Evolution of Style

Busy lately and been putting off following up my ideas for more posts.

So not enough to write a full post, but as I was going through my other blog, irruidiate: photogenic, which stories my experiences from 2005-present, I was surprised to see the changes in my writing style. Especially compared to my writings in 5th grade, by which time I was mostly fluent in English, my writing had more prose with each passing year. Interestingly, I wrote more poetry when I was younger. Less prose when younger maybe meant that I had a choppy style that was interesting to the composition of poetry. Vocabulary, grammar, and stylistic flair are cumulative, of course. But I wonder how much of this change is related to maturation of my neural networks?

For that matter, do artists' maturation in their works reflect a maturation in their neural networks.

My instinct says yes to both. In Parkinson's patients who are artists, there are anecdotal reports of changes in styles / mediums / subjects of their art work with disease progression. In stroke and Alzheimer's patients, due to their deficits, they draw clocks and spell / write differently -- manifestations of damage to visual-spatial, motor, emotive centers, and apraxis centers.

One can argue whether or not aging is a disease depends on philosophy and semantics, but aging is indisputably a series of changes in biological function. As babies mature, their neural networks are pruned and by adulthood only have a fraction of the neuron they had at birth via apoptosis, or programmed cell death. However, adults also have more developed myelination of neural pathways - giving adults the advantage in forming and storing memories and articulating thoughts, for example.

So as aging produces these changes, can one predict the ways in which writing / artistic styles would change and can one manipulate the changes to desired effects?

Still thinking on these observations.

But now it's time to sleep. 

2012-03-28 20.23.20 crescent moon over Venus (brighter) and Jupiter (below an less bright), part of the conjunction of planets in March 2012

Genesis, failed cancellation, swedish goggles, winning by good habits

The genesis for La Neurologue started in the middle of the night.

In a fit of mental unrest, I lept out of bed to turn on the rude glare of my iPad. I thought of the perfect title for my new blog and had to ensure that it was still available. At least try to claim it if still unclaimed.

Neurologue was already claimed by a neurosci grad student at BU back in 2005. He linked to an interesting blog named Deep Space Supper Club, which looked awesome (I've always loved food, and recently started loving astronomy.)

I wanted La Neurologue anyway. And shortening the site address by "la" would make it inconsistent branding :)

La Neurologue... (with) adventureuse would be too long... (with or solely) gastronomique would be 1 dimensional and gives the wrong idea (would I be eating the whole time, would I be eating -- heaven forbid -- brains?)

So I would be la neurologue. Double checked to make sure that neurologue would be the same feminine or masculine, just with la or le.

And now it's all mine :D

***

So now that I'm up, I decided to to go Amazon.com and check on my order or swim goggles for mom and bow tie set for dad.

To my surprise, I had previously missed that the goggles were SWEDISH! There are no gaskets, they're just plastic against eye socket. I tried a pair once in 6th grade, and they were quite uncomfortable. Not sure whether it was my facial shape (Asian) or size (adolescent and still not at my full size), but they were really uncomfortable.

Try as I did, many times, I could not get Amazon.com to cancel the order -- kept saying "Important Message
We're sorry. An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we're working to resolve the problem as soon as possible. Please try again in a few minutes."

So this meant I was stuck with these Swedes. Not terrible as they were $12 for 1 clear and 1 mirror-tinted, no tax, free 2-day shipping with my free-prime. Since they were so cheap (probably not worth the hassle of using my ability to return) and Amazon.com only sometimes (unpredictably) deducts the return shipping fee.

I debated with myself whether to buy another pair of goggles with silicone gaskets
TYR Socket Rockets 2.0 Racing Goggle (Smoke) for $8 or JMK 07610 Swim Goggles - Various Colors for $6.

Decided against it since my mom has standard issue European face shape and they are, after all, Swedish goggles.

Also assembly for Swedish goggles did not seem complicated, as seen in a 2-minute video.

Also read this encouraging review for Swedish goggles for difficult-to-fit face shapes.

Hopefully my mom likes them!

***

While looking at pictures of people with Swedish goggles, I saw one of Michael Phelps, Olympic swimming wonder !

Linked to that picture was an article about how his good training habits facilitated his gold metal wins. Despite his goggles leaking (of all things!) and him swimming blind during an Olympic race (2008 Beijing), he was able to stay calm as he had already rehearsed (mentally and physically) just about every conceivable scenario, including swimming blind.


Phelps article

How exactly habits become wired into the brain/ nervous system is still a work in progress. A quick search yields results like "McGovern study shows how the brain forms habits," but the MIT press release does not actually show the how; in fact, the source article is about how lab animal behavior suggests primates have an “inborn tendency to maximize reward and minimize cost"
-- “Optimal habits can develop spontaneously through sensitivity to local cost” by, Theresa M. Desrochers, Dezhe Z. Jin, Noah D. Goodman, and Ann M. Graybiel. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 October, 2010.

Michael Phelps's case reminds me of another, when a comatose girl, Maggie Meier was able to perform the action of shooting a basketball -- this action was a habit she had apparently repeated enough to ingrain as a reflex stored in her spinal pathways, independent of the brain.

Maggie Meier article

Now a question that would follow is how to achieve the ingraining for ourselves with actions that we want stored?

And delete those we want gone?