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