Category: Stephanie Araujo Blog Posts

Oh boy, last analysis of the summer semester everyone. May I say it has been an absolute pleasure everyone, and yes I am aware that there is still a final project, but I have never done a blog before and this was like crazy cool so let me have my gushy moment. *Wipes tears away in Oscar-worthy moment*

Any-who, let’s talk memory ya’ll. This is fitting considering I have a story for this. I work with children and not a week ago a took one of my kids out to a diner for lunch. Then I saw this guy there who I remembered I met my freshman year in college. Considering I’m a senior now I knew he had graduated. He came up to me and we chatted for a bit. I remembered he was a political science major (insert throwing up emoji) but didn’t want to be a politician but a person behind the scenes, he loved stardew valley and ate every Wednesday at Jasmine.

Now with all this information, you think I would remember something basic, you know like his god damn name? But no, I do not. And that’s the thing about my memory, I can remember the slightest, tiniest details about someone and their face but heaven forbid I remember a birthday, name, or location (Left and right are my arch nemesiss’).

And that’s the funny thing about memory, it’s different for all of us. My significant other can look in a location and know what direction they’re facing, like ok showing off much, while I can remember unquantifiable about of quotes, plot lines, and snippets from the books I have read over the years. Yet we see in our media this week that memory gets a bit more complicated when we jump into metaphysically gifted people vs. those who have abnormal psychology.

Now professor, you have me pulling out my old abnormal psychology notes for your class, that is how you know this shit is getting real. But from a psych major, I’ll give you a quick synopsis of Alzheimer’s. There are three chromosome genetic mutations that we have identified that cause this disease but this only accounts for around 5% of cases. People who are more intelligent and have higher education, and who are more socially, mentally, and physically active throughout the years are less likely to get this disease. And it is not, I repeat not a normal part of aging.

Now we see with poor Marjorie, her Alzheimers actually could be linked heavily with the traumatic passing of her son. New studies have found that those who are already predisposed to the disease are more likely to have it occur if an exceedingly emotionally traumatic event occurs. But Marjorie seems to want to doll up the past. She asks Walter prime to make the movie he proposed to her with not My Best Friends Wedding (Which was HORRIBLE do not recommend, do not watch, it was the beginning of the end for rom-coms) but instead Casa-Blanca an exceedingly exceptional movie if I do say so myself. This altering of her past and even the conversation Tess has later on with Jon stating the memory is not a filing cabinet but a photocopy of a photocopy, getting blurrier and blurrier each and every time shows the fickle nature in which we live our lives.

We live day to day mostly discarding what we did because it was uneventful and meaningless in the grand scheme of it all but maybe we hold onto vague memories of what we wore or what we were doing that year. But Marjorie is physically going back and rewriting her past to make it dreamier, to make it fluffier and sweeter, not getting proposed to after a terrible B-movie but a sweet and romantic movie that has gone down in history as the romantic movie. This rewiring of her memories makes her feel more in control of what she is forgetting. If she is making the rules then whose to say that she’s not in charge? This is just how fickle memory is, a bit too much plaque builds up on the brain and soon people forget all they held dear for their entire lives. And soon the photocopy of a photocopy ends up in the shredder and it doesn’t even matter what movie your husband proposed to you afterward, because you eventually forget you have a husband and everything you hold dear.

Well, that was depressing, but what’s new? Now we go from a failing memory onto a memory so pristine you would think it was a machine, oh wait it is. Data’s question of humanity and consciousness comes into play in this episode, and whether or not he has one is not up to me, ( I think so, he may just act differently because he has an extreme case of Asperger’s with possibly a mild apathy disorder, but like I’m not a psychologist so take that with a grain, or mountain, of salt).

Data’s humanity is proven when he can conjure up emotions from the sight of the metals, the book the captain gave him, and the woman he slept with. These emotions and memories are what convinced the judge that he was allowed to make his own decisions, that he was alive and not just property, and that he was sentient. This distinction that memory gives us, this sentimentality that memory gives us is what sets us apart from all the other creatures on this planet. We keep ticket stubs from movies we watched when we were 14 because we thought it was the best night of our life at that point. We bring useless shells and sand from far-off places just to have it collect dust on shelves to remind us of trips we half remember from years long past. We are sentimental creatures who love to keep and reminisce. And this one little distinction is what makes us human, is what sets our memory, one of want and not convenience, different from all other creatures on earth.

Memory is strange, yet sentimental in nature. We look back on memories fondly, even if they are slightly tinted and duller than when we looked back previously, there is always this fondness felt by the person. And whether your mind is made of metal and is literally connected to the internet and can search anything at any time, or is fading away into nothingness, memory is the only thing we carry on with us that helps keep us pushing forward.

A sappy and sad note to end on I am aware but I wish to thank you all for reading my long (long, long, long…….long) ass posts each week/multiple times a week (idk schedule was wacky yo) but regardless, I appreciate it so much and I wish you nothing but A’s and no mental break downs this upcoming semester, good luck and stay sane everyone! 🙂

To quote my wonderful Mother when I started going through mental health issues a few years back, “Why don’t you just take a nap or go for a walk? I’m sure that will fix you right up.” Terrible advice that genuinely came from a good place (Don’t blame her, she came from a different time where mental health wasn’t a “thing”). I will be the first to say that I am very proud of how far she and the people around me have come in their understanding of mental health and its implications, but I am disappointed about how many people don’t teach their children their emotions and how to express them. I work with children and I always ask them what emotions they felt/feel during certain activities to help encourage a better understanding of emotions and how to express them. Because I wasn’t taught a better understanding of emotions and how to deal with/express them, it greatly exasperated the issues I was suffering with.

One of the biggest issues is how we often compartmentalize emotions as individuals. When I’m feeling happy I can only be feeling happy, when I’m sad I’m only allowed to be sad. Well, screw that. Sometimes I’m sappy (sad + happy) or scad (scared + mad), and when I was little it was expressed so much that we feel Happy or sad, scared or mad, never both at the same time. And here we come to Reily and her wonderful teen angst, I’m shocked she didn’t dye her hair black and get a fake nose ring. Moving is difficult, especially during such fragile and volatile years. And as we can see from her youth and the behavior of Joy, Reily isn’t emotionally mature enough to understand and understand that two emotions can coexist together.

And not even that, often we tell children that they should be happy and jovial, but don’t express to them that it’s okay to be mad, it’s okay to be sad as long as they channel those emotions into something productive. All emotions are normal and valid as long as they are expressed in the correct manner. No emotion should be invalidated like we see Sadness usually is in Reily’s brain. Obviously being too much of one emotion, like sadness, usually doesn’t mean good things, but that can be handled with some therapy and maybe some meds. We need to stop vilifying natural and common emotions that are inherently negative. We all feel them, and damn it, I wanna express them in an emotionally cognitive and valid way! Is that too much to ask???

And the issue with expression and coping mechanisms is amplified to a billion when we look at Ambassador Ves in Star Trek. Ohhhhhh boy, talk about issues with expressing emotions. He is so unwilling to learn how to express his emotions and thusly he physically projects his emotions onto others. He tosses all his negative emotions like anger, impatience, violence, pain, worry, and stress onto an unwilling host. And all those emotions he’s pushing onto others, he is unable to fully break down and understand these issues. But what I don’t think is fair is that these emotions are seen as corrosive and negative as putting a person into extreme old age and death.

Obviously, the build-up of emotions in which as not handled correctly or in a productive manner is bound to cause some major issues, but those emotions themselves are not bad or villainous. Yet unchecked emotion, especially years and years of unbridled emotion like anger and sadness and pain pushed upon someone has got to have some major stress attached to it. It’s already difficult for us to break down and express our emotions, let alone doing it for someone else.

This breakdown of the body due to a lack of emotional compartmentalization is just a slight over-exaggeration compared to real life. Trust me the breakdowns I’ve seen from not only me but my friends from emotions that were unwanted and unchecked are unbelievable. Teach your children how to deal with emotions people, it’s not that hard. Emotions that are left to fester and rot in our minds are extremely detrimental to our bodies. Our minds and what we are dealing with at the moment absolutely have an effect on our bodies just like stress. Just shoving emotions aside will only lead to a pile of them stacked on top of one another until it topples over like an unbalanced pile of dirty laundry. And trust me, you don’t wanna be under that mountain when it knocks over. There’s no cute Bernese mountain dog with a barrel of whiskey around its neck coming to save you, no matter how many times you’ve seen it on Loony Toons.

Emotions are important for every facet of our lives. It helps us as humans to better understand our minds and the mind of others. But unfair prejudice against certain emotions and a major lack of understanding/breakdown of said emotions can lead to huge issues down the line. So please, check in with yourselves and try and understand the emotions behind your actions and how you can thoroughly and productively break them down. Trust me it reveals a lot more than you think. Until next time dear reader, grab some popcorn, put on your favorite B-movie comedy or rom-com, and know that all the emotions you feel are completely valid and universal.

To say I love language and words and all that mumbo-jumbo would be a massive understatement. I still remember the days staying up later than I was supposed to, reading by the light of my princess nightlight (That probably messed up my eyes more than I would like to admit, but all good I guess, glasses here I come!). Those were the days, they were also the days where I could function with all the energy in the world on like 3 hours of sleep, but I’m no longer at that point. If I were to operate on three hours of sleep nowadays I would need an energy drink and 4 times the recommended dose of Advil. But, those nights lying awake in bed, squinting to make out the words in my Magic Treehouse Book was some of the fondest memories I cherish, and it set in motion my love, drive and desire to study English. And although when I decided to do that my immigrant parents looked at me in horror and proclaimed that I was going to live in a box, I knew that this was my passion and understood just how important language is.

Now after that long ass intro (Don’t come at me for cursing, it is a valid part of our language goddamn it) we finally get into this analysis of one very stupid (sorry professor) and one amazing piece of media

OK, if I could insert an audible sigh right now I would. And I mean this with my heart in the right place, I really do, but the aliens in Star Trek: The Next Generation are beyond infuriating, actually, it’s mind-boggling how infuriating they truly are. THEY DO NOT HAVE VERBS, let me repeat, NO VERBS. Their language is based upon metaphors, interesting at first (or so I thought before it became infuriating!). Like how do they even communicate? Metaphors, especially metaphors that relate to very specific pop culture or culture-specific things IS NOT A WAY TO COMMUNICATE. Ok, I got that out of my system.

Just to visualize how impossible this would be, I’m going to make our own example. Imagine if I wanted to convey that I was sad and longing for something I would say Gatsby on the dock. But here’s the issue, you misconstrued what I said and interpret it as how he was hopeful and dedicated to trying to get Dasiy back. Or even how Gatsby was living through a pipedream and was detached from reality. The issue is the broad sentences meant to convey extremely specific things lead to multiple interpretations. Not to mention that if you hadn’t even heard about The Great Gatsby, you would have no freaking clue what I was talking about because it’s a conceptual metaphor with no previous context. To communicate with us everyone must know every single story or cultural impactful event in our culture. AND AGAIN NO VERBS!

Metaphors are fantastic, they help us convey very complex feelings into very limited space (Your hardheaded, I’m bent out of shape) but it can not be the crux of an entire language. I would wager that it would be impossible for a language to develop just by using metaphors because I feel as though with almost 8,000 languages on Earth, we would have seen at least ONE example of this occurring. But no, because it is stupid and impossible (sorry professor lol).

Now, after that rant, if you haven’t moved on yet, I’m quite shocked actually, but happy nonetheless, and on we go to talk about the good part of this week’s viewings. Arrival has been on my list to watch for a while, and I was glad to finally cross it off! I’m not usually a fan of those slow-burn movies that tone everything down a notch to keep this element of realism in effect, but I found myself enthralled and glued to the screen. Louise saying whose child is that literally caught me off guard so much I audibly gasped, let me tell ya.

The way they approach language is quite fascinating. We never actually see a verbal communication format for Abbott or Costello, it’s all through visual media. Essentially only writing and no talking, is this because they have no mouth? Hard to say because they lived in the densest freaking fog I’ve ever seen so I have no clue if they had mouths even. But the way they present the language in a circular fashion is fascinating. It’s a sentence no doubt just rounded. The blotches represent certain words, and it actually ties into how they perceive time and space, everything is cyclic and follows one after the other. Everything is a circle. This shows just how important the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is when trying to break down language. These creatures see language in these circle blotches, they never thought about language as just an individual blotch, it was always a circle. As compared to how Americans typically look at language as individual words strung together in a straight line, this is a drastic difference just based on how our language developed over time.

This difference in linguistic relativity can even be found on our own planet. Many languages on earth cause certain people to think quite differently from others. For example in Spanish, every person who speaks it sees objects as feminine or masculine. Now compare that with Mandarin where there are no gendered pronouns unless it’s in writing, both he and she is Ta, (With a little bar over the a) and it sounds exactly the same with speaking. This difference causes a huge difference in how these drastically different languages affect the thoughts and views of the world, seeing everything as gendered vs. nothing as gendered.

Language is always something that is going to affect how we view and interpret things. I for one only know some words in Portuguese even though I’m a native English speaker and that makes me look at the world differently than my fellow peers. But even humans who fluently speak the same language can have drastically different interpretations based on their own experiences which causes them to look at the world in slightly differing ways. And so when people tell me, psssshhhh English isn’t that hard I look at them and ask how the hell this is a grammatically correct sentence, “He couldn’t explain that that thing he created wasn’t working.” God, I hate when I’m writing and I have to write a sentence like that. Anyway, English is messy and language is something that I will always cherish, it’s the only difference between us and animals. They may be able to communicate but can they say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? I think not!

Cognition is universal, we all feel aware and sentient, and through our senses and our perception of the world around us, our brain is able to gather knowledge and further our consciousness and information. But how is this concept portrayed in media? Our mind has forever and always been an evolving question mark that we are trying to solve, and through the years our media has tried to solve and understand cognition.

Futurama is actually a show I am familiar with, actually, more than familiar, quite in love with in fact, and its episode The Day the Earth Stood Stupid” (A spoof off the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still, which was a terrible movie, by the way, do not recommend, at least the 2008 version) tackles this question of cognition and how it plays a role in our lives. Floating brains shut off all consciousness of the people on earth, and thusly everyone becomes stupid and loses all function. Here we first see this interesting symbiotic relationship between the brain and the body. Cognition cannot occur without outside includes from our perceptions but the perceptions are useless unless our brains are there to process them, and vice versa. Without one there cannot be the other and here we see this breakdown in communication. Their bodies were still able to feel, see, taste, hear and smell but their brains weren’t actually processing or breaking down the information to add to their cognition and therefore it did not occur at all.

Now for the much more sciencey sci-fi. Futuramas is a comedy after all and we all know we humans live for the drama and action. And may I say nothing on this watch list was as dramatic as the Altered Carbon episode Out Of The Past. Here we see another interesting correlation between the mind and body. In the episode, all humans after the age of 1 have a cortical stack that stores all of a human’s memory and consciousness on it, and if undamaged/backed up onto a storage device, people’s consciousness can essentially be placed into a new body. In this example, although there is still this massive connection between the brain and body for creating said human cognition, the body is put at a lower value than the brain. In a world where your body is disposable and replaceable the mind has all the value. This idea happens back to old-fashioned psychological ideas placed forth by Plato that the soul/mind is imprisoned within the body and that the body also is worth less than the mind. The body is more of a vessel and animalistic than the brian which is human and the primary source of consciousness. Now does the show still present the body as an important part of our cognition? Yes absolutely, but it still makes this dual-way cognition seem extremely one-sided (As if the body and mind were grouped together in a group project and the mind did the majority of the work and the body scribbled his name on top of the paper with a crayon). The mind is the handyman while the body is a tool.

And who doesn’t love a bit of old Sci-Fi, I sure do. I must admit though I had never watched Star Trek before so this was a great excuse too. Return To Tomorrow has a shocking similar premiss as Futurama. Quite frankly it is extremely fascinating to see two different shows tackling the same topic, even though they are decades apart from one another. We see in this episode that a consciousness called Sargon is in a sphere after the death of his entire species drove him to place his cognition into an orb. He is a being of pure energy and no matter, purely the mind part of cognition. And just like the Futurama episode, there is this breakdown of communication for their cognition. They are able to manipulate things around them but they are still missing a vital piece of this puzzle, a body. Without one they are stuck like a brain in a vat, not really a being anymore, not really human. The cognition that they do retain is from when they were humans when they were able to have a perfectly functional system of equal parts body and brain.

The idea of cognition is actually surprisingly tackled quite frequently in the media. I suppose it’s from our human-filled desire to understand everything but still not fully understanding ourselves. And regardless of what Sci-Fi of the past, present, or future presents to us, cognition is an equal players game between the body and mind.