About music and personality

I found an article in a magazine in which were explored some recent results and ideas concerning to music preferences and its relation to the personality of each listener. The text made me reflect about the problematic tendency to assume linearity across matters so subjective as those including man and his choices.
It is a really danger floor the one of linearity, where the risk to fail or fraud keep a suspicious presence beyond the featured conclusions.
I am afraid we can not assume that a person who listen a particular style of music shows a specific personality because agreeing with that would conduct to the assumption that every person has a unique style of music, like a unique personality that is expected to have. To study relations between music styles and habits or incidence of illnesses or problems in life of listeners seems to be, in my opinion, a tricky work that tries to extract formal and serious conclusions from a net of complexity that is far from being just a question of photographing brains or treating statistical results towards a scientific result.
Maybe the investigators are not the responsible for that information based in linearity, but the journalists use the data available to sell articles that implicitly want to say that if you listen rock and jazz you are like this, or if you listen R&B and hip hop you are like that, leaving the reader free to think that if he wants to be like that instead of like this, he just needs to turn the tune and magically his life changes automatically.
Searching relations of the kind presented based in the scientific method can be very hard to do, but I think people must be very careful while interpreting the results and even more when extracting information from clues. Tendencies are not pure relations and that is the key for understanding that it is not fair to leave the readers thinking that maybe they are the same, with all the possible consequences.

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About alimentation confusion

While weigh becomes a serious problem to our society, being motive of sickness and of social disintegration, I take the opportunity to mention something very intriguing concerning to alimentation habits.
According to my personal experience, I realised that there is a common confusion in my mind that relates hungriness with the will to taste something. Chocolate is one of the most popular and desired products and I chose it to clarify the confusion I mentioned. If the reason for such passion is the flavour of chocolate as well as its property to melt at mouth temperature, how can we explain that many people prefer to eat it in quantities, a kind of avid devastation that bars the appreciation time of that product in mouth? The confusion resides exactly on the indistinction of hunger and pleasure to taste and fill the flavour.
The example is very representative of what may happen with other food and products, that also might suffer identical approaches. In addition there is a necessity to pay attention and understand the real differences behind those two objectives, because otherwise our progressively easier way to buy food in quantity will lead to a problematic relation with food.
Once forced, the distinction can help our mind to make it clear that many and many times our wish is more about breaking the monotony of mouth sensitive receptors than packing inside huge quantities of food.
A bubble gum is something that I believe it is used based in this confusion to solve some problems. By cheating our brain with the flavour of the gum, the hungriness is delayed or decreased. However, in this case we have an inverted use of the confusion: if in the chocolate situation the will of tasting leads to feeding and an unreal hungriness, in the second one, the bubble gum uses the confusion to avoid hungriness by guaranteeing a longer taste in mouth.

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About self motivation process

Personal motivation is definitely a key for success and improvement.
Why not start with that classic image of a donkey pulling a cart because of seeing a carrot that a man intentionally tries to catch donkeys attention by using a stick attached to the carrot. This image despite simple and of easy understanding, can be used as a metaphor to our own lives and motivation aspects.
Although in the case of the donkey the animal needs a human to let the work be done with the motivation of a fresh carrot, if we abstract from the connotation of donkey so that comparing is not a problem, I would say that each person can be the donkey and the human of that image on personal life.
To explore that I call some moments of life in which a motivating activity that will occur later acts in the precedent activities as a source of motivation, producing by that a motivation otherwise difficult to get. This is the case of being the donkey and the human, while the carrot is the later activity and the cart the such moment.
A person that has an encounter with friends, a play to watch, or any pleasured activity planned to have or do, will be a case of self motivation based in the principles of the donkey, the human, the cart and the carrot.
Because lives tend to be monotonous during the week as a result of job compromises, people lose quality of living by having no tricks like that to reach higher level of motivation during boring or predictable tasks.
In the same way people plan weekends, I suppose weeks should deserve a certain planning to. Films, plays, dinners, meeting, receiving visits, walks, games, phone calls to family and other things could improve the will of facing a whole week of stress and activity.
It is true the we all survive without interfering in motivation process, but will be a slave of donkey position and the stick with carrot will hardly be in own hands.

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About lists of contacts

Today I bring to discussion a fact that was object of my attention although seeming very obvious and simple.
Despite knowing that a catalogue or list is a product of human need to have an order of any kind that allow a quicker dealing with information, based in organization principles, it is however interesting to realise that people so different can be put together just because of name or birthday.
One such case of that can be found on cell phone contacts list. There, the danger of contacting the wrong person can be a question of an incorrect press. The list of contacts based on names do not include profoundly crucial things like the kind of relation the person has to you, so it has a consequence of allowing a random combination of family, friends and work contacts. Grandfather, girlfriend and your boss are one improbable but possible sequence combination. We have to remember that sometimes the names of contacts assume other words than the real names, what helps to develop a higher random predominance in our expectations.
The fantastic thing about that rather than the danger of wrong message sending or phone call try, is that we accept that order established by lists, because they seem to make sense according to names and designations, but if we experience reading them in sequence, our thoughts are conducted in such a path that some of them may be in opposite positions of your brain, according to feelings towards them.
In addition it is also funny to realise how a so diverse sort of people have a connection in particular list that serve as a criteria to join them together. A rule that means nothing in practical terms since those elements of the group may even be unknown to each other for a whole life.
More than a try to extract a conclusion this is a text of observation, aiming to bring up the fact from the cabinet of known but unthought things of human life.

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About radicalism

Every time I watch religious radicals on television, my upset grows in the same way my incomprehension does.
If we keep those images in our minds it is very probable that rather than trying to understand we will be conducted to a situation of combating violently such evil.
I believe that radicalism is far from being just a religious or political problem. Each person has a disposition to be radical in a specific type of questions. We can find it in football, in justice, in food preferences or in musical preferences, for example.
I don’t feel prepared to discuss the fundaments of radicalism, but my guess is that radicalism origins in one out of two possibilities. Firstly it can be a consequence of having no possibility to known different perspectives, like trying to think as if in the head of the opposite side. Secondly it is possible to justify radicalism as a consequence of being lazy in terms of searching and become instructed about the things in a more neutral way, what can be easily done if the search for knowledge centres in the opposite perspective of the same question. This second possibility is independent of interest, in that it resides uniquely in the will of subjecting the perspective defended to some contradictory discussion.
It is important to refer once again that we tend to see radicalism as a distant thing, only present in people seen on television. In fact, that is a result of having little sense about our own radicalisms. They are born small but can become a monster and destroy even the question that was in the base of its purpose, inasmuch it becomes an uncontrolled walk into somewhere sometimes worse than the initial problem.
Finally I want to say something about radicalism according to its effect on personality. Despite its badness, radicalisms define easily a person as a proper individual and not as a vulgar one in many, than the constant neutral behaviour.

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About abstract skills and their worth

For some people it might be a bit incomprehensible the importance of developing abstract skills. One question I used to make while in high school was about the pertinence of learning some subjects, since I couldn’t find any practical use for that information. Once at university, I have discovered a text containing an explanation for my doubt: the practical relevance of some matters is not the potential applicability, the goal is achieving the mental elasticity that allow you to deal with that questions, a mental path that once discovered and improved can increase the power of the mind towards more complex thinking.
Keeping this present on my memory for a while, I return now to add something new. Some proofs of this lack of abstract skills are becoming very obvious to me when I reflect about people that need sensible stimulus to be touched by some questions of life. Knowing previously that the reasons are not only the ones I will mention, I can not avoid saying a part of our insensitiveness about the world, particularly about violence, poorness, hungriness or pollution and planet warming come from this absence of virtue concerning to abstract thoughts. A big slice of population need a documentary like “An inconvenient truth” or a strongly televised campaign about people suffering around the world to turning on the solidarity existing somewhere inside. The floods in Indonesia, that killed thousand of people were other evident example of such need to contextualize the problems.
The physical distance to problems, that let us primitively believe the problems are not of our concern, is the same mental distance that I used to question when dealing with some abstract surveys: if people do not develop mental tools to solve problems that may or may not have a connection to personal reality and context of life, this only will make that people even more dependent of external stimulus in order to correct the lack of abstract touch about problems existence.

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