maybe this wasn't such a lame idea

for the story idea archives -- the antibiotic-resistant strains of tuberculosis. some guy named goldfarb who's working on it in russian prisons. guy at uwashington profiled on the berkeley evolution museum site. tomasz.

of monkeys and zebrafish

the V&R theory proposes that population-level brain lateralization asymmetries arose because the asymmetry conferred an evolutionary advantage on the group. that is, it paid to have everybody exhibit the same brain biases. the main evidence was in the shoaling of fish, which had a better chance of escaping prey when they all swam together and had the instinctual response of turning the same direction. this is counterbalanced by the prey then figuring out that they should attack on the other side, which conferred some advantage to the outliers in the group, those who swam left when everyone else swam right. then there was evidence that the fish could change the direction of their lateralization, and that some species cycle from left-brain to right-brain and back in their flight response bias.

so what does this tell us about humans/primates/any other animal? that lateralization may have occurred back when we were all fish, or earlier? but then what about the switching? why right in the first place? is it consistent across species?

ooh - it would be fun to write about finch songs. plus ten thousand and three people are studying birdsong. now i see why... it brings together lateralization patterns, learning, communication modes, sound, evolution -> hell yeah.

galapagos, wherefore art thine standards?

excerpts from the cinematic underground's promo card:

Scene III. My Dear Self
Wherein we find, astonishingly, our agonist - driving his Self home.
...
Scene IX. The Face of the Girl [Like Glass]
In which He meets Her at a park and sees hope.

oh sad! in later scenes the Airport beckons him and, alas and lo, a decision is reached.

~

this could be interesting -- from jeffrey hutsler's web page -- music cognition vs. language cognition paper. was expected to be published in cognition; a cursory search didn't turn it up, maybe it's elsewhere? the blurb was from 2003, so don't know what happened.

more links for the frozen brain

apparently today's latte rewired me for happiness, not productivity. icelandic music links to be explored:

http://www.dotshop.se/ds/release.php?code=12TO08CD&rand=243226865

http://icelandreview.com/icelandreview/features/multimedia/?ew_news_onlyarea=&ew_news_onlyposition=12&cat_id=29473&ew_12_a_id=163734

http://www.tonlist.com/ViewAlbum.aspx?AlbumID=5579

http://www.mugison.com/Mugison/Music/albums/

defrosting

about that book idea: so i think the antarctic barber - or pastry chef, whoever - story will have to wait until i'm settled, famous, have an agent, and can do the whole book project in a month. because post-iceland i've decided that visual homogeneity aka complete sensory channeling into eery white and eery blue just won't work for an entire year. i mean, wouldn't that burn something weird onto your retina, like the way screensavers used to save your computer screen from getting shadowy icon tattoos? and what an experience it must be to then leave and see real red, real green for the first time. or maybe the underground world of antarctica is really colorful to compensate, like a psychedelic 60s rennaissance all year all the time. i wonder if there's rampant drug use -- it's not the kind of place where you'd want to get lost on a hallucinogenic whim.

yo. why doesn't anyone sell jakobinarina and/or thorir for cheaper than $40/cd?
http://www.rokk.is/
i'm still simmering in iceland (wait. simmering? iceland? crap.)

gingerly

would apple ginger bread be gross?
how about a banana walnut ginger kablammo bread?
ginger chocolate cake?

ideas of the 7am

how do you study the effects of forgetting on psychological health? want to pursue gazzaniga's idea that we spend so much time forgetting that the impact of memory-enhancing drugs might spur on a whole new set of mental disorders. That we create narratives through selective placement of experiences and events into a storyline that implies the rejection of incompatible memories. (and the related idea that at a certain point the number of incompatibles accumulate to the point of spurring a shift in perception. or understanding.) Well, I don't care so much about the rejected memories as I do about what a person does with what he/she does remember. Is there a link between mental disorder and really great memory? Probably not. What about areas of the brain that are activated when a person experiences confusion --- higher activation in memory areas (hippocampus? ug need to learn brain) as well? (if confusion can serve as proxy for narrative failure)
this whole idea of narrative is too conceptually distant from what you can measure, but it does give a more interesting shape to the musings on the possible impacts of better memory.

other thought - how can you write about emergent social properties from a scientific perspective? effects of caffeine on how people work. doctors working ridiculously long hours. being able to command your mind to pay attention on demand. what has this meant overall in terms of our ability to be productive -- and the pressures it places on others to similarly become superhuman caffeine sinkholes? if some people are relying on caffeine to raise their productivity levels, presumably there is some social pressure to also push yourself further and buy into the stimulus game. obviously this would translate into the cog enhancement debate, but how do you get anything concrete about caffeine and social patterns? look at consumption patterns.

start with studies on caffeine and negative side effects. that study of mice with improved learning and intensified susceptibility to pain.

heaving to action

guilt is a powerful motivator. so i apologize to the lady whose aerodynamic locks suffered my scorn - i'm sorry, i really did like your hair.

may cleanliness always be in vogue!