This New year has been notable for a very high profile media event: the casting of Matt Smith as the new Doctor Who. That’s prompted me to write this post pointing out a previous entry of mine:

Personal Regeneration.

I don’t believe in New Year resolutions, however I do believe in change and improvement. The New Year – like a birthday or other anniversary – can be an excellent symbolic moment to begin a planned process of change and move closer to the ideal you.

The chances are that you aren’t a Timelord, however that doesn’t mean you can’t change significantly whilst still remaining the same inner person. The advantage you have over The Doctor is that you can do it at will.

Perhaps now would be a good time to start designing a New You?

I want to finish this short series of time travel inspired posts with one more specificallly referring to Doctor Who. Don’t worry if you’re not a fan of the show, it’s just a jumping off point for some general ideas that remain applicable even if you’ve never heard of Rose Tyler or Davros!

The specific Doctor Who concept I want to talk about is regeneration. When an actor decides to leave the show, the Doctor “regenerates”. The new actor plays the Doctor his own way and there have been many very different portrayals over the years.

Yet despite the many differences between Doctors, the character’s fundamental personality remains the same. He changes whilst remaining the same person. That’s the idea I want to discuss here.
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The Milgram Experiment is one of the most famous – or infamous – in the history of social psychology. In essence it shows how easily people can be persuaded to perform reprehensible acts if instructed to do so by an authority figure: volunteers administered what they believed to be a painful and potentially fatal electric shock to another “volunteer” simply because a man in a white coat told them to do so.

Of course that’s just an experiment from the 1960s. We’re enlightened, self-aware 21st century individuals. We wouldn’t do anything like that.

Would we?
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Charlie
You scored 69% kindness, 26% courage, 55% seedy past, and 84% secretiveness!

Your polar opposite is: Michael.
You are similar to: Claire and Kate.

Link: The Which Lost Character Are You Test written by ack_attack on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Which Lord of the Rings character are you? Which Naruto character are you? Which Digimon character are you?

Such quizzes are hugely popular. Partly this is because they’re great fun, however they also tell us something about ourselves. They do this in a non-threatening way with no technical psychobabble!

Fictional characters vary in depth but usually represent certain archetypes (or, if badly written, stereotypes). Archetypes have been around since the earliest mythology and Jung introduced the concept of the psychological archetype (child, hero, trickster, etc). Identifying elements of ourself in characters from Lost or whatever is simply a modern version of such archetype analysis.

So what can we do with this knowledge? What action can we take?
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