Mensational

Now that some time has passed, it's not clear to me how I got into this mess.

My wife remembers it differently than I do. I thought she brought it up, she thinks I did. In any case, I was curious about what the test getting into Mensa entailed. I looked into it and got an email from the local chapter.

There are two parts to the test, the Wonderlic Personality test, which is used by recruiters and others screening job seekers. The NFL uses it extensively, apparently. They give you 12 minutes to answer 50 questions. Do the math (which I can't help but do) and you see that you have just over 14 seconds per question. It's a speed test, basically. The other half of the test is something that Mensa cooked up itself that is similar to the Standford Binet test that most people have heard about.

The top 2% are eligible for Mensa.

I put off doing anything for a long time. I thought that nothing good could come of this. If you fail, you feel like a failure, if you succeed, what if you get a big head and become arrogant? It seems like it would be better not to know. But I got very curious and the thought of taking the test would not go away.

I signed up and showed up for testing, paid my $40 and sat in the room at the local Junior College. There were two other people taking the test. It had occurred to me that if only 2% of the people taking the test are eligible, then my chances were 1 in 50 - not too good.

The people running the test were friendly and not as intimidating as I expected. They asked if we had any questions, and I asked mine about the 2%. They said that it's not 2% of the people taking the test, it's 2% of the general public. They said that 2 out of 3 people that take the test pass it. The comment was that you don't go take the test unless you already have a pretty good idea that you are qualified.

I took the test. The Wonderlic part was grueling. I only got about 35 or 40 questions done, and at one point, aware of the time on the clock, I kind of started to despair. It was a brief feeling, and passed quickly, but when they called time and I saw how much I did not finish, I figured that was it.

The rest of the test was interesting. He started by reading a story with no explanation as to why or what, then went into the test that was not related to the story. It ended up that the questions about the story came after the rest of the test. I had just heard something about this on a podcast, the test being how well you hold something in your mind after there is a stream of interrupting information that comes afterwards. Fortunately, I had just been reading about the subject of the story, so it was already fresh in my mind. Every time they threw a name into the story, I would flash a visual picture of it, sort of as a memory marker. I knew what was coming, so I almost feel like I was cheating. I knew all the questions an hour later when that part of the test came around.

The rest of the test consisted of a lot of comparison contrasts where you have a series of pictures and you have to pick the one that's best or doesn't fit with the others. The pictures were like illustrations taken from 1950's advertisements. Sometimes, you'd look at them and go "what the hell?" Other times it wasn't that hard.

After the test, they talked about what it was like to be in Mensa and go to the meetings. I wondered how political the people would be. Would they tend to think similarly, because they were too smart to be fooled by the spin? Politics comes and goes: are smart people just as divisive as the rest? I wasn't sure I wanted to know. They said they preferred to discuss books and movies and restaurants. That seems pretty smart to me.

It was a fun experience, taking the test, and I'm glad I did.

Did I pass? I told myself before I ever went that if I failed I would be too embarrassed to admit it, and if I passed I didn't want to brag. So I can't tell you. Sorry.

Live & Let Die

I've been thinking a lot lately about how death is a natural process.

It's one of those things that seems perfectly clear when you look dispassionately at people that you are not connected to, people that you do not know personally. We get very callous about death when it happens somewhere else to someone else.

But it's everybody's lot in life.

I've often thought that death is one of the things that makes life worth living. Knowing that your life is temporary makes it more precious and sweet. The only problem is that you appreciate this fact the most only when you are getting close to the time for yourself. If you're lucky, that will be because you're getting old. I've listened to older people complain about getting older and how bad it is, and I understand what they are saying, I just think there's something to be said for the alternative - it's much worse. Actually, I can't help but think that if you took care of your health, exercised your body and mind, and took the time to find pleasures in life and have some accomplishments you are proud of, then age isn't so much a time of defeat. Who isn't going to long for their bodies when they were at their peak of beauty and resilience in their youth?

I have ofter realized that while death is always mourned, it's also necessary to clear the population, make way for people born into the current age. Give the youth their chance. We humans have searched for the fountain of youth since the earliest records, back to the days of early pyramid builders. Perpetual youth is a bit of an oxymoron. What people want is a youthful body and a fresh perspective. With science, we might be able to give them the youthful bodies, but how do you restore innocence? After all, isn't innocence just another word for ignorance? Would you trade in all your experience for youth? I'm sure some people would. In a way, we do become more innocent as we age, for it seems certain that we don't store all our memories, some are destroyed or overwritten as more things happen to us. If you live long enough, you can read the books you read years ago, and it's almost as if you never read them before. Old acquaintances are that way too. Try going to your 20 year high school reunion and see how many people you don't remember at all.

Immortality would bring it's own problems. Would wealth concentrate into the oldest people's hands? Would they tend to get into positions of authority and never give them up? Would the population truly explode if people weren't dying? This would tend to make life cheap. If no one ever died naturally, you'd have to either stop having babies (a biological drive so strong, that I can't see how you could eradicate it) or let people murder without penalty.

I sometimes think that people feel that their life gets stale after a while. We don't seem as sharp, our senses are dulled and we become emotionally jaded. That might be natures way of making us want to die. In biology, there is a phenomenon called apotosis. Cellular suicide. It's used as a way to take a cell that is misbehaving, badly damaged, or developing incorrectly out of the game. The body or the cell itself sends a signal that makes the cell kill itself. You see parallels in human life. Some people commit suicide. It makes you wonder if some of them somehow know that they aren't met for life. If you knew that the people that commit suicide were destined for a horrible life of pain, you could understand why death might seem like a better alternative. Or, if you look at society as a body and people as individual cells in the body, it seems quite clear that society benefits from the removal of some individuals.

On an individual level, when it's someone you care about, it's a tragedy for a person to die. I wonder what it would have been like to live in an era where death was very common, like during the Civil War or the Bubonic Plague. Do you just get numb to all the death? If we lived in a world where people rarely died, would the occasional death seem that much worse?

Conflict Irresolution

Watching the news of the day and reading about history, you learn a few things about war and conflict.

Man seems to be an irredeemably warlike creature. If you look at it from a Darwinian standpoint, the group that is willing to be stronger and more aggressive will naturally win out over groups that want to be peaceful or be left alone. Evolutionary biologists would probably disagree with me, but natural selection and survival of the fittest seems to dictate that the most warlike people will probably prevail and pass on their genes. This is the thought that leads me to not be surprised that man can't seem to evolve past war.

History's examples of invasions and wars often follow a pattern. The winner tends to completely dominate or expel and sometimes wipe out the loser. The winner often moves in and occupies the territory of the loser. While history has many examples of the loser regrouping and rebuilding and challenging the winner again, there are also many examples of the loser being utterly destroyed. My favorite example is what the Romans did to the Carthaginians after the third Punic war. Although it is probably just a myth, it was said that the Romans sowed the ground with salt after defeating Carthage so that they could never even farm and support themselves in the future - they could never rise again. Another great example is what happened to the biblical era Assyrians. They had a brutal empire that wiped out anyone that opposed them. They made examples of their rivals in order to terrorize any other groups that might be thinking of rebellion. In the end, when they were finally defeated, the rebels wiped out all the Assyrians to a degree that 200 years later, the locals did not even know who used to live there. The Greek warrior Xenophon moved through and asked who used to live in the huge empty cities that were abandoned when the Assyrians were destroyed. The locals thought that it was the Meads, the memory of the Assyrians was so well destroyed. See Dan Carlin's Hardcore History about the fall of Ninevah.

The average defeated minor group could resent their losses all they wanted, but they were powerless to do anything about it. If they weren't killed, they were usually stripped of all their possessions, and often forced out of their homeland.

If you look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you see that this pattern was disrupted. The Palestinians were not allowed to lose completely. The peace plans after the various wars and armed conflicts usually ended in a "civilized" system that let the civilian population keep their lives and stay in their land. The problem with this is that the Palestinians are still around and still want to keep the conflict open. They will never be happy until the Jews are gone. The hatred has only grown through their defeat, giving a face to the cause and a people to be championed by other enemies of Israel.

Ironically, if the Israelis had been less civilized and more brutal, and wiped out or displaced the Palestinians completely, they would not have the population of people that sit in their midst, sowing discontent.

If you look at other examples, actually, I'm thinking of Germany and Japan after WWII. In that case, the central government was defeated completely and replaced with a foreign government to rule over them. So in a sense, what we Americans fought during the war, ceased to exist when the war was over. What was left was the people, and they were governed in a manner that let them understand and believe that their welfare was important to them. I wonder if that could have ever worked in the Arab-Israeli conflict?

Crystalline Memories

I was talking to a friend about memories. I find it interesting to think about how memory works, because it varies so much from person to person, and from memory to memory within one person.

I find that I access memory different that most people. Sometimes, when my brother asks me if I remember something, he describes it a certain way and it makes no sense to me. I find that he was focused on some aspect of what we were doing, and I was focused on something else. Often, if I can get a handle on how I would have looked at it, maybe where we were, when it was, or what happened before or after it, I can get a handle on the memory and draw it out.

Often, at that point, it still does not match my brother's memories, but I find that to be a separate issue. I believe that people often alter their memories, either from repeated retelling and embellishing, or from wishful thinking. We're all guilty of it.

I find that memories behave a little like an imperfection in a crystal. If you've ever held a natural crystal up to the light, you've noticed the internal fractures and imperfections in the crystal that are invisible from some directions and very clear from others. I think memories are like that, sometimes. They become clear if you approach them from one direction only, just like seeing those imperfections in a crystal.

I heard when I was little that all of your memories of everything you've ever done were still in your head. This begged the question of why you can't remember anything from the first 3 to 4 years of your life. Recently, I've heard that new memories overwrite the older memories, but I wonder if this is completely true. The science report I heard that said this also said that the brain is making new neurons throughout your life, which is something else that they did not used to believe, up until recently. I've also heard theories that memories are stored in a distributed fashion in the brain, like a holograph, which is an interesting notion. This means that individual neurons could be responsible for helping to build the image of many memories - a redundancy. It also means that a portion of the brain could be injured, but not knock out whole chunks of the memory, but just weaken the memories.

Regardless of how it physically works, I believe that sometimes capturing memories can only be done from a specific direction. I used to dabble in self-hypnosis when I was younger. I remember reading that you could use hypnosis to retrieve memories and to do age regression. Besides that, the books said that hypnosis could relax you and relieve stress. I think maybe there is a connection here. If you think of the memory as being most visible from one direction, the hypnosis acts as a way of shaking up your viewpoint. If you are not rigidly fixed in your viewpoint, if you relax and float around, you can let the memory matrix rotate until it lines up and lets you in. I think of it as freeing you up to see in all directions.

Another think I find to be interesting is the scope of memories. Sometimes we remember what we were doing or where we were over a long period of time. Then you get to zoom in to a particular event within that context, then looking closer, you may remember a particular instance. This is a nesting of memories. You have big groups of memories that are each loaded with many little memories. Going back to the crystal analogy, are you looking for a tiny fleck embedded in the crystal or a fracture that spans the entire crystal. Does it help to frame the memory in the bigger part it is embedded in, then zoom in and focus on a narrower and sharper portion of that megaevent?

I think this is a useful construct in thinking about how your memories are stored in order to help you recall things. I remember when I realized that memory could be as good or as bad as you wanted it to be. You can attempt to remember something and if it doesn't come immediately, you can say "I can't remember". This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you say you can't remember, you stop looking and it's true - you can't remember. If you say instead, "I can't think of it right now, wait a minute, it will come to me," that often works. I find that the memory is often there, I can feel its presence. Sometimes, it's a little like taming a skittish animal, when you relax or back away, it comes out and comes to you.