Memoir musings.

Why don't I write on this blog? Why don't I write in a journal? Why don't I write copious pages of witty social commentary, or thoughtful reflections, or a novel???

These questions have plagued me over the course of my life so far and I've not yet found the answer.

My latest inspiration is to write some memoirs. Iain recommended this to me when I declined his invitation to attend a coffee/breakfast experience with him, by saying that it would be like "being stabbed in the thigh with a compass, but without the compass, and without the stabbing".

I thought "Memoirs! sounds like sophisticated and linguistically-related fun". So here I am. On my blog (which was not created at all for this purpose - sorry loyal readers! please allow me a this ephemeral self-indulgence...). Ready to write some memoirs!

But where to start? I have so many questions! (e.g. what is a memoir?)
I looked them up on the interwebs and found an informative website to act as my guide (Inkspell memoir website http://inkspell.homestead.com/memoir.html).

To orient myself appropriately toward the trajectory of memoir excellence, I decided to reflect on the definition that the website had to give...

Definition of Memoir

A memoir is a piece of autobiographical writing, usually shorter in nature than a comprehensive autobiography (OK! So far so good...). The memoir, especially as it is being used in publishing today, often tries to capture certain highlights or meaningful moments in one's past, often including a contemplation of the meaning of that event at the time of the writing of the memoir (Meaningful events? Doubts forming...).. The memoir may be more emotional and concerned with capturing particular scenes, or a series of events, rather than documenting every fact of a person's life (Sweet action...).

It just sounds so EASY!
However, I lack meaningful moments from my past.
So I will have to think about this before I write embark on the memoir journey.
Ideas welcome.

Shameless Promotion!

Needless to say I need to update my blog more often.

One of the reasons I have not updated it lately is because I am doing my PhD.
One of the things I need to do for my PhD is research.
Now my "research" takes many forms, but presently I have an online survey set up to look at customer service performance.

If you would like to, I would LOVE you to do it, so that I can get some data to analyse and then get around to the important things in life (e.g. blogging).

It's really easy; answer questions about yourself and about four video clips of customer service.

It should take about 20 minutes to do.

Here's the link:
http://asb.qualtrics.com/SE?SID=SV_2hRQCyxKbCIFROY&SVID=Prod

I anticipate that the link will be active for another week or 2.... probably more if I don't get any responses.

If you have questions about it, just ask me..... Happy to answer them.

How we perceive emotion

Something I have learned - and feel is worth sharing with people, because it truly is fascinating - is about how people perceive emotions. So prepare to have your minds blown!

Before I give you the readers digest version, I need to let you know that there are competing theories about this, and that there are even different theories about what emotions actually are (I challenge you to come up with a definition!).

So how do we perceive emotions?
Interestingly, this ability requires our own internal simulation of the emotional state. That is, to perceive another person as being happy, you need to - in some way - experience this "happiness" for yourself (whether by some form of volitional imitation or by automatic mimicry). This does not necessarily entail that you - when faced with a fearful person - suddenly get infected with their emotion and begin to show outward fear-stimulated behaviours before you interpret their emotional expression as fear, but a comparison process takes place whereby the perceptual information you get is processed by the premotor cortex and/or posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) (part of your brain responsible for guidance of your physical movement, amongst other things). In other words, you essentially internally simulate what is happening in order to understand it. (As an interesting aside, people who have larger pSTS's have been found to be more altruistic! Go figure...).

Although I might point out that you certainly CAN experience this "catching" of someone else's emotion - there is a large literature on the phenomena, called emotional contagion. Now you know why you like being around happy people - because they make you happy :-)
This, and other evidence from studies on empathy and neurophysiological studies on imitation focusing on mirror neurons (I don't have time to go into these here, but let me encourage you to look them up - they're sweet action) have provided much of the empirical basis for the above view.

Cool huh!?

The woes of infirmity

Oh dear friends... woe is me!

I have been struck down my the mighty hand of back pain and am currently wallowing in a cesspit of doom, guzzling down cocktails of anti-inflammatories and self-pity in a fruitless attempt to comfort myself. The physiotherapist gave me about a thrillion torturous exercises which I can't even do, and all of this becasue...

MY TORSO IS TOO LONG.

Yes... disproportionately so. I have always known that I am mostly torso, and have been telling people for years... however all I ever got in return was mockery and scoffs of disbelief; now I have diagnostic proof from a real live health professional that my torso is just too long to survive. Too bad this information has finally come packaged in the form of a life sentence! Suck on that, mockers!!!!!!!!!!

Flog

noun

a cross between flaming and a blog; a blog for flaming.

For example, I just checked out John McCain's blog... and all I found were rants about how hates Obama! It's more of a flog than a blog, really.

Love on

verb

To dote upon in a non-patronising way, typically with undertones of awe and excitement.

For example, I have spent all day loving on my new iphone.

Frickin

expletive

When you don't want to use censored words.