"…the pictures come to you one by one and you look at them, some of them last longer than others…"

"I'm beginning to lose it, you're afraid of how weak you are, that you can't get her all back into you again and now the whole thing is going out of your body and it's more in your mind than your body, the pictures come to you one by one and you look at them, some of them last longer than others, you were together in a very white clean place, a coffee house, having breakfast together, and the place is so white that against it you can see her clearly, her blue eyes, her smile the colors of her clothes, even the print of the newspaper she's reading when she's not looking up at you, the light brown and red and gold of her hair when she's got her had down reading, the brown coffee, the brown rolls, all against that white table and those white plates and silver urns and silver knives and spoons, and against that quiet of the sleepy people in that room sitting alone at their tables with just come chinking and clattering off spoons and cups in saucers and some hushed voices her voice now and then rising and falling."

-from "Break It Down" by Lydia Davis.

"…her eyes seemed to her to be wide open behind the closed lids…"

"She thought about the opening and closing of her eyes: that the lids lifted to reveal a scene in all its depth and light and dark that had been there all along unseen by her, nothing to her since she did not see it, and then dropped again and made all that scene unseen again, and could anytime lift and show it and anytime close and hide it, though often, lying sleepless, her eye shut, she was so alert, so racing ahead with what she was thinking, that her eyes seemed to her to be wide open behind the closed lids, bugged, glassy, staring, though staring out only into the dark back of the closed lids."

-from "Liminal: The Little Man" by Lydia Davis.

Title of the Week!

"The Effect of Criticism on Functional Brain Connectivity and Associations with Neuroticism" by Michelle Nadine Servaas, Harriëtte Riese, Remco Jan Renken, Jan-Bernard Cornelis Marsman, Johan Lambregs, Johan Ormel, and André Aleman, appears in the journal PLOS ONE.

Title of the Week!

"Strobing Brain Thunders: Functional Correlation of Extreme Activity Events" by F. Lombardi, D.R. Chialvo, H.J. Herrmann, and L. de Arcangelis, appears in the journal "Chaos, Solitons & Fractals."

Thank you for giving me control of your brain!

Привет, Россия!

Many NeuroCooking pageviews are coming from Russia, and we would be delighted to hear from our Russian readers.

Please, consider saying hello using the blog comments, or via twitter at @thaler or @jimpekar.

Explain science to an 11-year-old.

Take the flame challenge!

A Racy Taint.

Just the final sentence of the article "Off-Color Communiques Taint FBI Sting in Court: Racy text messages between informant and agents turn off jurors" by Del Quentin Wilber, which appears on the front page of today's Washington Post:

“U [expletive] [expletive],” the agent texted back.

"Belgian-Style India Pale Ale"

Washington D.C. Pacifica radio station WPFW refers to the local professional football team as "the Washington professional football team" in order to avoid saying its name.

We would like to suggest, to those NeuroCooking friends who drink beer, that you may want to sample the remarkable 20th anniversary ale from Flying Dog brewery. But we will not print its name here.

__________

[Please note: All trademarks are property of their respective owners; their use here does not denote endorsement or sponsorship. Specifically, NeuroCooking is not supported by the good people of Flying Dog brewery, whose upcoming tour of fine establishments serving their superb ales you absolutely should attend, if you possibly can! To locate this "Belgian-Style India Pale Ale" on the Flying Dog website, see their online beer list, and click on the Latin "canis major".]

What is an algorithm?

[Reggie Watts @ Google.]

"An algorithm is someone who feels good on a rainy day..." [starting at 5:44]

"Accessible" & "acceptance".

The wonderful poetry of Billy Collins is often called "accessible", but Mr. Collins prefers the term "hospitable", because "accessible" sounds like it involves ramps & handrails.

Similarly, in the context of embracing the diversity of our communities, I've wondered whether we could use a more positive word than "tolerance", because "tolerance" sounds like it means putting up with people who smell funny. Today, I discovered that the word I've been looking for just might be "acceptance".

Hmm... I wonder what else I have to learn from professional rugby players...

[h/t: Andrew Sullivan]

Long-Form Storytelling in a Short-Attention-Span World

Last night, I attended Long-Form Storytelling in a Short-Attention-Span World, the first public event of the nonprofit investigative journalism organization ProPublica, in conjunction with The New School. The panelists were:
Ira Glass, Host and Producer, This American Life
David Remnick, Editor, The New Yorker
Raney Aronson-Rath, Series Senior Producer, Frontline
Stephen Engelberg, Managing Editor, ProPublica
The moderator was Alison Stewart, Co-Anchor, Need To Know.

Here are my notes from the discussion

Engelberg
If it's a really great story, you wind up in a place you couldn't imagine at the beginning.

Remnick
Sometimes you have to publish a writer's B piece in order to get their A piece.

Glass
Great stories happen to those who can tell them.

Glass said that his mentor, Keith Talbot of NPR, told him: "Every story is an answer to the question, "How should I live my life?"

Engelberg
The new era of all these choices tends to crowd out poorly done, bad journalism.

Aronson-Rath
We used to save the good stuff for the end, because we thought everyone would watch all the way through. Now, we're seeing that we need to know more, earlier.
[On the use of iPads, etc, to watch Frontline] People want to be more engaged in the content. We need to move from 2-dimensional to 3-dimensional storytelling. We need to let people see eyes and pores.

Remnick
Language is still the greatest invention we have...I'm not sure I want readers to leap out of language and into video just because the technology is available.

Aronson-Rath
We use the other media to take the viewer 15 feet deeper. How do you use the other media, righteously?

Glass
I'm not sure I agree with the premise of this panel: that we live in a short attention span world. People listen to us for an average of 48 minutes!

Remnick
If the story is good enough it's going to reach 2 degrees deeper than the surface stuff and change somebody's life in a significant way.
We have to think about the density of a story. I mean density in the best sense, like chocolate cake.

Engelberg
I try to outwit the reader...I try to give people enough candy to keep them interested.

Remnick
It can't all be brown food.

Engelberg
The Kindle, the iPad, etc., is about to make long-form journalism incredibly accessible.

Remnick
The New York Times is elitist because it tries to do the greatest thing possible.

Glass
Radio is reporting on things that have happened. In order for TV to be compelling, it has to be emotionally compelling; something has to be happening. TV is like reporting on the future!