Rain Man Assignment

The story I'm choosing is The Man to Send Rain Clouds by Leslie Marmon Silko. The theme of the story is about the strength of Native American customs and traditions and bridging the gap between Native American customs and Christian customs. The author uses the setting and the mood to surface the theme throughout the story. The Man to Send Rain Clouds helps to set up a recurring theme that Silko will use in many of her other stories.

The short story “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” by Leslie Marmon Silko is a deceptively simple narrative about the death and funeral of an old man of the Laguna Pueblo tribe of Native Americans. Set in the desert southwest of the United States, the story is narrated from an omniscient point of view, and describes the discovery of the old man’s body, the preparation of the body for burial, and the interaction between the family of the dead man and the Catholic priest who lives on the reservation. The author uses very simple language and unsophisticated descriptions to describe an intricate and complex relationship between the Christian culture of the priest and the religious culture of the Pueblo culture. Descriptions of the bleak landscape

How is memory encoded and what methods can lead to greater recall? There have been many different models suggested for human memory and many different attempts at defining a specific method of encoding that will lead to greater recall. In this experiment subjects are asked to do a semantic task on a word related to them and an orthographic task in which they analyze the letter in the word. The results of the experiment indicate that the words which where encoded semantically and are related to the self have greater recall.

The author's language is concrete, and for the most part pretty easy to understand. The reading is short, and very descriptive. The author uses descriptive adjective, she wants you to image exactly where the story takes place, and what is happening.

In the story, The Man to Send Rainclouds, the author Leslie Marmon Silko talks about a family losing their grandfather death and putting them to rest and making sure they are peaceful, bringing different cultures together to honor the deceased. But many things are going on behind the scenes of planning the funeral, Leon warps Father Paul’s ministry to serve the Pueblos’ true intentions, Silko alters the short story’s intentions to show the process of cultural practices and progress. The plain talk and style seems an odd, unconventional way of telling the story. Silko does not describe her characters physically or personality wise, or develop much sense of individual personality. Characters say little to each other

Memory is the process of encoding, storing and retrieving information in the brain. It plays an import role in our daily life. Without memory, we cannot reserve past experience, learn new things and plan for the future. Human memory is usually analogous to computer memory. While unlike computer memory, human memory is a cognitive system. It does not encode and store everything correctly as we want. As suggested by Zimbardo, Johnson and Weber (2006), human memory takes information and selectively converts it into meaningful patterns. When remembering, we reconstruct the incident as we think it was (p. 263). Sometimes our memory performance is incredibly accurate and reliable. But errors and mistakes are more commonly happen, because we do

In the movie Rain Man that was released in 1988 is about a character named Charlie Babbitt and his understanding of his brother Raymond Babbitt who suffers from autism.

Messages become shorter when passed from one person to the next. Memories can be modified to fit one’s personal social experiences (i.e., conventionalization). Memory is unreliable, sensory stimuli are not stored as is but are actively transformed by the brain for storage depending on individual factors such as personal relevance and expectations. The most essential information is better remembered, but what is considered “most essential” may depend on an individual’s experiences. This suggests memory does not function as a video recording, but is a highly complex process that is influenced by an individual’s levels of attention, motivation, expectations, experiences, emotional state, etc. It also suggests that memory is an active process that involves constructing narratives out of events rather than passively recording

Whether we notice or not, almost everything we do today was taught to us by someone who were taught it themselves. This is a mere example of tradition. In Man to Send Rainclouds, many unfamiliar traditions are exposed during their funerary process. Three of the Navajo burial traditions that caught my attention is that they believe a person should not die in their home, smearing ashes over your body, and sprinkling holy water around the deceased’s body. Sometimes our traditions feel so customary that it takes looking in from a different perspective to notice how dissimilar all cultures truly are.

Autism is a syndrome from the result of a neurological disorder that has a huge effect on the normal fuctions of the brain. In the movie, Rain Man, and the book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the main characters are autistic. In the book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Christopher has another adventure, after his neighbor’s dog is mysteriously murdered, which leads him to find his mother. In the movie, Rain Man, however, Raymond Babbitt, the autistic brother of Charlie Babbitt, inherits all the money from their late father. When Charlie finds out that he gets a mere car and a rose garden, he searches for where the rest of the inheritance has gone, thus sparking the adventure with his brother, whom he had never known was his brother.

“KMart sucks!” This very short sentence was one of the most meaningful lines said by Raymond in the movie Rain Man starring Tom Cruise(Charlie) and Dustin Hoffman(Raymond). This line represents more than it says. It shows the ability to learn and grow of those who are considered ‘disabled.’ Rain Man shows several psychological views.

Saive, A., Royet, J., Garcia, S., Thévenet, M., & Plailly, J. (2015). "What-Where-Which" episodic retrieval requires conscious recollection and is promoted by semantic knowledge. Plos ONE, 10(12), 1-13. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0143767

Some aspects of the second article that was chosen are difficult to interpret. This includes the use of two hypotheses in which one reason for better memory performance by synesthetes can be explained by cues involved in encoding and retrieval. Another alternative structural organization hypothesis concedes that there is some other mechanism that helps synesthetes recall more information. According to the findings, it was not clear which hypothesis was more strongly supported as some verbal tests agreed with the former and the visuo-spatial ones with the latter. It is also unclear which aspect the authors were trying to assess since there existed a shifting emphasis from how synthetes encode information to how they recall it.

When speaking about memory, one needs to look at the parts of the brain that are

Case 1 tells the story of Henry Molaison (HM), a man with no memory. He lost his memory due to the operation of suctioned out the hippocampus to treat his epileptic seizures. At that time, it was not known yet that the hippocampus was essential for making memories. After operation, his seizures were significantly reduced, but Henry suffered a global amnesia. Owen et al. (2007) describes patients with global amnesia as perceptive and attentive but with a total loss of short-term memory and some trouble accessing memories of the recent past. Henry could not learn new things as he quickly forgot everything that he had learned. He could learn at a subconscious level only.