Blog Post #10

In chapter nine, something I found really interesting was the thinking critically article entitled "The Fear Factor--Do We Fear the Right Things?" This article pointed out 4 main points about why we fear things we do. 1) We fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear. 2) We fear what we cannot control. 3) We fear what is immediate. 4) We fear what is most readily available in our memory. I think that this article is totally true about our fears. I am afraid of things such as spiders or snakes that put our ancestors at risk years and years ago, even though spiders and snakes are barely dangerous at all today. I fear losing important people in my life because I cannot control who stays and who goes. We all fear immediate threats. For example, a smoker may not fear dying from the cigarettes because the danger isn't immediate. If they are diagnosed with a bad form of cancer, however, they then fear the cancer because it could kill them at any moment. Finally, we fear the most vivid memories. For example, if you witnessed a horrible car crash, you may be afraid of riding in a car even though you weren't before the incident occurred.

I think that I am creative. I love art and could spend all day working on projects once I get into them. I apply creativity to my life everyday. I believe everyone has to use their own creativity all the time. Being creative isn't limited to art or writing, either. Creativity is expressed through matching clothes to wear during the day or redecorating a room in your house. Creativity can be applied to almost everything in life. I think being creatively intelligent is very important because if a person weren't creative, they wouldn't be original or unique. Everyone would be exactly the same if no one possessed any creativity.

I found it interesting in chapter 10 how they talked about the size and proportion of Einstein's brain. It turns out that his lower parietal lobes were 15% larger than other areas of his brain. This section of the brain is a center for processing math and spatial information. The book says that this explains why Einstein was slower at learning how to talk but was so exceptionally smart in math. I found this interesting because I remember hearing somewhere that the size of our brains doesn't determine how smart we are. Apparently, in the case of Einstein, the size of certain sections of our brains can relate to how well we do in certain subjects.