Similarly, when psychologists Helga and Tony Noice surveyed actors on how they learn their lines, they found that actors search for meaning in the script, rather than memorizing lines. The actors imagine the character in each scene, adopt the character’s perspective, relate new material to the character’s background, and try to match the character’s mood. Script lines are carefully analyzed to understand the character’s motivation. This deep understanding of a script is achieved by actors asking goal-directed questions, such as “Am I angry with her when I say this?” Later, during a performance, this deep understanding provides the context for the lines to be recalled naturally, rather than recited from a memorized text.
In another test, the suspects would be placed in a dark room with a sooty cooking pot, told to touch it, and assured that God would miraculously keep the hands of the innocent clean. “It seems the expectation here,” Stanmore writes, “was that all those who were confident of their own innocence would touch the pot and leave with dirty hands. The one person whose hands were clean would be the guilty party, as they had not dared to touch the pot in the first place.” Cunning indeed.
I’ll tell you what I think is weird, and it ain’t the hermit. It’s how entire generations of people have been conned into believing that there is only one way to live, and that’s on-grid, in deepening debt, working on products you’ll probably never use, to line the pockets of people you’ll never meet, just so you might be able to get enough money together to buy a load of crap you don’t need, or, if you’re lucky, have a holiday that takes you to a place, like where I live, for a week of the happiness I feel every day.”
For months, I would bring packs of 12 forks to the dining hall and spread them across my friends’ plates at the end of the meal before the dishes were returned.
I appreciate this class of subversive yet harmless prank so much.
Alternatively, you might decide that while you’re doing your weekly chores – washing the dishes, hanging up the laundry, or going to the grocery store – you’re not going to listen to anything on your headphones. It’s a counter-intuitive method for productivity enthusiasts, and one that I often have to force myself to partake in. And yet it works.
I do this. A lot. I use chore breaks like dishes as a chance to think and to turn things over in my mind. It doesn’t feel healthy to always be actively busy with external input.
“Nina has numbers on her arm, and they make her sad,” Aija said again, pointing to the inside of her forearm. Then she added: “Nina misses her family. Nina was taken away from her family.”
It wasn’t just the words that sent a jolt of adrenaline through Marie’s body, or the way her child said them — clear and certain, with the letter R pronounced correctly, which Aija usually couldn’t manage — but there was also something about Aija’s expression in that moment.
Nearly three years later, Marie tries to explain it: “There was just —” she pauses. “There was such deep pain there.” It seemed beyond what a toddler should know: “The look on her face, it was too old,” Marie says. “Does that make sense?”