Jonathan Bernard

It seems fitting to me that the first entry in my blog is a justification of its existence. After all, the thought that my words deserve their own shrine on the Internet feels rather arrogant. However, I think there are many good reasons to blog on a semi-regular basis. Let me show you.

I have been using Twitter for a little while now — I reached one-hundred tweets about a week ago. I have noticed that using twitter forces me to condense and crystallize my thoughts. I dislike the shorthand that has evolved for IM and texting, so that one-hundred-and-forty character limit is all the more restrictive. I tend to ramble when I write; Twitter is a good exercise in self-editing for me. Sometimes I want an area to discuss a thought in more detail than micro-blogging will allow. A blog allows me to do so.

I tend to be an introspective though absent-minded person. I almost always remember what I have thought in the past, but my memory of past events seems sparse to me. I remember big things, but even then a lot of details are left out. This is normal, but from conversation I gather I forget more than most. This makes me wonder how vulnerable I am to confabulation, or false memories. My earliest memory is being stung by a wasp, but I am the only one who remembers that. How do I know that actually happened, what if it is actually from a video I saw as a kid?

A little while ago I read an article about a woman who remembers every day of her entire life in detail. Initially researchers believed there was something special about her brain that granted her better memory, but this was disproved. She was able to remember her life in detail because she kept a detailed journal of every day of her life and she studied it compulsively. She was memorizing her life much like we would memorize a list of definitions or a verse of the Bible. One interesting aside, this suggests that our brain can hold far more information than we typically learn. Blogging can combat age and fallible memory in two ways. A fresh, first-hand account of interesting thoughts or events will be recorded for later reference and in the process of writing I increase the reliability of my own memory.

There are more reasons for this blog but I have covered enough ground for one entry. While I hope you enjoy and benefit from my blog, a primary goal of this blog is self-improvement. I will write about this later but character is built around habit. Expressing and verbalizing thoughts is a critical part of internalizing them and that is what this blog is about. My topics will follow my interests, so expect some technical subjects mixed in with the musings and the Biblical study. I welcome discussion; as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another (Pr. 27:17).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 5:41 am and is filed under Life Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.