Flowers for Algernon: progris riport 4, progris riport 5 mar 6, and progris riport 6th Mar 8

Please use this thread for discussing Flowers for Algernon: progris riport 4, progris riport 5 mar 6, and progris riport 6th Mar 8.

Algernon 4.

The conservatism of a moron - Don’t tell lies or you will get hit like when you were a kid. Imagination is lies.

In a Psychology Laboratory they do spearamints like making chooing gum.

Algernon the mouse can do amazeds faster than Charlie the moron. Even when you move the boards around and put them together in differnt ways Algernon won every time, but Charlie can still learn slowly.

progris riport 5

Charlie is ‘exited’ because he has been chosen to have the operation to make him smart. His key quality is ‘motor-vation’. In a fine piece of logic, Charlie deduces that motor-vation does not mean cheese, even though cheese is the motivation for a mouse, because Charlie has motivation but did not recently eat cheese.

Already, the scientists tell Charlie they are worried that the operation would make Charlie sick. Nowadays that in itself would be sufficient grounds for ethical rejection of the research proposal. I find it an interesting dilemma. If this experiment were truly possible, would the potential results and scientific learning be worth the personal harm to Charlie? If this experiment left him worse off, but opened the way to make millions of people smarter through brain surgery and related treatment, would it be ethically justified?

Chapter 6 – the operashun. Charlie gets his lucky rabbit’s foot and lucky penny with a hole in it and lucky horseshoe to make sure the operation goes well.

Belief in superstition is a classic marker of stupidity, with the assumption that magic can influence causality despite absence of evidence or mechanism. What shines through here is Charlie’s good heart, optimism and ambition despite his incapacity.

The doctor tells Charlie that if his operation is a success and they can replicate it then he is doing something great for science.

Charlie thinks that being smart will mean he will have a lot of friends who like him. The irony here is that despite treating him badly, people do have warmth for Charlie as he is.