A Mind at a Time

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I am currently reading the book A Mind at a Time (actually more listening since it is an audio book). I found this to be a very interesting book in helping understand myself and my children.

A couple of things I took from the book are:
  • Some people are visual thinkers - for these people, it is difficult for them to absorb if you provide too many words to them.
  • We have three types of memory, short term (works only for 2 seconds), middle term and long term.
    • For cases where the short term is faulty, it may sometimes cause the person not to be able to grasp input that is too fast.
    • Sometimes, our memory is selective, so some people have very good recollection in certain subjects but not in others (I believe I fall into this category).
    • Our long term memory is potentially unlimited but sometimes the way we store it may cause them to be unretrievable.
  • Many times due to certain mental development dysfunction, people misunderstood. For example, a person may be very intelligent but because of problem with language, his mind may become overloaded and be mistaken as slow.
    • Too many times, we place our own perception on other without understand the challenges they face.
  • Mel Levine also brought up the case of mental memory. For some people, this mental memory may not be sustainable and may be susceptible to power failure/brownouts. I have had cases of such failures. Also one thing I noticed is if I use too much mental memory, my body tends to overheat and will need hours to cool down.
    • Hmmm, I wonder how many calories are used in the process. Maybe another way of burning calories to maintain the body weight.
I found that by listening to this book, it provides me a better understanding about myself as well as others. It also helps me a appreciate the precious gift that we have in the mind. The complexity and the load that is placed on our children. Often times, the expectation we place on our children is many times more than what is required in most daily expectations at an workplace.

Finally, based on the mental development of each person, each will have certain jobs that they are best suited for. It helps us appreciate diversity, otherwise, we will not enjoy the richness of live - music, technology, arts, sciences etc.

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