A Metaphor of Memory Systems: Paper Filing and Episodic and Semantic Memory

The different emotions we have, the things we learn are momentum shifts.

The more a certain shift happens, the shift is reported by our appropriate brain systems.   The brain system’s paperwork, usually written on very thin tracing paper, piles on to a folder that absorbs that certain shift.  After a huge number of those certain shifts, eventually we get a big folder stock full of papers, some of which can get lost, and some of the important papers get used over and over again.  It might become harder to retrieve specific papers.

For example, if we’ve undergone a lot of momentum shifts in the form of left turns we’ve made in our cars, we’ll have this huge folder of left turns that we can’t possibly remember every left turn.  There might be some left turns we might remember at a specific time or we might just remember that we tend to do a particular left turn a lot, but overall, we’ve left turned so much that we can’t quite remember every left turn we’ve made.

That big folder holding all these little papers is part of what we call a “semantic memory”, the memories for the categories we have for life.  The little sheets of paper within those big folders make up our “episodic memories”, specific times and places of certain experiences in our life.  The size, weight, shape of the folder determines how much, how quickly we recall or even recognize certain things, and that makes up our “procedural memories.”

In Wikipedia, “semantic memory” is defined as memory of general knowledge, facts about the world, main feature being that it’s “absent of context.”

We’ll remember the general fact of a left turn, but we won’t remember where we learned it was indeed a left turn.  Similarly, we’ll remember that an apparatus with a flash, a lens, and records certain images of us is called a camera, a furry, purring mammal with whiskers is a cat, an orange spherical object with black lines on it is a basketball.  We’ll remember all that, but we probably won’t remember what grade school we were in (which is how I remember a lot of stuff), let alone specific times and places for when we learned it.

If I could extend the metaphor, I think the reason ’semantic memory’ is “absent of context”, is mainly because the folders usually get too thick.  I think context just gets gradually stripped away (or at least lost) from an object or action that we learn about.  You’ ve taken too many left turns in your car.  You’ve seen what so many cameras, cats, basketballs, have looked like, and feel like that you probably won’t really remember when you actually learned what many of them were.   The folder that has recorded the instances of left turns, cameras, cats, basketballs is really really full.

But if you hear about something only once, like me reading about the industrial strength of a material called buckypaper, then that would be defined as a mere episodic memory.  I can’t remember the exact date, but I generally remember reading about that when I was with my first job and I remember that it’s really really strong.

It’s important to note however, that I don’t think the “semantic memory” in most people however starts out as a “folder”, I think it starts out as an episodic memory, a thin little sheet of paper.

If we’ve undergone a lot of episodic memories under a certain file, if we get more papers and place into a certain folder, the file becomes bigger and it becomes thicker, it becomes a category and then part of the vast semantic network we have.  The category is just one category amongst an infinitude of categories we have.

Experts and Cause-and-Effect

Ever since I’ve been arguing on basketball message boards, I’ve always argued about the causes for the Bulls losing games.  However, it seemed like no matter the outcome, message board posters were citing the same exact causes they were citing every single game, though in varying degrees.

This got me interested in the exploring how people determine cause-and-effect.

Donald Shoup, urban planning guru and writer of The High Cost of Free Parking, once said “the problem can’t be defined until the solution is found.”

Basically, I take that to mean that people generally have their solution in mind even before they start to talk about the problem.

From years of observation of these boards, it seems like posters will blame the same reasons they always do when they’re losing.  If they had a preference for defense wins championships-basketball, they will usually cite the shortcomings on defense as the reason for losing.  The solution these posters had in mind would be better defense, and so they defined the problem as “a lack of” defense.

Inversely, if they had a preference for fast-pace scoring basketball and they lost, they usually cited that the team didn’t have enough scoring.  The solution these posters had in mind would be better offense, and so they defined the problem as “a lack of” offense.

Lots of people in the message board space don’t renege on their ideas of causation, and I have the sneaking that people, specifically self-known experts, are like that in general, especially when it comes to politics, and probably science.

Applied to something in real life, it seems like some conservatives will always have a problem with anything Obama does, no matter how much he bends towards their ideals to win their votes.  The solution they have in mind never involved him being in office, and so there’s no way that he can win.

Inversely, the same was true with George W.  The solution for tons of people never involved him being in office, and so there was no way he could win for a lot of us (and yet he did…TWICE.)

What folks don’t realize is that they aren’t really observing cause-and-effect like they think they are.

Taken from Making Truth:  Metaphor in Science by Theodore Brown:

Much of our understanding of causation is metaphorical, not literal.  We don’t really observe cause-and-effect as much as we do.

“The golf ball hit the window and broke it.”  Assuming that you actually observed the golf ball hit the window and broke it, this is a literal causation.

So OK, we don’t observe a lot of cause-and-effect events.

But I think people who believe they are experts think they see a lot more cause-and-effect.

In the sciences, direct causation is even harder to observe, especially if you’re trying to do it with just the naked, raw 5 senses.  We need these extensions of our minds, in the form of technology before we make any more direct observation.  And even that might be imperfect and won’t give us the entire picture.

“Radiation at the resonant frequency puts the electron into the excited state.”

“Neuronal activity can elevate serotonin concentrations.”

“Medication brought her out of her coma.”

You can assume medication did something, but you can’t actually see it doing its work.  Unless you’ve got said patient in some kind of observation tank monitored with all the latest X-ray or nano-imaging technologies that cover the entire body, you can’t really “observe” the medication doing what it does on a molecular level.

Learning in High School

As I was sitting in the Cahuenga library, I was observing a cauldron of tutors working one-on-one with students.

One of the pairs was a UCLA student and a high school student in algebra.

The UCLA student, a tall, charismatic Latino dude who looks like Antonio Villaraigosa’s football-playing son, if Villaraigosa wanted to have a son like that.

The high school student, a talkative Latina who looks like a cross between one of my sister’s childhood friends with the teenage girly mannerisms of a family relative.

The high school student is having trouble in math.

What caught my attention was what she said when trying to justify her lack of achievement to her tutor.

“It’s her job to help me out”

“It’s her fault”

“Twenty people are failing her class, and she has 30 students”

It was phrases like that which brought me back to my own high school days. I would say things just like that when I justified why I didn’t do so great in classes — everybody else was failing and didn’t get it either!

To me it seemed like a lot of students, her achievement depended on her social environ.

This showed the social nature of learning and quite possibly the effect of peers on motivation and learning. Groups can come together informally and almost indiscriminately “code” the learning experience as something negative. I guess if this is true, that the majority of people learn through groups, and that peer groups can code the learning experience as negative, the question for educators should be how to code the experience as things positive for them?

Ethical Dilemma on the Street

On a personal/professional note, in addition to editing Mestizo Revelations, I am now focusing my writing efforts on Social Policy in Los Angeles for the LA Examiner, and will probably do so for the next few months.

Anyhow, I have a dilemma for people to help figure out with me.

The dilemma is whether or not I should have done something, anything, and how I could have done something, anything.

Today, I was walking down Vermont in East Hollywood to the Cahuenga library just as it started raining.

People already had their umbrellas.  They knew this shit was coming.  I didn’t care, I never use umbrellas.

As I was walking behind this teenager on the sidewalk, suddenly a middle-aged dude pulled over and got out of his car.  I didn’t notice at first, but then he said to the teenager, “that’s my umbrella” and calmly made a motion with his hands asking for what seemed like his umbrella.

The teenager suddenly got real violent.  He shouted, “what the fuck” and with that sharp-looking end of the umbrella threatened to stab the middle-aged dude, scaring and threatening to chase the dude into a driveway.  He screamed, “it’s my fucking umbrella.”

I looked into the alley way and saw the middle-aged dude look back at me.  I kept walking.

The teenager walked off looking back at me, and me looking at him.

I walked off as far as possible, images in my head of The Wire, where I’d get shanked if I snitched.

Over a fucking umbrella.

I felt bad for the man who was visibly shook, but maybe he was a gangster trying to take something that he “thought” was his.

I thought the kid might’ve stolen that umbrella, judging by his reaction, but maybe he was just shook and didn’t really know how to react.

At any rate, if I had an absolutely bulletproof body, I felt like I would have had the confidence to mediate the situation a bit better.

What Knowledge Needs to be Embodied, and What Knowledge can be Outsourced to Technology

Bastard, you took this idea and this idea.*

Back in May, I wrote about how we in the globally urbanized American culture have “outsourced” a lot of our knowledge from our bodies to technologies.  With that “outsourcing” to technologies, those technologies become “extensions of our minds.”

I’ve been struck by how we continually outsource our knowledges, our experiences, our memories to technology and to other people. We take a picture, scan, write, or type it down for later reference and use. As memory researchers and scholars are keen to say, those technologies act as mnemonic extensions of our brain…So basically in the context of our society which is increasingly global and urban, we like to outsource and externalize a lot of stuff we could know and that we could experience.

Today, the New York Times picked up on some writing via Edge who built on that idea.

Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory…The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is.

Essentially, what they say is that knowledge “outsourced” to technology means that what people actually “remember” or “experience” becomes less important.  It becomes less important because we have a deluge of “memory” to deal with.

We’ve got all kinds of external devices that carry data.  We’ve got pictures.  We’ve got our USB plugs.  We’ve got google docs to write down our thoughts and actually “remember” our papers.  We’ve got delicious.com to remember great links.

“Memories” in the technology world are just data, if I may borrow communications technology linguo.

What becomes important instead of “remembering” memories or “remembering” data is “filtering” data.

I guess that might work for office type jobs like perhaps tech support or writing, but I don’t think it’s easy to outsource memory if you’re some kind of physician or surgeon where the knowledge seems to be remembered within their bodies.

*Obviously, the idea didn’t exactly start from me, but a collection of memory researchers and scholars whose names I will retrieve if absolutely pressed to do so.

How I Remember and How She Remembers

Memory is a metaphor needed by a ‘handicapped‘ observer who cannot see a complete system…” (Ashby, 1956: 115) – by GC Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences

An erudite way to say that the more talented you are, the less tools you need.  The more talented you are as an observer, the less you need memory.

It takes me a really really really long time to leave my place.  I tend to leave late, and when I’m on the cusp of leaving, I spend even more time gathering all the stuff I think I need.

After I’ve headed out the door, I then have lingering doubts that I’ve forgotten something.

Wallet, possibly?  Keys?  Locking the door?

I’m always constantly making sure I have my wallet, keys, and phone, especially when biking, by patting my pockets.

I almost never remember locking the front door.  Many a time on the road, I’ve driven back while on a Los Angeles freeway, just to make sure that I indeed locked the door.

If I apply the quote to my situation, by definition, I do not “see” “the whole system.”  I am a “handicapped observer” when it comes to making sure I’ve got everything before I leave the house.   However, the flip side is that I can recall lots of obscure things in my past.  I guess I’m a “diligent observer” of my more distant past.

Its quite the contrast to my partner, who never appears to flinch when I ask her if she’s got her keys or wallet.  She knows she has her keys and wallet, and were out the door.  She’s a “diligent observer” of the short-term. Yet on the flip side, she says she has “bad memory”, meaning “bad [long-term] memory.”  And it’s true that she can’t recall a few of the things in the past that happened just months ago.

I think that one reason I can’t quite remember things, and subsequently leave the house so quickly is because I’m always thinking about something. All that thinking or mental traveling obstructs “the” or “any” coherent picture of LOGISTICAL stuff that needs to get done in the moment.  Apparently, according to my partner, I’m horribly oblivious to a lot of my surroundings.

Metaphors and Decisionmaking

Cogito, ergo sum doesn’t just mean “I think therefore I am.” It means, “I shake things up, therefore I am.”

The TED video below is of James Geary speaking about metaphors.

I got off of My Mind on Books.

I was drooling over this quote:

“We can never ignore the metaphorical meanings of words.”

This is a big statement, which basically means that we are imperfect thinkers. As imperfect thinkers, who make reason and explanation through words, we become cognizant of all the associations of the words we use. Mostly on verbs and nouns. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

For example, the verb “kill” doesn’t necessarily have to mean

For instance take the verb “kill.”

If there’s food on the table, I must “kill” it.

This fool “killed” me in Street Fighter.

We can’t ignore the metaphorical meaning that to “kill” literally means to end someone’s life.

However, what we are not usually aware of is how we might build off those associations. If we keep using the word “kill” in these non-serious contexts, like playing video games, then eventually maybe the subject itself elicits a perception that beating some one eventually becomes a matter of preserving or ending life.

When we perceive things a certain way, we learn a way to react to it, and if we somehow come in confrontation with it, how to act upon or in reaction to it.

If this statement is true (and I think it is for the most part), I think back to that oft-used public metaphor of “killing cancer.”

I wonder how molecular biologists doing research on cancer even would internally frame their objectives. Does that involve “killing cancer” at all costs, consciously and/or unconsciously? Or is that more a facade used to rally support and funding from the public and donors?

Social Infrastructure of White Privilege and Bike Lanes

I felt very aware of my race and ethnicity almost all the time during my most formative years.

I knew that I was Filipino before I began going to the “puti” high school. It was going to be different from the more homely Filipino-dominated grade school.

I knew that I was one of only a few Filipinos in my college dorms. I didn’t have too many white friends going to the “puti” high school.

I know that I am one of the few Filipinos interested in pursuing anthropology and science studies as a career. I come from a background of nurses and future nurses, and in my stage of liminality, I keep getting pulled towards a career like that.

There’s just a bit of a “disconnection” between where I’ve gone/where I want to go and what has surrounded and currently surrounds me.

I use the word “disconnection” because that’s exactly how I feel when I become “aware” of my race/ethnicity in a setting.  I feel “disconnected” from the people who inhabit the space, like I can’t make a connection, like we share almost nothing in common.

I can become “aware” of that when I’m in an academic conference full of older white guys as the key speakers and experts, when I’m in a wine-tasting shop in Silver Lake. I don’t become as “aware” of this when I’m at the basketball court in Glassell Park.

My thinking implies that people who have a feeling of “fitting in” either consciously or unconsciously feel or have a connection.  Let’s assume that’s true. What fosters that connection?

It is at this point that I’ll borrow the term “infrastructure.”  “Infrastructure” fosters that connection.

“Infrastructure” is used in the context of public works projects.  It is defined as the “basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.” Infrastructure is the freeways, roads, BIKE LANES, power plants, power-lines water sources, the internet, phones, and other forms of communication. I use the term “infrastructure” to mean “a collection of connective strands used to maintain a system.”

When you are a white American, and probably male, there is an “infrastructure” that firstly, helps you forget the negative parts of your identity and secondly fosters the ability to go in and fit in almost anywhere. You see your likeness reproduced in all kinds of public discourse and spaces.  Public discourse and spaces like movies, academia, arts and high-class theater, corporate jobs. You can literally identify with being almost anything cause you know that no matter where you are, someone with your identity, perhaps even your looks, are there and you can probably talk to them, and they can hook you up.

If you’re a white guy in America, unless you’re queer and/or poor, you don’t really have to constantly (whether conscious or not) re-evaluate your belongingness in mid-high class settings.  You don’t have to think about where you come from because you’re already everywhere and the possibilities are endless.  You can do this and this and this.  You can just be “human” and not focus on your color.  You know that your opinion really counts.  The infrastructure in the form of movies, academia, arts  carries these people any and everywhere and they don’t have to stop and think as much cause they’re so connected to whatever they want to do.

Conversely, the existence of an “infrastructure” working so well for a white American male implies that there is little to no infrastructure for a person of color.  There isn’t as much infrastructure that would firstly help a person of color forget the negative parts of their identities.  There isn’t as much infrastructure that would help a person of color fit in almost anywhere.

There are infrastructures that help people of color, but are more insular, and are not as stepped in history.  I’m thinking about ethnic organizations and policies such as affirmative action.  However, those organizations might force people of color to think about and even reify/glorify some of the “negative” parts of their histories.

Like the BIKE LANES in LA that last for one block, the infrastructure for people of color is piecemeal and far and few between.  Bike lanes and infrastructure are built only on certain streets.   But even without any BIKE LANES/INFRASTRUCTURE on streets and avenues, a few people will still bike, but it’s not expected that they will bike. People could technically go anywhere with their bikes without “infrastructure” but it isn’t a safe bet, and usually most drivers, pedestrians, don’t expect bikers on their streets.  The streets are reserved for drivers.

Yes, we see a few people of color here and there in some movies, some academic fields, some arts, some sports, infrastructure that holds up popular culture.  But there are only certain professions and things that people of color can be acknowledged to do, like my whole my family and the nursing profession.

People of color could technically go anywhere with their careers without “infrastructure”, but it isn’t a safe bet and usually families and people in power, won’t expect those people of color to be in professions like that dealing with Science Studies or Anthropology.  The streets are reserved for white Americans and obssessive Asian kids.

So the question is how do we keep building that infrastructure for people of color?

For me…Manny Pacquiao is a start.

Expertise and the Metaphor of Outsourcing

As I was reading Emily Martin’s Flexible Bodies, I came across a quote that highlighted how the idea of expertise in the sciences (and perhaps academia and academia’s language in general) dis-empowers ordinary folk’s opinions and experiences.

The problem of expertise took two forms.  From time to time in the neighborhood interviews, people felt as if they were being tested on subjects about which they had limited knowledge.  In spite of the students’ and my eloquent (and accurate) statements that we were not experts in biology or medicine either, such is the authority of science and medicine in this society that sometimes these assurances were not enough.

One man was worried about sounding like a dummy and wanted Monica to correct him. Another, when asked what he thought of the interview, said he liked how open ended it was but wanted us to contact him later to correct anything he might have got wrong. – (12) Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies

Even though they were solicited specifically for their opinions, which are inherently subjective, at least two people still wanted to be corrected.

The interviewees reactions reminds me of how decisionmaking might be inhibited when listening to experts. (Pointed out to me by the Eide Neurolearning Blog.)

A brain-scanning study of people making financial choices suggests that when given expert advice, the decision-making parts of our brains often shut down.

…Says Greg Berns, an Emory University neuroscientist, “It’s as if people weren’t using their own internal value mechanisms.”

The reaction of those interviewees brings up the concept of outsourcing.   Seems like the interviewees wanted “to outsource” what they did not know and blindly let the “expert” guide and dictate their experience.

On a more personal note, the interviewees non-belief in their abilities reminds me of how I felt during my first time. I didn’t feel that I was good because I didn’t last so long, and I wanted to be told that I wasn’t very good.

All the Cultural Themes on Avatar

My first movie of 2010, and already my mind was whorling at all the possible meanings of this monumentally long anime-sci-fi-love-adventure.

Avatar packed quite a few themes and references, something for almost everyone to chew on.  This makes it interesting as a springboard for discussion about our culture and society.

Incorporating all those themes into one movie was probably a monumental task,  I couldn’t help but smile at the end, but at the same time, it felt incomplete and annoying.  The feeling of incompleteness because it really only referenced themes rather than explored any.  The feeling of annoyance was elicited from how the movie represented the Na’vi and their protagonist.  But overall, I can’t really hate the movie.

1.  The themes that were worth a smile:

• The intelligence and connectedness of the Na’vi. I liked how the Na’vi lived a connection to everything by their bio-botanical neural network.  That’s a nice fantasy.  The neuron-talk, the healing practices, showed that there was a certain knowledge and intelligence in their behaviors that people may not understand at first.   In real life, I’d hope people would understand that other groups of people also have their own knowledge and intelligence that many would not understand at first.  I also liked that the truth-driven scientist acknowledged the intelligence of the native people, perhaps a bit of a poultice for wounds inflicted in the Science Wars.

• The importance of societal memory. The Na’vi had all their memories stored in this big tree of knowledge.  When that tree was about to be demolished by the humans, so too would’ve been their memories.  Those “memories” are quite similar, slightly dated yet slightly more advanced than “our” memories which are now basically stored on computers. By putting the Na’vi societal knowledge in terms of “memories”, this was a way to put the regular American audience member into thinking critically about destruction and taking of cultural artifacts from other cultures.  You probably didn’t like seeing their memories getting fucked with, and it follows that you probably won’t like your memories getting fucked with.

• Making the destruction of the native Na’vi population’s structures and environment parallel to destruction of the US population’s structures and environment. The image of the destruction of the Na’vi tree looked a lot like the imagery of the Twin Towers falling on 9/11. By using that imagery and thereby eliciting a milder form of emotion from those events, I think it was a good way for audiences to internalize the destruction of the “other” and destruction of their own habitat.

• The body as a technology;  a vehicle and extension of consciousness. A vehicle which can take you anywhere.  A vehicle,  also something that you can eventually trade in.  Your body, whether it’s in the form of an Avatar body, or a robot body, is merely an extension of your consciousness and your heart.  Interesting was the fantasy that with the development of neuroscience you could transport your consciousness to another living thing.

From Slate Magazine:

Memo to Al Gore: If we can just bio-engineer large blue representations of ourselves and hook them up to our brains via isolation pods, climate change is not going to be a problem.

• The warring and destructive behavior of the humans leading to predictable consequences. In one corporate executive’s search for sources of power, the humans prepared for war against the Na’vi, using familiar Bush-Cheney-Ashcroft era linguo such as “pre-emptive strike” and “insurgency” to justify their invasion of the Na’vi lands. We see where that lead to the movie, we see where that has lead to in real life.

• Highlighting the link between corporation and science/academia.  I first noticed this when the scientist talks about the restrictions placed on her truth-finding missions by her corporate boss.  Corporate boss says that all the work that she does should lead him to make more new discoveries so that he could keep funding her work.  The tension was touched on a little bit by Savage Minds.

• Highlighting the link between corporation and military power. The military is basically a machine that the corporation uses to feed its greed.  The corporate executive enjoys a leisurely life, flippantly making big decisions.  The military commander will pillage, kill, anyone it is asked to kill, sometimes injecting their own personal motives just to get their corporate-sponsored jobs done.  Also discussed by the Global Sociology Professor.

• The Amazonian-like female protagonist saving her little crippled human man. That made my panties, *cough* I mean masculinity-proving, Alpha male boxer shorts, drop.

2. Themes that made me cringe:

• The white man hero and protagonist. I really, really, really, REALLY hate this ongoing theme. It’s a Hollywood production so I shouldn’t have expected any less, but given that it’s a big movie with big reach, I always wish that people en masse could see more people of color as apt leaders who can go through tons of emotion as well. I wasn’t particularly wowed when it showed how decidedly unresilient the band of Na’vi suddenly became until the white super-hero did his thing.

From Sociological Images

Sully is not only a superior human being, he is also a superior Na’vi. After being briefly ostracized for his participation in the land grab, he tames the most violent creature in the sky, thereby proving himself to be the highest quality warrior imaginable per the Na’vi mythology.  He gives them hope, works out their strategy, and is their most-valuable-weapon in the war. In the end, with all Na’vi contenders for leadership conveniently dead, he assumes the role of chief… and gets the-most-valuable-girl for good measure. Throngs of Na’vi bow to him.

It’s as if none of the Na’vi were capable of bridging the gap or being a leader themselves.  I think that’s a hidden tension in this society — people of color, people from “minority” populations becoming leaders and protagonists.  I understand that it’s a movie with a certain vision, but I’m completely over the narratives dominated by these white guys from privileged backgrounds.

• The persistent image of the stereotypical noble savage. The people who believe in chanting to random deities and interpreting signs from nature, which makes all this magic happen.  Also wasn’t thrilled when the Na’vi were persistent in futilely fighting with their bows and arrows and eventually getting crushed by newer technologies wielded by the white people.  It was as if they had no adaptability at all.  But as I mentioned in one of the things I like about the movie, we eventually see that they do have an intelligence to their ways.  Perhaps Cameron was trying to use the old noble savage template through Na’vi to talk about how old tribes were in fact smarter than you thought.

From the Savage Mind comments

Dances With Wolves meets Jurassic Park through the device of HTS.

Agree, and remain troubled by, the flatness of the Navi. Yes, it may take more time to develop, but take away a few minutes from the final militaristic invasion and would anything be lost? I don’t think so. What I missed was less a broad ethnographic understanding of their social systems and practices – politics, economy, material lives, etc. – and more some depth by way of a sense of subjectivities, on the one hand, and histories, on the other, related to these systems/practices For instance, how did the youth, Netyiri et al., feel about the traditions of marriage and leadership/rule? I didn’t get any sense of pride, resistence, identity conflict, etc. from within the Navi. They remained as much psychologically flat as culturally.

An Astrophysicist: suggests an alternative way to representing the Na’vi.

I do have one minor complaint, that given their networking abilities,
the Na’vi should not be so technologically inferior to the humans. On
Earth, the largest barrier to technological progression was that
information that existed in the brains of primitive humans could not
be easily shared or preserved. As soon as writing was developed,
suddenly it was possible to store information outside of the brain,
and record and build upon knowledge. The knowledge available to a
human or tribe went from one brain’s worth (and a minimal amount of
oral tradition), to thousands, and ultimately billions of brains’
worth. The result was a technological and social explosion. Hominids
have had technology like spears for about half a million years, but
only 7,000 years after the development of writing we had left the
planet. And the sharing of knowledge is still undergoing a revolution
with the development of the internet. Now we have instantaneous
access to the combined knowledge of the entire history of humanity.

Since the Na’vi have had the ability to download information and share
it in a massive network for long periods of time (evolutionary
timescales), they should be way ahead of us in terms of technological
development.

I wondered why the Na’vi seemed to function so much like humans instead of these beings from elsewhere.

• Ditching the Disabled Body. While it’s interesting that the protagonist has no legs, I was sort of hoping that he’d come to terms with his legless human body.

• The sexification of the wild native woman. Wild native woman mating with civilized man.  Now where have I heard that before?  Probably,  a Psychology Today Blogger.  Or Pocahontas.  I was kind of hoping that this would be a completely different species who mated asexually, but of course once the audience is introduced to this female, I knew that there would be some kind of love story going on.   However, something interesting I noticed was that when Jake and Neytiri were in the process of mating, we see that Neytiri inexplicably temporarily loses her braids.  Braids that we see she has been wearing for the duration of the film but suddenly comes off in this one moment of intimacy, and comes back on for the duration of the film.

There was just a lot to think about for me, and if any movie can hold my attention long enough to get me to do that, I pretty much like it.