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Firstly, I think I need to take a shower. Also, earlier, while in C class, I zoned out. It wasn’t like falling asleep, however. I was sitting fully upright, keys on the keyboard, typing out a program as the teacher talked. I sort of ‘blinked’ and shook my head, and looked up, and he was on a totally different program. I zoned out for about a minute or something. I hastily exited the program I was on, and moved onto the one he was on. I think my eyes were open the whole time, and I don’t remember having any dreams or anything. It was like I was abducted by aliens and then reinserted into space/time or something. Very unsettling. Maybe I’m just going insane.

However, I’m awfully happy about Cocoa, the programming framework for Mac OS X. Its great fun, and very intuitive! I’ve never done any object oriented programming before, but I’m really getting into the book I’ve got, “Learning Cocoa with Objective-C.” If anyone has any ideas for simple little single-window OS X apps, let me know! I’m still uber-beginner, but I’d love some ideas for things to practice on!

Oh, and speaking of going insane, I realized today that I can selectively turn off my ability to understand the English language. I can’t really do it while someone is specifically talking to me, but if I’m standing in a hallway, and there are people talking to each other next to me, I can make it so that I can still hear their words perfectly clearly, but that I don’t comprehend any of them. It just sounds like utter gibberish to me. Then I can turn back on my understanding, and the words turn into phrases and concepts, and I eavesdrop on their conversation. Then, I can turn it back off, and my brain just inputs a useless stream of senseless babbling. Am I atrophing my brain by not utilizing my language center? Or am I saving energy by recycling my thought processes toward better tasks? Only time will tell… The feeling of hearing, but possessing no comprehension reminds me of what it must be like to be an utter foreigner, or someone with a severe mental illness.

Speaking of mental illness, Oliver Sacks, author of books such as, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat,” is coming to speak at Washington University. Saddly, I will be unable to attend, because it is before my last day at work, and it is during the day, when I am very busy. However, Oliver Sacks would be a great person to hear talk (and I’d leave my comprehension circuits turned on). For those of you who haven’t heard of him, he is a neurologist who has written many books on mental illness, and gone a very long way in promoting understanding towards various mental conditions that seem very alien to us of reasonably ‘normal’ mental faculties, which, for the purpose of this discussion, includes just about anyone who is capable of reading this website. After reading his writing, I feel a much greater understanding for what people with severe mental abnormalities experience, and how they live their lives. Through that understanding, empathy can grow, as well as a greater understanding for how my own mental quirks and properties shape my whole development. Oliver Sacks takes a very holistic and humanist view, and promotes the idea that while an illness may affect one specific physical part of the brain, that the entire mind and body react to that change, and shape themselves around it in attempts to adapt and cope. His stories of people living with severe mental illness are filled with technical and medical descriptions of course, but never leave out the deeply human side of each case. However abnormal his patients may seem, there is a deeply human side to all of them that is impossible to ignore. I highly recommend reading some of his books.

Goodnight.

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