Susan Blackmore Strange Creatures Analysis

The word “emulate” is defined in the dictionary as, to try to equal or surpass somebody or something, especially by imitation.

The novel Monster by Walter Dean Myers is the book I chose to read and do my essay on. The genre Walter chose for the book Monster is realistic fiction. The novel was published in 1999 which is a year after I was borning. The reason why I chose this Novel is because a teacher recommended the book to me a couple year ago but, I never got a chance to read it. I always assumed the book was good because it won three awards. The first award the book won was the National Book Award for young people’s literature. The second award the book won was the Michael L. Printz Awards. The third award the book won was called the Coretta Scott King Award Honor all in which the book won in the same year 2000. The book is told from the perspective of a young african american teenager named steve harmon. Steve lives in harlem where the story takes place. One night steve chose to hang with a bad group of friends and was in a robbery. During the robbery one of Steve’s friend kills the cashier. Now Steve is in jail and going back and forth to court hoping to be proven not guilty of felony murder. Steve and I lives are alike in many different ways although we come from different backgrounds.

In the book Monster, written by Walter Dean Myers, a young boy named Steve Harmon was accused of taking part of a crime. In a real life trial called Murder on a Sunday Morning, a young boy named Brenton Butler was also accused of being a part of a crime. The main reason of those false accusations is because of their skin color, the witnesses notice color instead of physical appearance.

“I mimicked his eyebrow thing.”(72) Connotative- copied Denotative- to imitate in a servile or unthinking way

OCD is “a phrase that gets to the existential core of worry, a clenched, demonic doubting that overrides evidence, empiricism, plain common sense” (Slater234). The meme theory states that a meme consists of “everything that is passed from person to person” (Blackmore 37). In “Strange Creatures” by Susan Blackmore and “Who Holds the Clicker?” by Lauren Slater both authors discuss the control humans have over their minds. In “Who Holds the Clicker” Lauren Slater discusses DBS (deep brain simulation), which is a type of psychosurgery in which electrical impulses are sent to certain portions of the brain to control and change the emotions one feels. She discusses both the positive and negatives of deep brain simulation through a specific patient named Mario and also presents the control DBS can have over one’s mind. Similarly, Blackmore in “Strange Creatures” discusses the meme theory, which consists of any idea that is passed down from person to person. Both authors provide information that allows people to draw conclusions relating to why people do not have control over their minds. Even though some people believe that humans do have control over their minds, Blackmore and Slater both successfully portray that in actuality humans do not have any control over their minds because human thoughts and ideas are unoriginal products of external forces, many human thoughts occur at deeper level of consciousness, and

The Article “A Stranger in Strange Lands” written by Lucille P. McCarthy is an examination of the writing process. This article follows a college student through a twenty-one month study to determine how the students writing ability is affected as he transitions from one classroom to another. Focusing on specific writing processes in different types of classrooms,this article hopes to uncover the importance and effect of writing towards a specific audience within a particular genre and to offer a better understanding to how students continue to learn to write throughout college.

For example; if James were to see a driver that did not stop at stop signs or speed through red lights, James is more likely to imitate the same behavior of a bad driver. If James were to see a good driver who watched for pedestrians, James is more likely to imitate the good drivers behavior. This is due to Observational learning. Since we learn from other people in our life, James probably has watched and learned tha habits of his parents or an older sibling. Chances are James will drive similar to whoever normally drives

Aimee Bender’s Willful Creatures is a collection of fifteen short stories each with their own unique story. Although each story has its own plot and characters, the overall effect produced individually ties the book together into one single work. Whether the story is about a woman and her potatoes, a girl who is bullied throughout her life, or a man who has intercourse with single mothers, the problems of society is enlightened. Bender ultimately shapes her novel into a collection of satirical pieces directed towards society. Through the individual messages portrayed in the stories, including “Dearth,” “Debbieland,” and “Motherfucker,” Bender exaggerates and criticizes problems in society. Ultimately, the satirical aspects of each story connect them with each other and makes Willful Creatures a work of criteria to humanity.

Although being two different categories of texts, “The Black Cat” and “Self Reliance” have similarities and differences as well. Both texts share the common upbringing of the idea of learning from mistakes. In “The Black Cat”, the narrator realizes his killing of his cat was wrong. Recalling, “I experienced a sentiment half of horror half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty…”(Poe 5). Despite his murderous actions and recent corrupt behavior, the narrator still learned to recognize that what he performed was a mistake or wrong, and even sensed guilt. The narrator of “Self Reliance” also contributed to the topic of becoming aware of mistakes, but instead, aimed it at society instead of himself. He says, “we recognize our own rejected thoughts...and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another” (Emerson 4). To summarize his message, Emerson believes that people of society emphasize their mistakes, and by doing so, it teaches people to learn from them. Akin to what was previously mentioned, a difference between the two pieces is the subject of the Oversoul. “The Black Cat” does not mention this. In fact, the opposite is the case. The narrator is disconnected from the other characters in the text due to his nefarious actions, unlike the innocence portrayed by the cats and the wife. On the other hand, the Oversoul is talked about by Emerson when he states, the ‘deep force' through which we ‘share the life by which things exist'...this self

Stop. Look around. Everything around you becomes an integral part of how you live your life. These unique surroundings that encompass individuals possess a power similar to a triggering chemical catalyst which can cause a chemical reaction to happen that normally would not. This power that the surroundings of an individual holds exists in the form of cues and these cues act on the behavior of every individual in society. The cues hold an inherent role on how human behavior is controlled. In Susan Blackmore’s essay “Strange Creatures” she explains the imitative intricacies of how human behavior exists through her meme theory. In a similar attempt to explain behavior, Malcolm Gladwell in his essay “The Power of Context” discusses human behavior from a social perspective through the Broken Windows theory. Individuals control

Learning by observation is a type of learning in which an individual observes the behavior of others, sees the consequences of the behaviors, and then attempts to carry out the same behavior. Social learning is based on the standards of classical and operant conditioning and observational learning. It is a commonly shared belief that people have an instinctive ability to imitate the behavior of others. However, this ability is not unique to humans. Animals have also showed evidence of being able to mimic humans and other animals (Mazur, 2013). Chimpanzees, or Pan Troglodytes, have demonstrated social learning through many different experiments in different settings. Chimpanzees have shown the ability to observe the behavior of a model and reproduce the behavior. However, chimpanzees have also demonstrated the mental capacity of understanding when behaviors do not elicit a desired reaction and not repeating these behaviors under these circumstances. This paper will focus on chimpanzees and their ability to learn new behaviors through social learning.

A group of four friends called the “white monsters” don’t like any colors except for white. They even have a room where they always hangout and guess what color it is. Yep it is all white including the carpet and furniture. They try to avoid color if possible. Since they didn’t like being around colors their lives are pretty boring and dull all they do is hangout in their room all day except for going to work or other places. When they do go other places they try to get rid of the all colors by trying to get the people to wear just white and to get all white things. That is why they are called the white monsters because they want to take all the color out of the world and have everything just be all white.

Albert Bandura’s Bobo the Doll Experiment was performed to solidify and add credence to his belief that all human behavior is learned through social imitation, rather than inherited through genetic influences. During the 1960s, many psychologists debated whether genetics or environmental factors, such as social learning, effected a child’s development. Bandura designed the Bobo Doll experiment to prove that children imitate behaviors set by role model’s. Bandura’s research hastened the evolution of the 20th century experimental psychology from pure behaviorism into what is now known as social cognitive learning (Artino, 2017).

A meme is an idea or behaviour that spreads from person to person within a society. The word originates from the Greek word “mimeme”, meaning “imitated thing”. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene in 1976, as the mental equivalent of a gene. Dawkins proposed the idea that social information can change and propagate through a culture in a way similar to genetic changes in a population of organisms; evolution by natural selection. The idea was subsequently introduced in to finding the root of religion, which was named memeplexes, because they contain vast numbers of interacting memes. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, and ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes

Within us, we have the dark and the bright side. We do the good, but have evil thoughts and some people act on it, thinking it may drag them to feel good in doing so. This informative short-story provides a perfect example on how we take control of our mind. Edgar Allan Poe, the author of “The Black Cat”, develops the central idea that violence solves problems. On the eve of an unnamed narrator’s death, he writes a story of how his life collapsed, turning around his love for everybody and falling into a big pile of a hopeless mess and madness by committing brutal actions.