On The Train, (Synaptic Learning) Mar 19, 2007

Few years back I learned something important about myself after I finished reading Anthony Robbins’s Unlimited Power. What I learned was I could create tracks in my mind for different feelings that I cold trigger at will. The way to set any trigger is to do something when I am at the maximum feeling of any emotion. When I set the triggers often enough I could just flip from one feeling to another at will just on a flick of my fingers. I did not understand the scientific explanation for that and since then I hardly practice is. Today reading Mind Wide Open it was explained why. The process of creating the ‘tracks’ is called Hebbian Learning, based on the scientist Donald Hebb that discovered the phenomenon. According to Hebb when we were experiencing certain traumatic or high intensity emotion we fire off several neurons on several tracks and during that traumatic event there would be other things happen at the same time in our mind. For instance during that moment a music was playing on the background or something that we were not conscious about or seems to be related to your high emotion event. A few months later when you hear the same song the same feeling of the moment started to swell within you. According to scientist the component of the brain that does this to us is called amygdala

In early 1996 in a dark winter evening I was seating alone in my East Genesse St basement apartment. I had the radio on and was also plucking on my guitar to no particular tune. I looked out of the window the snow is falling creating certain lonely feeling in me. Together with the cold I felt really homesick and at the same time a certain song was on the radio. Until today whenever I heard the same song not only I feel the same intense of homesickness but I would be taken back to that moment with a very clear vision in my mind. With this knowledge any form of narrative extraction with certain degree of contextualization is a possibility

On The Train Oct 30, 2006

After a whole week of holidays naturally it was a bummer to get up and go to work this morning. It got better for me as the day grew and by the time I was on the train home I was already in my normal mood. There were still a lot of people with big bags or rucksacks boarded on my way home. Remnants of holiday makers no doubt.

Today I met my old friend from my Syracuse days that I have not met for at least 13 years. I just could not believe we have not met that long. I was glad I did and we had a chat to catch up on old times at his hotel. Because of that now I am thinking about Syracuse. Well it was not so much about the place but the experience of being there, meeting new friends, new culture and environments. Still no matter where we are the one thing that we will cherish for ever is the friendship that we created or have with our friends. Apart from the business or working world there are three big moments in my life that were so significant to me. Seven years in school, three years in college and almost two years in Syracuse. Three set of friends that are constantly encroaching into my life. Now I really understand about the social network that matters