Saturday, September 11, 2010

Mind, consider yourself blown

I just finished watchiing a documentary originally aired on PBS but I got to watch thanks to Netflix instant streaming (ah, what an age we live in) called Between the Folds. In it, one of the people interviewed makes a statement somewhere along the lines of paper having a memory and that once a fold is made in a piece of paper, that piece of paper can no longer go back to its pre-folded state. You can try to lay it flat but it wants to go back to its folded state. From this, it is possible to make the analogy that a piece of flat paper is like the human mind. Prior to any folds or changes it is blank and is, for the most part, useless. However, once even a single fold or, for the human mind analogy, a single thought is placed into that mind, that thought can not be un-thunk (is that a word?). That thought then goes on to influence other thoughts which then in turn effects who we are as human beings. Just a little origami meets Inception mind-blowing thinking for you :)

1 comment:

Julia said...

Ah but that requires that we assume that the mind is blank and flat like the paper. We know however that it is not. We are pre-programmed to perceive things and thus think things in particular ways. While in the normal human brain you can't "unthink" things, many diseased and damaged brains lose the capacity to store things... so it is as though the items are unthought. Just more food for thought... :)