Do you ever smell something and suddenly you feel like you are back in an old memory. Maybe you smelled some cookies and it reminded you of when you went to a bakery with your friends after school one day. Or maybe you smelled burnt rubber and it reminded you of the time you saw a car crash in a movie. Why is it that by smelling something for even a second can bring you back to a place and time that you thought you forgot about? Now, this doesn’t happen all the time, it happens when you least expect it, and most of the time- in my experience- the memory that you remember is quite bizarre and random. You could be walking down to street and all of a sudden you smell something that reminds you of when you made a paper clock in 1st grade. I was thinking about this because we were talking about memory in TOK class and because I recently bought a new lotion, and when I smelled it for the first time, I realized that it smelled like an apple field. The only time I have ever been near an apple field was when my family and I drove past one on a road trip. I found it a little odd that memory would come up because the lotion wasn’t even apple scented, it is ‘Pomegranate Argon & Grapeseed’ scented. I don’t know if this happens to anyone else, but sometimes I miss that scent and I want to smell it again, especially if you don’t know where it came from.

I found this article the other day through StumbleUpon, which is a website where you add your interests and it will take you to websites based on those interests. It’s a really fun thing to do when you are bored or when you want to find something new. The article I found (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/older-people-dont-lose-cognitive-power-they-just-know-too-much-say-scientists-9074205.html ) was about elderly people and how they don’t lose their ability to recall knowledge, they just take longer to recall knowledge because they have so much of it. The article explains it like a computer; a brand new computer will run fast because it doesn’t have so many files and data to slow it down; whereas an old computer will take longer to load a file because it has so much data and has been pulling up files for a long time, thus wearing itself out.

            Our brain is extremely complex when it comes to our memory. Memory is very selective on what it stores; there are three basic steps to the storage and remembering of our memories. Encoding; this is the labeling of memories for storage. Consolidation; this is the storing of our memories. Lastly, there is retrieval; this is the remembering of memories. Because memory storing is a highly selective process, we only remember the very important things and we lose the memory of other not so important things. Let us say, for example, we create 100,000 memories a year. Multiply that by 80 years and we have 8,000,000 memories stored. I like to compare this to the movie Inside Out (if you have not seen it already, I highly recommend you do). Inside Out is a children’s movie about memories and emotions. Each memory that the protagonist has is stored into a ‘memory orb’ which are stored in her brain: shown here:

Last summer, my family and I took a family vacation to Florida. We drove from West Palm Beach to Orlando. While on this ride (we were driving on miles of open highway) I saw many pro-life billboards, and I mean dozens. There were so many, I didn’t think that Florida was such a pro- life state. I didn’t really think back on it until I saw somewhere that Florida legalized capital punishment. Florida was the first state to reintroduce the death penalty after the United States Supreme Court struck down all statutes in the 1972 Furman v. Georgia case. This struck me as a bit odd because how could such a pro-life state have the death penalty. So I did some searching and I came across this debate on debate.org that argued if you could be both pro-life and pro-capital punishment (http://www.debate.org/opinions/is-it-reasonable-for-someone-to-oppose-abortion-and-simultaneously-support-capital-punishment ). The votes were split pretty evenly, 53% saying yes, you can oppose abortion and simultaneously support capital punishment; while 47% opposed. Now, I don’t want to get into the age old abortion debate but I do want to bring up some of the points that people had on debate.org. These are straight from the website and I am just paraphrasing some things. I am not adding my personal opinion into these answers.

            For the ones who voted yes, most of the reasons argued that there is a difference between being guilty and innocent (they used the word ‘innocent’ and ‘innocence’ a lot). They said that “Abortion takes the life of someone innocent; someone who has done nothing wrong except exist” and “opposing abortion is opposing the death of an innocent life, while supporting capital punishment is punishing someone who maliciously took a human life”. Basically the argument for supporting capital punishment but opposing abortion is that abortion takes the life of an innocent being, one that has committed no crime and has not voluntarily inflicted pain onto others. For those who voted no, their reasoning was that ‘No, it is not [reasonable] because killing is killing.’ The main argument for calling it unreasonable to support the death penalty but simultaneously oppose abortion is because killing is killing no matter what. In both the death penalty and abortion, there is a life taken. One person said that there is no point in having the death penalty because it is expensive, and we could just keep the criminals in jail for life.

            From a moral standpoint, not matter if you agree or disagree, there will always be points that are valid that void yours. If you agree (to support the death penalty but simultaneously oppose abortion) then some people may say that you are a hypocrite and that both acts are still killing a being. If you oppose, then some may say that abortion kills an innocent being while capital punishment doesn’t and that it kills someone who has already done harm in this world. I feel like this is an extremely touchy subject, and that religion can come into play, which is why I didn’t want to add my personal opinion. But rather that I just wanted to explore and explain both sides of the argument and let people decide for themselves which side they would rather be on.

Movies like Back to the Future, The Butterfly Effect and Project Almanac deal with the implications of changing something in the past and how it affects present day. For example, in Back to the Future Part II, Biff steals the time machine and uses it to travel back to 1955 and give an almanac to his younger self to get rich betting, then returns to 2015. When Marty, Doc, and Jennifer return to 1985, they see that the 1985 to which they return has changed dramatically. Because of Biff changing the past by giving himself an almanac that he would have otherwise never had, he changes the entire course of history for himself and those around him. This creates a parallel universe, and in the movie, the only way to fix it is to go back to the point when the history was altered (when young Biff got the almanac) and change it back so that it never happened. 

            There are also many other temporal paradoxes that come with time travel, for example, the Grandfather Paradox. The Grandfather Paradox is a hypothetical situation of what would happen if you traveled back in time, before your grandfather had any children, and killed your grandfather. This creates a paradox because if your grandfather was killed before he had kids, your parent would never be born and in turn you would never have been born. If you were never born, then you could never go back in time and kill your grandfather, which means that he never died. If he never died, then that means that you could have been born. This mind bending paradox is infamous for its complexity. Another variant of this paradox is the Hitler paradox which is a frequent trope in science fiction. In this paradox, the protagonist travels back in time to murder Adolf Hitler before he can instigate World War II. If Hitler was murdered, then there would be no reason for the travel, along with any knowledge that the reason ever existed, thus removing any point in travelling in time in the first place. The consequences of Hitler's existence are so monumental that for anyone born after the war is likely that their birth was influenced in some way by its effects, and thus the grandfather paradox would directly apply in some way. One ethical issue with the Hitler Paradox is that a variant of it deals with killing baby Hitler. This brings up problems because baby Hitler was innocent at that point, so by killing him, you are killing an innocent person. This also applies to any other serial killers, if the only possible way to stop a serial killer was to kill him while he was younger; would it be right (or even mandatory) to kill him while he is still innocent?

            Where do you draw the line? Who decides what should be changed? What if someone tried to change the timeline who was a religious or political extremist? Should we change the timeline to swing elections in a particular direction? If everyone was allowed to freely travel through time, they would change history constantly. What one changes in the past, affects the past lives of many others. There is really no way to know how time travel would affect history because we don’t know if anyone has ever changed history. This is a really difficult question to answer because we would only be speaking in hypothetical situations and that would not get us any closer in finding the answer. I guess the closest we would ever get to the answer is that by going back in time and changing history, we would create many paradoxes in present day and those paradoxes would in turn create more paradoxes.

I was on one of my social media accounts the other day and I came across this video that someone shared of Katie Hopkins on This Morning saying that she judges’ children’s personalities and habits based on their name. She goes on to say that a child’s name shows how they are as a person; because she was talking about which kids she lets her children play with, she said that she won’t let her children play with another child named Tyler (for example) because if a child is named Tyler- then they must be a bad child, who has bad habits and doesn’t follow directions. The hosts of This Morning were appalled, for good reason, and they were pointing out that a name means nothing on a person’s behavior and that they didn’t choose their own name, their parents did. They had a poll at the end of the video and 9% of people say that they agreed with Katie Hopkins. It just goes to show that there are all types of people in this world. It’s a quite interesting video to watch to get inside knowledge on how some people think, even if you may think that it’s wrong. Watch video below:

           Names are so unique; everyone has the name that they have for a reason. Maybe their parents liked that name, maybe it was passed down through family generations, or maybe the person changed their name because they liked another one better. However, in most cases, we don’t choose our names; they were chosen and settled before we could even talk. So how does it make sense to judge anyone based solely on their name? If we saw that a man named ‘Mark’ robbed a bank, we don’t automatically assume that every ‘Mark’ is a bank robber. We cannot group people with specific character traits just because they have the same name. For example, Katie Hopkins said that she doesn’t like kids names Tyler because they are probably bad children who don’t listen to their parents. Maybe Katie Hopkins knew someone named Tyler who didn’t follow directions so she branded that name with not misbehavior. This isn’t fair because not every Tyler acts the same.
            To judge someone based solely on their name is cruel, they most likely did not pick their name or have any say in the matter. A name is no more than a simple word used to identify someone. Especially in children who don’t have any deeper meaning of this whole name discrimination situation going on. In school admission offices and job admission offices, throwing away a file just because the person has a “black sounding” name is racist and it denies the person of an opportunity that they might have been best for, if they had another name. It’s a person’s actions that define them, not their name.