Today's Word: Appeal

You wanted the last chance, she whispered in my ear. How much would you give for a little more? How much would you sacrifice to spare your own life? Threaten a man with his life, and you'll see what life he wants to protect.

Celebrity Neural Colonialism, or Audrey Tautou owns my brain

This is a bit weird.

When scientists sampled brain cell activity in people who were scrutinizing dozens of pictures, they found some individual cells that reacted to a particular celebrity, landmark, animal or object.

In one case, a single cell was activated by different photos of Berry, including some in her "Catwoman" costume, a drawing of her and even the words, "Halle Berry."

The findings appear in a part of the brain that transforms what people perceive into what they'll eventually remember, said Dr. Itzhak Fried of the University of California, Los Angeles, a senior investigator on the project.

The findings do not mean that a particular person or object is recognized and remembered by only one brain cell, Fried said. "There is not only one cell that codes for Jennifer Aniston. That would be impossible," Fried said.

Nor do they mean that a given brain cell will react to only one person or object, he said, because the study participants were tested with only a relatively limited number of pictures. In fact, some cells were found to respond to more than one person, or to a person and an object.

What the study does suggest, Fried and colleagues say in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, is that the brain appears to use relatively few cells to record something it sees. That's in contrast to the idea that it uses a huge network of brain cells instead.

Further down...

The researchers tested eight people with epilepsy who'd had electrodes placed in their brains so that doctors could track down the origins of their seizures. The electrodes monitored the activity of a small fraction of cells in a part of the brain called the medial temporal lobe.

The researchers kept track of which cells became activated as the participants looked at images of people, landmarks and objects on a laptop computer. One participant had a brain cell that reacted to different pictures of Aniston, for example, but was not strongly stimulated by other famous or non-famous faces.

Heck, I could have told you that the brain's gonna remember Halle Berry in her Catwoman outfit. I mean, sheesh.

Today's Word: Know

He grabbed on to it, that one immutable piece of knowledge, the thing that would remain real and true. His brain was fading, dripping away as the drugs kicked in, and he needed something to remain his true North.

This whole shtick, being hard on myself for not being original, for thinking that everything's been done before...it's getting old. I'm tired of projecting my novel into everything that pop culture is tossing up these days, from Riverbend to Land of the Dead. Tired of this paralysis, this numbness that I have to rub out of some psychic skin to get the blood flowing again. It's bad enough to have an acidic demon monkey poke me and say what I'm writing could be better. At least I've trained that monkey to give me visions of how a draft could get polished. This projection shit is getting wearying, as if obsessing over if people will think of my novel as a cheap knock-off is some healthy alchemy that'll make the end-product better. No, wrong way. Worked out a decent first draft of a scene for Chapter 3 last week. And while I'm not trying to worry about audience thinks, I felt a little more confident when the scene passed the Tuesday Night Writing Group's sniff test. It's a crutch, I know, but crutches can help you walk on your own. You need to know when to wean yourself off of them.

Speaking of weaning, it's time again for another sabbatical from poli-blogs and their comment boards, locations that are all fists and no ears. Tired of textual yelling. I've got more important things to do with my time. As great as poli-blogs are for ready-mades, the snark and caustics are getting to me again. I'll stick with Cursor for now, as well as a few guilty pleasures: IGN, slashdot, This Modern World (a comment-free poli-blog), Morford. I'm reading for the articles, I suppose you could say. I'm cutting myself off of the peanut gallery. Too many fists, not enough listening.

Note: I've been writing this entry in fits and spurts all day. Sometimes very angry, sometimes snarky. There's a lot of problems I have with the general sniping that goes on at blogs and message boards. Too much noise, not enough signal.

That said, I found this at ThisModernWorld.com. It's in regard to Sen. Durbin's recent mea culpa about earlier comments over Gitmo, torture, and the growing stain on America's soul. The last line, however, stands on its own, a veritable Swiss Army Knife of wisdom to be used in so many locales.

And you can't allow yourself the luxury of being afraid of your own words.