On Repeat

Reading Summary

The first part of this podcast talks about two comedians Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler who did a skit in front of an audience. At first, the audience finds it funny but the comedians keep doing the same thing over and over again and the audience begins to get tired of it and stops laughing. Then, the audience finds it funny again after a while. The people doing the podcast talk about how its weird that the audience finds the skit funny and wonder why this repetition is so amusing and why it exists.

The second part of the podcast is about the story of how a daughter discovers that her mother has transient global amnesia. This is a condition that makes the individual forget things extremely fast but only last for 1 to 24 hours. Christine Campbell records a video of herself talking with her mother where she explains what is happening and a few seconds later she has to repeat the conversation again because her mother had already forgotten. This happens over and over again.

Outside Example

This podcast reminded me of the movie The Theory of Everything that tells the life of Stephen Hawking. The movie shows how Stephen Hawking meets Jane at the university of Cambridge. Soon after, he finds out that he has an illness and is expected to live for a few years. Stephen Hawking decides to keep Jane out of his life but she insists that they stay together. They fall in love and after he graduates with a doctorate they end up getting married. As the illness progresses, Jane begins to take more time out of her day to help Stephen with everyday activities he can no longer do by himself. the illness begins to damage their relationship and Jane begins distance herself from Stephen. Jane meets a guy named Jonathan from church and he begins to get closer to the couple and helps out Stephen be able to go out and do family activities. Jane hires a a woman named Elaine to help Stephen and Jane begins to slip away from him. They end up getting a divorce and Jane later ends up marrying Jonathan. Stephen decides to dedicate his whole life to his research pursuing the equation to explain the “Theory of Everything.”

Reading Connection

Although the movie and the story told in the second part of the podcast are very different conditions and situations, they both share an illness that affects the brain and makes the brain work against the body. In both stories we learn how the people affected by these illnesses are ordinary people and at some point in their lives, they are faced with a unexpected horrifying situation. When I first saw this movie I was shocked at how fast his life changed from having everything, a bright future with a loving wife and kids and a great career he faced an illness that would limit him in many ways and ending his life short. It made me realize that the way the mind works is amazing and horrifying at the same time. In the podcast they mention how the brain works similar to a machine and that it just reads code and there isn’t a way we could fix it ourselves. Both situations show exactly that, the brain created this “bad code” and didn’t try to correct it even if it meant harming the rest of the body because it was just following these orders.