Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!
Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.
I’m not flighty, I’m just corollarily challenged
So I was thinking about what we were discussing in class; that we can walk without thinking about it, type on a computer without consciously sending a signal to each finger at each moment, etc. I thought this was very interesting, and I happily continued to peruse the issue in my head. I thought about motion sickness and mixed signals, and about the blood vessels in your eyes that you don’t “see” even though they are there… I was merrily meditating on all these ideas, when suddenly I looked down and realized I had been taking notes on organic chemistry the entire time. I didn’t remember a lick of the stuff I was writing, but there it was, on the page. It was even legible and coherent. I found this rather amusing and startlingly appropriate.
Someone mentioned in one of their posts how they sometimes correlated personality with how the aforementioned phenomena might affect different people. Now, to be honest, I kinda feel that with all this talk about everything being “a product of the brain” and i-boxes within boxes and whatnot, our definition of personality has probs been mangled beyond recognition at this point, however, if I were able to send myself back to the time before I was enrolled in this class, back when things were simple, I would have said to you that I have a very “scatter-brained” personality. I am the queen of tangents. I am the empress of non sequiturs. I think nine things at once, and when I try to say them all they get garbled together and it comes out all wrong and is therefore usually interpreted as dirty(as most things are). A former boyfriend of mine was always complaining that I would be in the middle of a conversation with him and suddenly I would run away and start talking to someone else. When he would confront me about it later, I’d just get confused because I couldn’t remember that I hadn’t finished our conversation before I ran off and started the next one. My point is, I always wondered what the heck was wrong with me that new thoughts were always flooding into my head and I couldn’t freaking concentrate on one thing, that I could move on to something new without even realizing it. I guess what I am trying to say is that like walking, or typing, or taking notes while thinking about something else, the human brain seems to apply this concept of ignoring certain signals and focusing on others to everything, not just physical stimuli but “I-function” type (self perpetuated) stimuli too. I think that’s pretty sweet.
That being said, I think my “I-function” regulator is broken.
Maybe that’s what I’ll use as my excuse next time my friend yells at me because my room is a mess. I mean seriously, do you know how hard it is to clean your room with a busted corollary discharge monitor? Not easy my friends, not easy.