Near Matches
Ignore Exact
Everything
2
Right now,
(
place
)
by
LeoDV
Mon Jan 03 2005 at 10:56:53
you are
reading
.
Specks of light
are being flung out of this computer screen and landing on your
cornea
. The image of the
screen
is crossing your
pupil
, reversed as it crosses the
lens
and then landing on your sensitive
retina
. From there, the
image
is transported to the back of your
brain
through an astoundingly fast chemical and electric
signal
.
In your mind, each letter is identified and designated by a
sound
. As sounds come together, they form words, and you compare those words to the database of words whose meaning you're already familiar with; for instance,
fa-mi-li-ar
means something you know well.
If you're
relatively smart
and have experience of reading, your mind will identify the
words
as a
whole
before it has to put their parts together. Normally, you should have about 100,000 stored up, not to mention those you vaguely know and those you can figure out from their
etymology
; for instance, etymology comes from
ετύμος
, "true" and
λόγος
, "speech."
The words come together to form sentences, and you
analyse
their meaning. From there, the sentence is moved to an other area of your brain in order to be stored there temporarily. After all, you never know: if the sentence seems uninteresting to you, as most are, you can easily clean out this
temporary buffer
.
However, if you deem it worthy of interest, you will open up
another spot
in your brain and the sentence will be stored there longer. That will allow you to do two things: to use the
information
in that sentence to solve problems, or you can
pass it on
to other people who haven't read this
node
.
If you're very lucky, the words in what you're reading will add up to more than the sum of their parts.
Words
are tyrants; since we cannot live without them, and since they are forced upon us, they are tools of oppression as much as they are tools of thought. However, sometimes people and sentences can crack gaps into the meaning of words, through which our own
interpretation
can slither. Such words are always meant as a gift from their author to someone he loves.
I don't know if there is any in
this node
, but there is many in
others
. The name of this gift is
literature
.
Why your pet eats poop
Word
Information is fractal
You are reading this
information
There are many like it, but this one is mine
Eye
The Scholar and the Poet share a Constitutional
Philology
Some of our best friends are three minutes long
I can see the evening stars
How your brain codes knowledge
About beetles, and your inky heart
semantic memory
How your brain works
tie a word to it
Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Cognition
Pattern recognition
Mutual masturbation
short-term memory
eye contact
cognitive linguistics
This sentence is in Spanish while you're not looking
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