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Personality
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Link of the day
- Hits: 1380
Left or Right Brained?
Today's "link(s) of the day" (posted by now as you've noticed every other or so day, but time is often an issue, and I've given you value on the past links of the day, so please forgive my tardiness.) deal with personality - and various methods of measuring it. Personality inventories are overall pretty much the same thing, different ways of cutting up the same pie, but their value lies in how well they can predict the behaviours and actions of the individual. With that in mind, here are a few links to get you started:
http://brain.web-us.com/brain/braindominance.htm
Jung Typology/Myers Briggs Test
And, finally, what's it all about if you're not happy? (which, in a sense, is a personality trait.) So if your unsure (who's unsure about this stuff?) try one of the many tests here:
http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/
(OK. If you see the image above as spinning clockwise, you're right brained dominant. Anti-clockwise; your left brained dominant. Click here for an explanation.
Pareidolia
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Link of the day
- Hits: 1489
Today's link, complete with image of Virgin Mary on Toast and Jesus in Clouds, is Pareidolia. Which, for those of you too lazy or disinterested to follow the link, is the process by which people see images of the Beloved Virgin Mary in pieces of toast, Jesus in clouds, and the faces of devils in smoke. Or, less simply, Anthropomorphic Patterns. A noteworthy psychological quirk that we've evolved to read into abstractions and randomness patterns that may not be really there - often these things are considered newsworthy if they involve a prominent religious icon such as Jesus, Mary or Allah (verses from the Koran are forever being found in the seed patterns of eggplant, for example) - their purpose on the news is a sort of "feel-good" quirky, as inpiration to the faithful, and a nudge-nudge-wink-wink between a more skeptical anchor and audience.
It's postulated that there is some survival value in this, we are better off to see snakes in and jaguars in tree branches than not to see them, if wrong we lose nothing, if we are right we survive another day. Hence we are in some sense "hardwired" to see these images and project patterns onto randomness.
Nonetheless it does have some application - the images we see being somehow part of us, our larger "world view". Seeing snakes and faces have arisen from evolution, but think of the Rorschach Inkblot Test, whereby diagnosis is rendered based upon subjective descriptions of random patterns in ink. Here we see patterns that are determined by our personalities and life experience, as in the religious images hidden in everyday objects.
Pareidolia is a subset of an idea - Apophenia - the process by which our minds create meaning for otherwise random events - Seeing images in toast is one such process, but there are others - think coincidences, and the subsequent attributions of meaning, or the voices of departed spirits emerging from the hiss of blank audio cassettes. From here we can look at these things can be manipulated - intentionally or otherwise - to shape and control our thoughts. Think subliminal - wherin images and ideas are deliberately hidden within media to not be consciously seen, but to unconciously direct and manipulate our thoughts. But that is another post. . .
WordFest 2008
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Events
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Ah, just a reminder before I forget: Wordfest 2008 will be on from October 14th to October 19th. Check out their website for more information.
I might have been mistaken
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dear Osama
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Dear Osama,
In my last letter I said that the Americans have forgiven you for what happened all those years ago. I might have been mistaken as I just heard some US Candidates on the radio talking about how they plan to come and get you. Don't worry, it's a campaign promise, and probably they won't come looking. They always like to talk big at election time. There's some sort of statute of limitations in the US anyways, and so your time might be up.
Hope your day is going well.
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