Midnight Summer's Dream

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Glass Half-Full or Half-Empty?

  “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see,” -Henry David Thoreau I enjoyed Kawabata’s, “The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket,” as it elicited great emotion and offered an interesting perspective. In the story, two people look at the same insect yet see two different types. This got me thinking. Isn't it quite often that people can see the same thing but interpret it entirely differently? At the most basic level, we have the never-ending dilemma of the glass being half-full or half-empty. It always has the same amount of water, but 2 people interpret it differently. We also have the opportunity-seekers. A renter tours a smelly home, it has an old kitchen, an out-dated bathroom, overgrown shrubs and thinks, ‘This house is a dump! I would never live in it.’ Meanwhile, the investor sees opportunity. They see that they can give the home a facelift with a new kitchen, an update of the bathroom, an investment in landscaping while make a profit doing so. Again, same hous...
Read more

Neuroscience, Advertising & Emily Dickinson?

I really enjoyed Dickinson's poem and its analysis mainly because I am fascinated by the brain and the way it works. The brain is a superpower computer whose potential is unfathomable. At any given time our conscious brain is able to process 40-50 bits of information per second. Meanwhile, our subconscious brain is able to process up to 11 million bits per second. Therefore we make connections and pick up on things we never know.  Back in the mid-20th centuries when cinema and TV's were still fairly new, clever advertisers exploited the power of the subconscious mind to increase sales. In the cinema, they would insert a photo of popcorn for a fraction of a second, long enough for the subconscious mind to pick up on but quick enough to not let the conscious mind process this information. As our subconscious mind is responsible for 90-95% of our actions, the popcorn was at the forefront of the viewers mind. They would then get up and buy popcorn at a more frequent rate then when ...
Read more

Death of a Salesman & Perception

 The director of the film, "Death of the Salesman" interpreted the play differently than I had. Or perhaps he dramatized it to hold attention better and thus make the film a greater success.  The main surprise was the role of the main character. In the movie he was much more angry, loud and demanding than what I envisioned him to be when reading. On several occasions he would yell unnecessarily. For example, with the meeting with his boss I envisioned him nervous and begging for a salary. In the movie, he started out this way but gradually grew more and more aggressive where at one point the boss seemed scared to be in the same room. On several instances, he would snap at his wife whereas in the written version I interpreted his lines with a controlled firmness behind them.  These varying interpretations made me think about how everybody's perception of reality differs. Even though we might objectively see the same object or scene, our interpretation will be different bas...
Read more