into my inner voice.

Think about a baby. They only know certain words, and can only think within the words that they already know. Yet, the baby is considered"conscious" from the moment he/she is born, or maybe even before being born....or maybe the baby is not conscious before language develops. I wonder what goes on in the head of a baby, what does that thought process sound like with no voice (I think after the movie "Look Who's Talking" came out we like to think of babies as mini-adults).I also wonder if once babies have the ability of language they become able to label past experiences, and therefore have a delayed form of consciousness.

Think about it...do you remember anything that happened before you could talk?

Life isn't merry for Monochrome Mary

No sense of yourself can be frighteningly scary. She sits in her cell, and reads all the books, on wavelengths, and spectrums, and gobbili gook.

In the morning Thing 1 and Thing 2 come to visit, and measure her knowledge with questions and quizzlets. Lunch time for Mary is especially sad, because they cover her eyes with a colorless rag. The food tastes of Green, Orange, and Blue; but what color it is, is only known by Thing 1 and Thing 2.

The doctor of colors, he pokes and he prods. While keeping her there and acting like God. She doesn't care for his whosit and whatsit, she knows in her heart that she is above it.

The colors are just words on a page, and when she thinks about them she flies into a rage. The books and her notes are all thrown on the floor, she has all the knowledge, but wants to see more.

A rose that is Red, a ball that is Blue...what they might look like, she hasn't a clue!

So she'll sit and she'll wait for the day to come when her door is left open, and she's left to run. A day when the sun will shine a bright yellow, and she will see color like a normal fellow.

It will be known, on that special day, if her world will be color, or just stay at grey.

"A Stream of Illusion" from Exploring Consciousness was fascinating. It grabbed me from the beggining when Rita Carter quoted Pooh Bear's explanation of how the things we think become very different things ( due to the way others percieve them) once they are out of our heads. I always believed that our life, for the most part, is constructed from our thoughts and memories, which may or may not be true ( and how would we even know the difference?).

There were so many different areas covered in this reading, that I found it difficult to decide which ones I wanted to focus on. I really enjoyed the sections on blindness. I had no idea that blind people have "face sense" and can "see" by feeling nearby objects against their faces. I tried to think of what this might be like, and suddenly I was imagining myself as some type of cave dwelling animal that has learned to survive in darkness. This brought to mind several different horror movies where blind creatures are able to maneuver through the darkness.

I spent a good hour lastnight discussing Anton's Delusion, and the case of the woman who could no longer "see" the spatial orientation of objects with my science minded significant other. These phenomenons all seemed to make perfect sense to him, and he tried to explain the different parts of the brain responsible for blah blah blah....

The idea of the blind thinking they can see made my stomach get that sinking feeling. If we could "think" we were "seeing" things that weren't there ( since we couldn't see at all) how would we know? I believe the text mentioned that these people walk into things a lot, but so do I....and if you were to tell me I was blind, I would tell you that you were crazy. Are these people able to read? I would think that would be a deceiding factor...how could they pretend to be reading? They wouldn't be able to tell us what the book was discussing.

Then there is the woman who is able to grab the banana without any spatial perception. I imagined myself being in a blue room with colored blotches floating around. I can not conceive losing spatial orientation. I tried and tried, but how can we understand another person's experience? Furthermore, what if each spatially challanged persons experiences are different??

Sometimes I feel like everything we think/thought was real...is relative. It is relative to our perception and that of others. It is relative to our neurons firing, our eyesight...our hearing. There are so many variables...it makes me dizzy.

I really enjoyed the radio show. I especially liked the part about the chimps having self awareness. My 8th and 9th grade classes started their journals today, and I made them write their opinions on chimps and zoos, and if whether they should be charged for crimes. I told them how experiments showed that chimps have self recognition, and that this had led to controversy as to whether or not they belong in zoos. Most of my students already suspected that chimps were more like us than other animals, and began talking about evolution.

One student became very upset. He started yelling that everything I had said was a lie, and that animals do not have feelings, or self recognition, because only people do. He argued that having a soul is what gives you emotion and thoughts, and that since chimps don't have a soul they can't have either. I told him that it was fine for him to have his own opinion, and that he should write it down in his journal, but he argued that I should take back what I said about chimps, and that he was right, because that is what God said in the bible.

I was very thrown off, and thankfully the other students told him to chill out, that we weren't talking about God, just chimps seeing their own reflections. He eventually apologized to me, but it was a very strange occurence. I wasn't even thinking about evolution when I created the assignment, and all I could think of was an irate parent coming up to school to yell at me.

It's a perfect example of that Pooh quote:

"When you are a beer of very little brain, and think of things you sometimes find that a thing which seemed very thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and hes other people looking at it.

I really enjoyed reading James' Turn on the Screw. I felt like it took me on a wild ride, where I wasn't exactly sure what was going to happen next. I went from liking the governess, to thinking she was a complete psycho, to questioning my own belief in the supernatural.

While reading this novella for the second time I was reminded of Rita Carter's essay, and the concept of "Blind Sight." If those who are blind can imagine seeing, then why can't those who aren't blind imagine "seeing" things that aren't there? Think about how many times our eyes decieve us. All those times where we have read a word wrong, but actually saw the incorrect word on the screen or page.

Yet, the changes in the Governesses( sp?) vision is much more severe than mistaking a word for a similar word. The governess begins to "see" ghosts at Bly, which would be fine if other people had been seeing them as well. The novella never explains the visions of the Governess, and leaves her experiences open to the interpretation of the reader.

I really enjoyed the story, and upon completion felt a feeling of shock that the Governess had lost her mind, and shaken the little boy to death. Part of me, probably because we were seeing things from her perspective, believed in her visions, and did not immediatley question her sanity.

The question that stuck with me was why did this happen to the governess? And does she ever realize that she has lost her mind? ( apprarently not because she seems to think that the ghosts are responsible for the young boys death).

There are many possible reasons for the Governesses "hallucinations":

1. The Governess has "second sight" and is able to see ghosts ( of course doctors can explain away all of her symptoms, but you never know)

2. She has, much like the man at the beginning of The Feeling of What Happens, some type of Epilepsy, and the visions are caused by seizures ( pg 6).

3. There was some underlying schizophrenia that was brought out by the stress and isolation of her new employment. Some of the symptoms of schizophrenia is altered perception (voices, colors, sounds), and a belief of having deeper insight into your surroundings (mind reading, etc), as well as paranoia. http://www.healthscout.com/ency/68/472/main.html

4. There is a brain tumor that if pressing on parts of her brain, and causing adverse reactions.

After taking into consideration the Governesses situation, a biological reason for her hysteria seems much more plausible than second sight. Here is a young girl who has taken on a lot more responsibility than she can handle ( because she has a crush on her employer, which just proves her immaturity and her over emotional tendencies), and is now living a life of isolation. Limited human contact may even start to break down the most sane person, imagine what it could do to someone with an underlying condition.

*Did anyone else think of Stephen King's The Shining while reading this?

I used to see ghosts...a lot.at least I thought...

As I got older, people became worried. They viewed it as immature behavior, and felt that I was acting out due to the turmoil of events in my early childhood.

Sometimes I would see black figures near me. They seemed to be everywhere. I mostly saw them off in the distance, or standing on the steps, sometimes they were outside the front window. They would catch me off guard. They were there, just black splotches in a person-like shape, and then they were gone. Split second recognitions....

At the age of seven or eight, I saw a woman standing in the dining room. She was wearing a denim colored duster, and had a kerchief on her head. There were colors around her. It was as if time had stood still. She was not actually in my dining room, but somehow in my head. It felt like a dream, clear...but yet different from regular "reality." My friend Michael was sitting next to me; Michael saw her too.

I saw Michael about three years ago.... He asked me if I still remembered....I felt like a character in Steven King's It.

After that I would hear things, sometimes I would smell flowers. I started having vivid dreams. When I was eighteen I had a dream of an old woman who claimed to be my then boyfriends dead grandmother. We were in a garden, and she told me to say hello to Rose. I told him about it, he got really angry. Rose was his grandmother's best friend, she lived a few houses away. I had never heard of her before...

People were worried.....I went into therapy. We uncovered that these "events" seemed to happen when I was in highly emotional states..such as depression. I was diagnosed as depressed, but not delusional. The "ghosts" were never clearly there...they never told me to do things...they were images that lasted for seconds...no antipsychotic medications were necessary.

It still happens from time to time, but now it is mostly in the form of deja-vu's that make me feel nauseous. My grandmother's friend stayed over the house. He swears he saw a woman going up the living room stairs, I was left feeling like all this had happened before, it felt familiar. I told him what used to happen to me, he believes me...

I don't know if I believe in the paranormal...for the most part I do, but now I can't help but wonder if there could be something wrong in my brain. I plan on going to the doctor, and finding out....but a big part of me expects to be told that everything is fine. Where would the explanation for these events come from? I don't think the belief in ghosts is anymore crazy then the belief in God.

Furthermore, my grandfather used to tell me he saw things too, and that it started in his youth. He stuck to these stories until the day he died. I don't know if i'll ever find a legitimate answer for these occurences( do any "real" answers ever exist for anything?), but i'm going to try.