Caroline Kunkel Journal 1

For the first readings, due on the first day of class, I was pleasantly surprised that the articles were related to neuroscience and the brain, one of the commonalities between my majors. Being a neuroscience and linguistics, I had a great deal of trouble trying to think of another metaphor to describe the brain other than seeing it as akin to a computer. This, I believe, was so difficult for me due to the fact that I have taken so many classes which continually discuss the brain and its parts as though they were computers, or some strictly mechanical, programmed device which simply receives a stimulus and produces a calculated response. That being said, I was surprisingly compelled by many of the arguments made in the second article, despite my years of teaching to suggest otherwise. One of the things I found most challenging about the second article, was that, having had so much experience with the topics and examples discussed, I found inaccuracies in some of the claims made, most likely due to the fact that many of the examples had been rather oversimplified to expand the audience. Despite this, however, I was able to reason through a more complex version of some of the claims made in the article with which I had taken issue, and through said reasoning and with some outside knowledge and research, was able to come to the same conclusion of the second article, that being that the brain is not like a computer, and would not be able to be thought of as such due to the different effects that same experience can have on two different people as a result of their previous experiences and their fundamental brain chemistry.

With regard to the first exercise of Thursday, in which we had to choose a historical time to which we would travel back, I had a great deal of difficulty picking a time. My way of approaching the problem was to think about all the questions I have about history and which one I would most like to answer. After approaching it in this manner, of finding an answer to my question, rather than finding a time I would like to experience, it became much easier for me to decide, and what I chose was not so much a time as it was an event. One of the most debated subjects in linguistics, particularly that of historical linguistics, is whether or not there was one ‘original’ language, and if so, what it was, much like how biologists think about the last universal common ancestor. Thus, I decided that I would like to travel back in time to observe and document this original language in its entirety, and if I found that there was not in fact only one original language, I would want to document them all. In contrast, for the time I would least like to be alive during, I chose the world wars, during which time I would have wanted to be a doctor. What struck me about this exercise was the great difference between my two choices, that being not the time, but who I would want to be. In the first scenario I took a more scientific approach, wanting only to observe, document, and learn, not to impact, and yet, in the second scenario, I would have wanted to play an active role in the environment in which I found myself, even going so far as to imagine myself as someone completely different. Upon reflection, I found this difference in choices to be rather interesting, and upon closer examination, rather reflective of the multifaceted nature of my own character.

When discussing the view of technology today, I found that I agreed with many things said, however I drew the line of optimism versus pessimism not based on age, as so many of my colleagues did, but instead drew it based on access and adaptability. I see this as being a more representative way of seeing opinions of technology due to the fact that it is not the case that everyone past a certain age is pessimistic about technology and its impact on society, and likewise, not everyone, for example, in their twenties, is optimistic about these changes. Instead, it seems to be based much more on an individual person’s ability to adapt to the rapidly changing technology, with those more able to adapt being more likely to see the advances as a good thing. In addition, although I have not been able to have first-hand experience of this, it stands to reason that those who do not have access to more advanced technologies, or who function outside the interconnected technological world we have found ourselves in would naturally be more pessimistic about the drastic alterations technology is causing to society.