Autumnal flower-blogging!

Fall blooming camellia.

"Back out of all this now too much for us ..."

At a recent conference in Sonoma, California, I met the poet Jill McDonough. 

Most of the conference attendees were architects and designers. I'd flown in from Maryland to show how magnetic resonance imaging can reveal the functional organization of the human brain; she'd flown in from Boston to read poetry at the closing dinner.

Please may I suggest, dear NeuroCooking friends, that you read this poem, then wipe your tears, and buy this book?

___________

[Note regarding post title: The opening of Robert Frost's Directive is repurposed as a line in "Blackwater" from the book "Where You Live."]

This is not a slide.

I had planned to, but I changed my mind, and I did not show this slide at last week's Applied Brilliance Conference:

However, I did show this one:

We very much enjoyed her visit!

Bucky (left) and Ursula.

"Ursula" has left the building.

We've placed our visitor in a good home.

FOUND DOG!

Correlation and um, y'know, the other thing...

"Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates" appears in the October 10th issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Ideas flee the prison of the mind ..."

Escapism? I think escapism is healthy. Every time you cast a thought forward or look to the sky, you're escaping. I don't think of escapism as something outside of yourself; it's something natural and fundamental, like breathing. Everything we have was "escaped" into creation, right? Ideas flee the prison of the mind, become real. I believe in it as much as I believe in riding my bike or lying in the grass or digging in the dirt or eating bread or drinking water or skinning your knee. It's key.

- from the interview with Brian Chippendale in the July/August 2012 issue of the Believer.

Headline of the Day!

An article entitled "Swiss Cows Send Texts to Announce They’re in Heat" appears in today's New York Times.

"Science."

What little we have ever understood
is like an offering we make beside the sea.
It is pure worship when pursued
as its own end, to find out. Mystery,
the undiminishable silent flood,
stretches on out from where we pray
round the clear altar flame. The god
accepts the sacrifice and turns away.

"Science" by Ursula K. Le Guin, from Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems 1960-2010.


h/t: The Writer's Almanac