Speech
Kände bara för att dela ett tal jag hade förra terminen in Engelskan. Enjoy or something. :D
Our Powerful Minds
Hello!
So, remember when your parents used to tell you that you could do whatever you want to? Be whoever you want to be? Turns out they aren't that far off the mark. If you've ever thought yourself to be stupid or been called an idiot, if you've ever found your job difficult or think it's hard to get along with people, if you think you're unworthy of an education, consider this - your mind is infinitely more powerful than the fastest computer you've ever seen. The best smart-phone you can buy has the tiniest fraction of your brains processing power.
Do you want to know why? Because even if you're extremely generous in your definition, most 'technological advancements' have happened within the last thousand years. Less than a hundred years ago, man created functioning computers - artificial brains capable of processing information and realizing conclusions like we do. Here's the difference though - your mind has MILLIONS of years on the household computer, and it was your mind which created such a device. So with this point of reference, I'll explain why you are capable of doing things you don't even fully understand. I'll explain to you how amazing you are, and what amazing things you can achieve, without even knowing you're doing something.
For starters, we have language. If you were as idiotic as some people will have you believe, you wouldn't even understand that you were being insulted if someone called you idiot. Here's an example - if somebody yelled out 'STOP', consciously your mind might do one of a few things. You may, trusting in whoever it is yelling at you, stop what you're doing. If you're a little more adventurous, you might even decide to look around and figure out why you should be stopping. If you're a little bit stubborn, or confident in your actions, you might ignore them and continue. That's what you think is going through your head. You want to know what's really going on in your head in the second this takes?
First, your ears pick up the sound and carry it to your brain. This is a nervous response, and you're not exactly top of the class for being able to achieve this, but hey. Now your brain will process the information it's receiving from the ears. Throughout your early life, you have been taught to recognize sounds and process or categorize them into what they represent so thoroughly that your brain can do it without needing any guiding from you at all - this is entirely subconscious.
So your brain has 'heard' the word 'STOP' via the ears, and it has taken into consideration that it was yelled to you. This means it's probably important, so your brain processes it faster. This is part of the snap decision making that we've all encountered when something is urgent, like deciding to dodge a moving car just after you decide what you're having for dinner. Now this thought has jumped to the top of the queue, and your brain will probably now present your conscious self, the part of you that makes a sandwich or decides to walk down the beach) with the aforementioned options, and you'll choose one and carry it out. Crisis, may have been, averted. Well done, subconscious brain.
There are no doubt scientific terms and 'technically this is what happens' I could have used, but there it is. The basic process for what goes on in your head when somebody yells 'STOP'.
Because you're such a subconsciously clever cookie, a part of you has probably already realized what this means for more complicated situations involving dialogue or volatile emotions. For that other part of you, let me go into it a little.
Consider the following: you're chatting to somebody via an instant messenger or other text-based conversation, and you read the following sentence: "Hey, what's going on?". It's a fairly common greeting among two or more people, and I think we can agree that it doesn't take a genius to sort out what it means. The undercurrents here, however, show again that we are not as dumb as other people sometimes seem to think. First of all, this time it's a visual stimulus, as your eyes recognize a pattern of shapes and translate them into more thoughts for your brain to process. Our mind has been trained to select these patterns out of literally infinite combinations of shapes, and this is the part that I think is particularly magical. You see the following word written - CAR - , and in your mind you see the image you associate with the word. It's amazing how fast this happens - Banana. Guess what you're thinking about right now - Not a series of shapes, but a fruit you can taste and smell. Infinite possibilities exist here, because we will never run out of combinations to define the world around us. However, because we're so damn smart, mankind has also decided to name and define more abstract concepts, things you can't physically touch and see, but you can associate with more shapes all the same. If you see the following - Love - you might think of a person close to you, or you might think of the untouchable, pure feeling itself. It's powerful stuff, because the machine that runs it all, controls it and manages it, is a powerful machine.
Anyway, I might have gotten carried away there. Back to the original point; somebody says to you "Hey, what's going on?". So, you now know that each one of these words has been processed by your mind, and if it managed to get them in the right order, you are now thinking "Well, what am I doing? I better come up with an answer.". So off your brain goes on one of it's little adventures to figure out what you're doing right now, and suddenly you find yourself saying something like "Oh hey, I'm just listening to this speech about how powerful our minds are."
The message I am trying to convey to you all by having this speech is not solely the simplicity of "how our minds work". What I encourage you all to do is to use your amazing and astounding minds to create something great. We do not need to rely on modern technology to be able to achieve something, we can do it ourselves without any interference from technology. Prove you're not an idiot, whether you do it to yourself or someone else is not important. It is important that you feel the satisfaction of completing something without needing to rely on anything but your own, amazing mind. I hope you've listened to all this and you've come to the realization that even though other people might think you're an idiot, and you might even think you're an idiot yourself, there is a part of you so incredibly powerful that if you can tap into even a tiny piece of it, you can do amazing things. You can BE amazing things. Driving a car properly isn't difficult. Using a cash register isn't difficult. Planting trees, giving up drugs, learning to sail - these are not difficult things. Look at what you're doing every day, and you're so smart, so able, you can do it without even focusing on it. All you have to do is make your subconscious mind, conscious.
[Thank you!]
(C) 2013, Alva S.