story telling

“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”-- C. P. Snow

Lost-Wax Bronze castingin the Divergent and Convergent Mode

 

            Iwill be discussing two kinds of sculpting, lost-wax bronze casting and theprocess of clay sculpting, and how they converge and diverge from one another.  I will include a photograph of thebronze sculptures.   However,I do not have a copy of the clay nude female sculpture to which I will bereferring.  It would have been neatto have such a picture to show the difference in the sculpture mediums.

Neuroanthropology: Brain Enculturing
 Through the lens of the Capoeira Angola  

 

The Storyteller’s Reconstruction:
Over My Head, by Claudia Osborn  

 

            Claudia Osborn’s Over My Head is a riveting journey of coping, rehabilitating and learning before and after brain trauma.  The story shines a new light on the behavioral consequences of such an injury.  Through the lens of biology 202, we are able to understand that a reconstruction of the storyteller occurs in Claudia’s case.  This reconstruction leads to novel confabulations of the same stimuli that she received before her accident.

 

As someone with a passion for creative writing and a future career in medicine, I have always been interested in how others manage to intertwine these two disciplines. Oliver Sacks, author of several books including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, is one of the most prominent physician-writers. Sacks’s writing validates my belief that these two fields are not mutually exclusive but actually complement each other quite effectively. Sacks makes storytelling science and science storytelling. His book is divided into four sections—losses, excesses, transports, and the world of the simple—each of which contains a series of clinical tales focusing on an individual’s experience with a neurological disorder.