The most captivating aspect of class since my last post is definitely the movie, Memento.  I have never seen the movie before and became enthralled in the plot and the disease that the main character has.  I could not imagine being in his shoes, and having to take pictures and write notes to myself to remember who I am talking to.  I have heard of tragedies (i.e. his wife being raped and murdered by "John G"), having a negative affect on people's memories.  I would like to research his disease and see if it is real on an level.
One aspect of the films making that is interesting is the contrast and use of black and white vs color in the scenes.  It is difficult at this point in the film to tell the relevance of the black and white and color in differing scenes.  The reason, I think, for the difficulty is the fact that the movie is played in a sequence that represents the main characters memory.  The movie starts with what seems like the final scene, and works backwards, incorporating different characters before they are actually introduced.  This is representative of the main character because he is constantly put in situations where he is left wondering, "how did I get here?"  A prime example of his condition is when he is being chased by the man who shot out his window, and a couple minutes into the chase he stops and wonders, "why am I running," and has to use clues around him to figure out he is being chased by the gunman.  The fact that the movie goes in the sequence of his mind adds to the interest in his disease, while also adding to the mystery of what "happened" leading up to the point he is at now.  I am looking forward to seeing the end of the movie, and figuring out the earlier events that led him to what we have already seen.
In the last post, I commented on the assigned reading by JG Whitrow, "What is Time?"  After we read and discussed that article, we were assigned a later section from the same piece by JG Whitrow that further dove into the idea of "Time and Ourselves."  As I read the article, I found the arguments of many different philosophers, such as Kant, Guyua, Socrates, Diderot, Bergeson and Freud, among others.  Guyua had a theory that I found very interesting.  He though that "the idea of time arose when man became conscious of his reactions towards pleasure and pain and of the succession of muscular sensations associated with these reactions."  We discussed the idea of the difference in human memory and animal memory, and Guyua thinks that the difference is in the fact that animals have "particular patterns of sensory awareness- known as 'releasers'," where humans learn from their own experience.  Another interesting quote in the reading, that I feel relates to the movie Memento is, "the usefulness of memory is so obvious that we tend to regard forgetting as a defect."  I think that Leonard, the main character in the movie, illustrates how important both forgetting and remembering really are.  As much as Leonard cannot remember people or things, it would also make it easier if he didn't forget so easily after someone told him.  I think that remembering and forgetting, obviously, go hand in hand, in terms of importance.  Leonard would be in a much better situation if he could at least not forget things once he re-heard them after the incident.

Two questions:
What do people think is more important, short-term memory or long-term memory?

Since Leonard's disease came about after the incident, wouldn't he forget that he had the disease just as easily as he forgets other things?

While looking into diseases similar to Leonard's in the movie Memento, I compared it to Alzheimer's.  The early stages of Alzheimer's affect short term memory tremendously.  The inability to learn new skills or acquire new memories obviously relates to Leonard.  A major difference in Leonard and most Alzheimer's patients, is how the disease came about.  In Leonard's case, his disease was a result of a tragic incident, while Alzheimer's usually is a disease that comes about with age.  Alzheimer's is a degenerative disease, while Leonard seems to be living a healthy life, aside from his lack of memory. 

Introduction and JG Whitrow- What is Time?

During the first class, I really enjoyed the music video we watched "Come Into My World" by Kylie Minoque.  The inability to pick up on certain aspects of the repetition in the video were amazing.  We were able to compose a list of similarities after one viewing, and then another list, completely different, after the second time we watched the video.  Knowing what we were looking for, rather than nonchalantly watching the video, proved to help our eyes follow exactly what was happening, and see more of the parallels as the video progressed.  Similarly, in the second class, we watched another music video.  This video similarly was able to play tricks on my eyes at first glance.  The ability of the director to tell a story, not only through the words in the story, but also by changing the direction at which certain aspects of the video were playing, forward vs backward, were amazing.  Personally, I was fooled by this aspect of the video, in that I thought the black cat was going against the grain and walking backwards through the "forward side" of the screen.  Until we watched the video in slow motion did my eyes recognize that the cat was true to form, and was walking forwards. The ability of the visual tactics used to trick you unless you paid close attention was amazing.  Thinking about the screenplay of the video and replaying it in our own pictures and words, helped to organize the thoughts everyone seemed to have about the video.

"...Only time has this peculiar quality which makes us feel intuitively that we understand it perfectly so long as we are not asked to explain what we mean by it."
Whitrow begins his piece by discussing why we ultimately cannot seem to answer the question as to why we can not explain time.  First, he looks at the origins of time, whether it be with the Gregorian calendar, the Mayan calendar, the Christian calendar, and contributions by such groups as the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians.   The Mayans were "the most obsessed with the idea of time...picturing the divisions time as burdens carried by a hierarchy of divine bearers who personified the respective numbers by which the different periods- days, months, years decades and centuries- were distinguished."  Though we recognize that the Mayans were able to break ground on the though of time, we know that our sense of time now, is much more sophisticated.  Our ability to acknowledge and understand the idea of past, present and future is only a trait that man has been able to comprehend, differing from even the "most intelligent animals such as chimpanzees."  Once we are able to decipher between past and present, we can start to examine events in the past, such as the beginning of time, time that we consider today and also the start of everything we know.
Personally, I have never thought about the idea of explaining time.  It is a hard concept to ponder, because it is something that we know, but can't comprehend.  If someone asks me what is time, I would, after reading this article, think about time on many different levels, rather than the "time" on the clock.