January 11, 2012
Neuro New Year
Good news, Radio 4 history of the brain radio series: 10 programmes. Nice one! More please! Until then listen here
August 13, 2010
Radio neuro
HM Neuro Celeb radio documentary…
When a 27 year old man known in the text books simply as HM underwent brain surgery for intractable epilepsy in 1953, no one could have known that the outcome would provide the key to unravelling one of the greatest mysteries of the human mind – how we form new memories.
Listen to radio doc here HM – The Man Who Couldn’t Remember
November 25, 2009
B 0004
I’ve had to place myself on a strict Bataille diet. I’ve had to limit the Monsieur to un chapitre per journee towards the end of the journee otherwise I spend the entire journee wandering in his words. And there are a couple of other pressing priorities such as feeding the chickens and learning to write Ruby computer code or shoes code (or building v simple graphic apps in Shoes with Ruby language), whichever it is the Puffin and I are learning, thanks to the mighty Sarah Mei and her inspired ideas and instructions.
November 21, 2009
On furthering the construction
To add to the construction of reconstructing: what if pieces of the book were to then disappear. Thus the author was to randomly remove them each week. Or if the author was to upload them in sporadic episodes and then take them away. Would the reader form attachments to single parts? Would the reader check to see when that part might return?
Would there be any point at all? I hear you ask. Well I read something where Cormac McCarthy alluded to the fact that the brain had changed and thus it would not matter if you wrote some 5000 page epic and it was almighty in quality. People won’t read it was essentially what he was saying. If this is true, then how has the brain changed and what are its newer appetites (note the petit in appetit(e))
Are readers more willing to have a relationship with an ongoing piece of prose, the way they’ll have a relationship with a going blog or stream of tweetation. You could argue that the episode is seeing a resurgence like no other form. Whether it is through the web comic, or the blog, or the podcast, or the moment a la tweet.
If our brains have changed to embrace smaller amounts of text will we embrace a flittering manner of delivery?
I’m increasingly curious about the visual conquering the theatrical in cinema (tho’ I accept this happened eons ago). A droning monologue once had a place in a film that it may no longer have. Yet the monologue is a mainstay of youtube. In my earliest memories of being read to was Listen with Mother (we were sat on the kitchen floor beside a wireless and each day a voice said are you sitting comfortably, then we’ll begin…) It was somewhere around lunchtime I think. Then there was Jackanory (sp?) where a person in rocking chair read a book on television. There was also the man who drew and talked and stories unfolded. But essentially there’s very little in the difference between that and sitting on a train listening to a podcast or a comedy. My child consumes far more audio than I had access to.
I digress.
We need to consider if the brain has changed, how it has changed. The neuroscientists could enlighten on this.
November 2, 2008
Freethinking Festival 2008
It’s that time freethinking time again:
BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking Festival is back in Liverpool from 31 Oct to 2 Nov 2008, with conversation, film, performance, drama and debate about the ideas that are changing the world.
Better online access this year, so no need to hug the speakers close with an eye on the clock — it’s archived here
June 22, 2008
Middling
“He was greatly distressed in his head. All night the parrot had swung roosting from his palate…”
From Dream of Fair to Middling Women. A Novel. Samuel Beckett. (Arcade Publishing, New York, first Arcade paperback edition 2006)
December 30, 2007
House-ache
900 years behind the rest of the world here, and due to frugal amounts of telly watching, (aside from the unmissable or I shall surely expire… 3 versions of the weather forecast) I saw one episode of House yesterday. Instant relief Mr Laurie playing an obnoxious crankpot, mais oui, how fine, but House nowt to do mit habitation, mais non, it’s another Hopital a la tele fiasco.
Thanks to the domination of sincerely mad and nothing to be learnt from them medical dramas on the tube I have lost all interest in medical matters and acquired a medical pain in my hole at the sight of white coats or get a trolley in here on-screen.
It beggars the question:
have screenwriters/television producers had an naturally high number of encounter with obnoxious doctors or are there genuinely a very high number of obnoxious doctors populating the planet? You can find out for yourself at ratemydoctor.com
The point being I’d like to offer some alternative and varied occupations for successful onscreen portrayal and all of whom have the onscreen potential to be both interesting and obnoxious. (disclaimer: meant in the fictional sense only)
– bus drivers
– dental hygienists
– Greenhouse owners (specifically pushing the limits on tomatoes)
– librarians
– dinosaur egg experts
– elevator companies
The medical confusion that evolves from these hospital dramas is intense: what! you can’t have an MRI if you’ve plates in your face? Pity they don’t tell those of us with plates that. We have to learn it from sodding House, if indeed it’s even true. And doctors complain about hyper educated patients graduated from the medical school of Google!
When I think back down the years to working in a nameless London hospital I have the most hilarious memory of being informed by one of those NHS manager types that one snotty doctor, who I’d been greeting in what was considered in those staid old days as too cheerful a manner (you know what doctors are like he’d ho-hummed embarrassed to us …) had requested that we not speak to him.
Imagine here we are checking his patients in at the waiting area and we must not speak to him. What exactly were we supposed to do if one of them fell in a heap? The ironic thing was they were all suffering from serious illnesses and our chirpy greetings were no doubt keeping them afloat as they collected the grim news of what I think were called T Cell counts and CT scans.
Once one of the patients gave me thirty oranges (did he think I had scurvy?) another handed me a very sober looking grey wool suit (point taken, I was in a punk rock phase) another fifty quid, gloria in excelsis etc.
No doubt this is the kind of pompous nonsense (the don’t speak to me rule, not the presents) that spurned such TV shows and ruined the lives of medical students, who had to put up with his morse code style of communication. In that context ratemydoc frankly doesn’t seem such an outlandish concept.
December 11, 2007
Einstein’s Fiddle
Einstein partial to the fiddle: interesting radio piece on Einstein’s relationship to the violin here.
October 19, 2007
Autumn weather and brains
It’s Autumn so necessary to nest with my two Autumnal obsession the weather and the brain.
And how we’ve been tantalized by prospects of windy weather that has not actually landed. Tropical storm Ling ling’s leftovers joined us yesterday. It was like the dumping of a giant melting icecube. Seemingly we’re going to experience La Nina weather cycle this year. Last year’s big storm prompts the reoccuring image of trees falling straight through houses.
And on the brain, of which we truly know so little, two fine BBC Radio 4 program links:
This one is all about the science of acquiring and learning languages
Brain scanning is perhaps the most extraordinary and powerful technique scientists have for exploring how people’s brains work. Dr Mark Lythgoe, a neuroscientist at London’s University College, investigates whether it will ever help those who have mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia.
August 5, 2007
Brillopads
Could this be why it’s so damn hard for writers to make a living:
Living Modestly Despite a Nice Nest Egg
He seems to derive a kind of Zen pleasure through living modestly. He takes books out of his local public library rather than buying them at a store. He rents a one-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto, Calif., although he can afford a larger place.
The, he, in question is: “By Silicon Valley standards, Brian Wilson is not rich. But despite a nest egg of roughly $1.5 million…”
Article on rich folk in Silicon Valley in today’s NY Times who have financial anxiety.
With respect to the folks of Silicon Valley, who are sitting on a million and a half, but proudly wandering with brillopads on their feet instead of shoes because of “wealth anxiety” I say that by the time you come to retire and take your wads out of the bank and lie on your arses on distant beaches on misshapen spines, you’ll have nowt to read because the poor writers your miserly ways are depriving of a living will be forced to procure a life of software piracy instead to feed their chickens.
For God’s sake would they ever buy a sodding book, painting, if they want to really live dangerously they could shell out for a poetry collection, or the much maligned no one wants to publish them anymore short story collection … share the damn wealth and stop being such stingy gits.
To all those who do buy books un grand merci beaucoup. The simple fact is if people don’t buy books writers cannot make even the paltry living most of them actually make.