story telling

Jeff Oristaglio is a neuroscientist at Drexel University with whom I share an interest in better understanding the brain and its relation to human experience generally.  The continuing conversation here is excerpted from an ongoing email exchange between Jeff and me, and made available to encourage further thinking about possible future directions for productive research on the neurobiology of depression.  Others interested are invited to add their thoughts in the on-line forum below. 

PG - 11 June 2009

Meeting announcement: "To think more about what depression is."

Jeff - 11 June 2009

Ari Daniel Shapiro- "From recording whales to recording people"

his website/blog

Yep,  The Brothers Bloom is a con-man movie of sorts, and yep, it's (Roger Ebert) "lively at times ...lovely to look at, and the actors are persuasive ...

In his seminal work Language and Mind world-renowned linguist Noam Chomsky discusses the development of language. In a series of telling essays and lectures he presents the linguistic contributions to past, present, and future studies of the mind and details the distinctive nature of language. Combining concepts from biology and psychology he attempts to trace the origin of language, all the while analyzing what these origins imply about the nature of the brain. One Chomskyan theory of particular interest deals with language acquisition and is labeled "Universal Grammar" (Chomsky 99)1. In the following paragraphs I will present and discuss this theory and attempt to situate it with the neurobiological conclusions reached by our class this semester.

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Begun by Paul Grobstein and Bharath Vallabha starting with Paths to Story Telling as Life: Fellow Travelling with Richard Rorty.  Others are warmly invited to chime in in the forum area at the end.

Bharath, 12 May 2009
I read your post on Rorty and found it very interesting and thought provoking. One question it raises for me is:

Tim Richards
Friday, May 15, 2009
Evolit Final Paper

New Environmental Stories to Heed Biological Evolution

Stories can conflict not just with one another, but also with the very biological processes that gave rise to them. Normally, in studying the theory or story of evolution, we focus on how it conflicts with other dominant cultural stories, especially with Christianity and its insistence that God created the world. This conflict is generally controversial enough to occupy the intellectual content of a course discussing the social aspects of the theory of evolution.