We love the professor

Today I spent eight straight hours in a concert hall like thing listening to lectures. Since we can't use your Student Centre anymore, we have to go to Grieghallen, where they've placed chairs in rows in this big hall. Which is where we have our lectures now. It's not very practical.

Six hours into it we were all half asleep. We'd done four hours of social psycholoy and two of cognitive psychology already and the cognition professor was funny but now as funny as before. Or maybe we were just tired.

Then biology-psychology was up. We usually have this dreadfully boring Swedish guy but he wasn't there today. This old man was sitting on the edge of the stage before the lecture started. We all sat down, ready for two more hours. He must have been 75 but his voice sounded like he was 45 and his words made him seem 25 if it hadn't been for the slightly distinguished tone in his voice and some words he used.

We were all cracking up with laughter five minutes into it and more or less laughed throughout the first 45 minutes. He talked about stress and attention and just before the break he said that it's all about staying awake and he had to keep us awake, whether it was to provoke us, make us laugh or whatever else. That way we might remember something and not walk out and want to forget about it. I'm sure there were several of us who nearly fell off our chairs - I don't usually laugh that hard but he had some amazing comments you'd never expect to hear coming from a retired professor.

One of his comments was about this psychologist who lived in Canada and worked at the Université de Montreal. He didn't speak English very well and it didn't really matter because in Montreal they speak French, and if you do speak English you shut up about it.

This psychologist had done some research and realized the word 'stress' was one of few English words that were accepted in French. He then changed the meanings of the words 'stress' and 'strain' so that suddenly people who read his stuff meant something completely different by it than other psychologists - "as you would say in English" (the professor said in Norwegian), "he fucked it up."

We love him! I hope he'll be back sometime.