So much to say.

It's been nearly a couple of weeks since I've published anything out here and I'm sorry.   I have 3- 4 drafts I'd like to get published this weekend.   I'm going to struggle with wanting to do that because the weather here is wonderful 62 degrees at midnight in January in the Midwest is sweet gift!) 

My notes are all over the board having been written in 10-15 minute intervals over the last couple of weeks.  I need to edit them and stitch them together.  Watch this space for more on 

• the autism spectrum and mirror neurons
  
• community vs. neighborhood 
• Twitter, Facebook and other social media

More soon.

Threads Rewoven - A Thing A Week

And so it begins... I've just finished reading 16 habits of highly creative people and I'm going to start living #4 with this blog... "Creative people embrace challenges.".

Best Beloved, in an effort to encourage my writing, has challenged me to my own version of "A Thing a Week" just like Jonathan Coulton did in 2006, just as whimsical but not so musical. We are fans of several of his pieces including Code Monkey and the mash-up When I'm 25 or 64. It seems like it might work for me too. So let's see where this Thing goes. It could make for an interesting year.

This idea was not just thanks to Jonathan Coulton. It's also thanks to Stephen King and Charles Dickens. I recently listened to an unabridged audio version of King's "The Green Mile" which was originally a novel published in serial form. In his own acknowledgments, King tips his hat to Dickens, much of whose work was published serially. The technology required that it be months even years between Dickens’ installments. I find myself living in an age in which technology will allow me a publish an idea even before its time which is what makes this exercise so scary. Best Beloved and I were finishing up our Christmas wrapping at 3am on Christmas morning when the idea of me publishing serially came to him. BB said, "You develop your children's stories serially and refine them with each retelling. Why can't you publish that way?" And so it begins.

I don't know if blogging is the best format for this but I'm going to give it a try. This activity will be a little weird for me because I generally don't like to show people my writing. And while I'm still doing this largely anonymously, many of you know who I am in my real life. Now I'm asking you to be my witness, to hold me accountable for being disciplined about my chosen creative outlet, and most importantly to comment on my work, with the goal to helping me improve (my story, my style, my "voice"). Please be gentle, dear reader... I totally understand Anna Nalick's lyrics:

"2 AM and I'm still awake, writing a song

If I get it all down on paper, it's no longer inside of me,

Threatening the life it belongs to

And I feel like I'm naked in front of the crowd

Cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud

And I know that you'll use them, however you want to"

I'm a little afraid to do this because I'm worried that the ideas won't keep coming. Some days it seem I have so many ideas filling in my head-- some which are fleeting and some which tease me as they dance around the other more serious thoughts going about their business in my brain. Somedays the well is dry. When I expressed this fear at 3am, BB reminded me that some of JC’s thing-a-week works were real stinkers too. It worked for him, it can work for me.

I worry a little about the intensity of the words clawing to get out of me. Sometimes I carry big feelings around in my heart and in my gut which seem to need to purged before they eat me from the inside out. Is it weird to have that drive to write like that? I've always wondered if happens to other writers... (I read something about that same drive in Madeline L'Engle - she described it as a story begging to be told - and having to get the story down on paper in order to get any peace from it.)

Singer/song-writer, John Mayer sings, “Say what you need to say.” It seems important to distinguish between what I need to say and what I just want to say. Help me with this too, dear reader.

I think some of this stuff swurling (Yes, I know that's not the correct spelling but it's a play off of url... ) in my mind might be something not to say aloud but I think it might be the stuff of some good fiction. I hope to get some of that out here to get some feedback from you, on it. It could be it’s only a good idea when it’s in my head, but in the bright light of day it’s not worth the effort. So watch for opportunities to tell me if my characters are the least bit believable and likeable --- or not.

Here’s to an interesting 2009.

Fact or Fiction?

I found this story both sad and interesting. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081228/ap_on_re_us/books_holocaust_memoir

I guess this guy wrote a book that was supposedly pretty good (Oprah and others liked it anyway-- I haven't read it and I guess I won't get to read it). He sold it to a publisher as a memoir and it was discovered that it was in fact not a memoir but fiction. So, it's not going to be published and the publisher is demanding their money back and Jewish educators are up in arms, etc. etc.

They've all lost sight of a really important fact (at least I think it's a fact) and that is that the story was good ---Supposedly it was heart-warming, hopeful and hope-giving. None of that has changed really. So correct the dust jacket and inform the consumer it's fiction! Readers will still read it. The publisher will still make money. Perhaps even it will prompt more people to become educated in Jewish history so they will know where this book as gone astray from the facts.... Or better yet, have someone write a companion book correcting all the mistakes...

This could be just like several works of fiction that have had folks riled up for years (Dan Brown's book title escapes me presently)...

Mirror Neurons shape our reality, learning and interaction

I read a couple of tweets from @hyblis several weeks ago about mirror neurons and it started me down the path of thinking about mirror neurons and how they shape our reality.

From Wikipedia: "A mirror neuron is a neuron which fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another (especially conspecific) animal.^[1] Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were itself acting. These neurons have been directly observed in primates, and are believed to exist in humans and other species including birds. In humans, brain activity consistent with mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex and the inferior parietal cortex."

The thing that fascinated me about mirror neurons is that they fire in a person when they observe someone else being touched and it is the touch neurons in the skin that veto the input of the mirror neurons. That has to be a learned behavior.

I filed that little tidbit away for future pondering and moved on to something else.  Then a few days later while I was practicing my Mandarin I found myself trying to feel how the words should feel if I'd said them the way my coach, Jiang, had said them. The experience was both tactical and mental/visual. Eureka! I was trying to pull the data created by the mirror neurons to help me properly pronounce the words!

It seems everywhere I looked there was a little reference to mirror neurons and I found myself stopping to read all kinds of things

As an aside -- I think it's interesting how subjects like that can be out there seemingly invisible until someone we know tell us about them -- and then we them everywhere.  I was that way about forsythia bushes for years -- seeing them but not taking much interest because I didn't have any context with which to connect them in my thought stream.  But I digress

It turns out that there is a fair bit of discussion and debate about the role of mirror neurons in language acquistion.   There was a recent Nova episode on mirror neurons that was pretty interesting.

Some research suggests that the mirror neurons not only allow you to experience what the other person is experiencing but you may actually feel what they feel emotionally. "Mirror neurons can send message to the limbic or emotional systems in our brain." Does this scienfictically explain the Hallmark moment?

I bumped into a fair bit of discussion about mirror neurons and how they function (or malfunction) in people with autism.  It seems that their mirror neuron system is impaired in some way.    I found a lecture by @marcoiacoboni (video podcast from the UC-Davis) titled
Hypothesis on the Link between Mirror Neurons and Autism

Since listening to his lecture, I've connected with him on Twitter and learned he has a new book titled "Mirroring People".   I'm going to pick it up today.  I'm anxious to read the chapters on autism and language learning.   I'm also anxious to see if he's looked at the role of mirror neurons in VR and social media "stickiness"

Here are some key quotes I've been playing with:

"Heathy human beings are intensely social. We invent ways to connect with one another."

"Deep in our cells we are meant to be together. There would be no point in having a mirror system if we were not meant to interact with one another."

V.C. Ramashandra (another researcher in the field) says - Some time ago in human evolution mirror neurons got dramatically better and as a result, human development accelerated because we didn't have to wait for hundreds or thousands of tiny evolutionary changes and natural selection. We could adopt successful strategies within a generation and we didn't have to experience a failure to learn from it.

This discovery should have great implications on education, autism therapy, stroke victim therapy, artificial limb development and virtual reality platforms.

The subject is probably something I'm going to prattle on about for some time to come.