Thank you to whoever reads / comments on this. The prompt is as follows: "Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development."
While looking through some old family photos, my mother recently found a picture of me at age five, sleeping with a globe, tucked in next to me under the covers. She asked me if I remembered that globe. Of course I did. In fact, I never wanted to leave its side-it was just too valuable to me, a wealth of knowledge and information. I would spend hours tracing my finger over its bumpy surface as I studied its shapes and memorized its names; by the time I was six, I could rattle off every country and capital on Earth.
I found an inexplicable joy in memorization, but what I liked most about "Globey" was that he offered me the chance to discover. With every new country I learned about, I felt like some 19th century explorer mapping out uncharted wilderness. The world was such an expansive place; each turn of the globe brought something I'd never noticed before. I could start to make sense of the world, fit all its pieces together.
That love of memorization has stuck with me throughout my life; learning the phases of the French Revolution, the mechanics of photosynthesis, the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus all came easily. But just like the names on that globe, I was more excited about how these individual facts came together to form a complete picture. So it's only natural that I've recently started thinking about how memory actually works. I want to know how the brain can store and recall information, how it sorts and analyzes the millions of things that have happened to us over our lifetime.
Questions like these have led me to the world of cognitive science. I'm fascinated by its developments in using technology to delve into the brain's enigmatic functions and ultimately improve our ability to remember, focus, and learn.
To me, the brain is just like that old globe, a new, complex world to explore and understand. The possibility of studying its intricate mysteries rekindles that childhood feeling of discovery, the fantasy of unearthing some kind of hidden secret.
While looking through some old family photos, my mother recently found a picture of me at age five, sleeping with a globe, tucked in next to me under the covers. She asked me if I remembered that globe. Of course I did. In fact, I never wanted to leave its side-it was just too valuable to me, a wealth of knowledge and information. I would spend hours tracing my finger over its bumpy surface as I studied its shapes and memorized its names; by the time I was six, I could rattle off every country and capital on Earth.
I found an inexplicable joy in memorization, but what I liked most about "Globey" was that he offered me the chance to discover. With every new country I learned about, I felt like some 19th century explorer mapping out uncharted wilderness. The world was such an expansive place; each turn of the globe brought something I'd never noticed before. I could start to make sense of the world, fit all its pieces together.
That love of memorization has stuck with me throughout my life; learning the phases of the French Revolution, the mechanics of photosynthesis, the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus all came easily. But just like the names on that globe, I was more excited about how these individual facts came together to form a complete picture. So it's only natural that I've recently started thinking about how memory actually works. I want to know how the brain can store and recall information, how it sorts and analyzes the millions of things that have happened to us over our lifetime.
Questions like these have led me to the world of cognitive science. I'm fascinated by its developments in using technology to delve into the brain's enigmatic functions and ultimately improve our ability to remember, focus, and learn.
To me, the brain is just like that old globe, a new, complex world to explore and understand. The possibility of studying its intricate mysteries rekindles that childhood feeling of discovery, the fantasy of unearthing some kind of hidden secret.