Blog Post #4

You can refer to my "Audio Reading Notes" for details on the readings. After going through a bulk of the audio readings (which was a lot), I figured I'd use this post to reflect on them personally:

In the "As Loud as I Want to Be" article, I related to Silva's experiences but in the complete opposite direction. I am an incredibly soft-spoken person; it's just not in my nature to be loud. And when I do talk, I've always sounded like Chip the chipmunk who could barely pronounce her R's. Due to this, I've always felt that opening my mouth immediately demoted me to child status- not viewed as someone who has authority. This was especially difficult come senior year wanted to be both captain of my dance team and drum major of the marching band. In both auditions, I learned 2 things:

1) I can be loud when I want to be, and

2) Nobody expected that.

The latter is what bothered me at first- that there was this persona of incapability simply due to my voice. But the former changed my actions forever, knowing the genre of my voice doesn't define me.

Another hot topic in these articles is one about "sound overload," as described by Glennie from Ceraso's "Re-educating the Senses" article. At a young age, my parents liked to do "no-tech" days once or twice a month in which we weren't allowed to use any tech, thus no distracting sounds/music. I believe due to this, I do find a lot of reconcile in just listening to sounds rather than distracting myself with more. Don't get me wrong, I do love my DDR bops. But when I feel over-stimulated, listening to sounds as they appear is a helpful practice.

This also reminded me of meditative practices, which I've been studying lately in Sam Harris' Waking Up app. Just how Walter defines interiority in his article "Oral, Literacy, and Modern Media" as internalizing sound in your inner nature, a common phenomena Harris points out in his guided meditations is how sound is fleeting. As soon as you notice it, it's already gone. Sound seems to be the most prominent sense in meditating. For me, I'm listening to Harris guiding me. He instructs me to notice sounds without judgement. I have inner dialogues that often take the full time of meditating to finally somewhat pacify. To stop the visual, close your eyes; the sound, not so easy. It's something that takes practice, and affects your mind way more than you'd imagine.

This is Derren Brown, a crazy mentalist who introduced me to the extreme suggestibility of the human mind. His podcast with Sam Harris is what eventually brought me to the art of meditating. In this video, he claims he can guess which toy she picks from a humongous toy shop. How he does it involves tricks of the mind through senses.