story telling

By Arielle Seidman

Just as the oral version of telling stories has evolved over thousands of years since Homo sapiens came along, the invention of the alphabet and the development of written words have since evolved into written short stories and novels. Like the evolution of organisms, gradually, over thousands of years, human communication and the transmission of stories (and now knowledge) have continued to evolve.

     Human beings are perhaps the greatest, most sophisticated storytellers that have yet roamed the earth. Sure, creatures of other levels of complexity can survey their environment, summarize their observations, and live their lives according to their own stories of reality. In fact, these stories of reality have proven to be, in the Darwinian sense, quite an essential mechanism for the survival, continuation, and modification (biological evolution) of all forms of life, especially humans. What distinguishes humans as ‘special’ storytellers, however, is our capacity for language, a cognitive development that biological evolution has

The Evolution of a Sculpture

Jonah Lehrer, in Proust was a Neuroscientist, suggests that Marcel Proust, in his
writing, predicted the, “instability and inaccuracy of [long-term] memory…” [1]. Before
the dawn of the 21st century, neuroscience suggested that memory, valuable pieces of
information, were archived in a structure in the brain, such as the lateral and basal nuclei
of the amygdala.  In 2000, research on rats with fear conditioning and a protein inhibitor
showed that the act of remembrance (reactivation) in fact changed the molecular
underpinnings of the memory by making the memory ‘labile’ once again [2].  Therefore,
new protein synthesis at the synapse was needed to ‘reconsolidate’ the information to

An interesting juxtaposition of a visit to Cezanne and Beyond at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a course conversation about "Against Method' in science and "Against Interpretation" in art.  Some thoughts about the latter from an on-line forum ...