Semantic Aphasia

A contemplation of communication in all of it's forms, and an attempt to reconcile my educational and social influences into a coherent whole.

I liked Berlin. The city and I understood each other. I liked that they had left the bombed-out hulk of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church as a monument to loss. Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn’t like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn’t learned yet, that there was no such thing as an empty canvas

—While Oleander - Janet Fitch (via theawkwardhug)

Best Coast: When I’m with you

Theories of Personality

In this class I’m revisiting a number of paradigms I haven’t encountered since psyc101, and I keep tripping over theories that I remember being intrinsically drawn to years ago. I’ve come to realize that what connects them is that they involve the imposition of some kind of structure which makes life seem simple and predictable. They include: stage theories that depict the life span as if it were a staircase that everyone climbs; hierarchies that illustrate all of our motives for action in a simple, rank-ordered pyramid; and theories of learning that boil the complexity of human behaviour down to equations involving punishment and reinforcement.
The last one mentioned, the learning theory, may be my favorite of them all, and oddly, it is perhaps the coldest and most mechanistic. In this theory human behaviour is predictable and malleable: We do what we learn it is beneficial to do, and we avoid doing what we learn it is harmful to do.
Despite the fact that this theory seems dehumanizing, I think the comfort of it lies in it’s scientific approach. There is something reassuring about being able to see the world as logical and rule-bound, and perhaps this is especially true when it applies to the actions of people, which so often can seem to defy explanation or understanding.

Morcheeba and Talib Kweli-Let me see

Self-Serving Bias

In making sense of the actions of ourselves and others, there is a tendency for people to automatically evaluate their own in reference to situational factors, and other’s in reference to intrapersonal factors. Therefore, we tend to see others who do something bad to us as bad people, yet, when we perform the same action, we see ourselves as victims of circumstance. We don’t see our own negative actions as reflective of who we are.

Eventually, though, when we come to know someone else well enough, we begin to incorporate their personality into our self-concept. In the close relationships literature this is called inclusion of the other in the self, and when it happens, for that other person, the self-serving bias disappears. We give them the benefit of the doubt, and we interpret their negative actions the same way we would our own.

Bob Dylan-All the Tired Horses

But mostly, I wanted to tell her about her cat. I had kept my promise; I had found him. It took weeks of after-work roaming through those Spanish Harlem streets, and there were many false alarms — flashes of tiger-striped fur that, upon inspection, were not him. But one day, one cold sunshiny Sunday winter afternoon, it was. Flanked by potted plants and framed by clean lace curtains, he was seated in the window of a warm-looking room: I wondered what his name was, for I was certain he had one now, certain he’d arrived somewhere he belonged. African hut or whatever, I hope Holly has, too.

—Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (via shoreparty)