Blogs

Eric Kandel shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or medicine in 2000 “for [his] discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system” (The Nobel Prize). Nobel laureates are asked to write a short piece describing the research for which they were awarded the prize. What Kandel wrote instead was a nearly 500-page history of neuroscience and his own participation in it, as well a detailed description of his research on the cellular and molecular basis of memory. He ties his own life experiences, especially the necessity of leaving Vienna as a child in the face of the Nazi takeover, into his research, giving the book a more human element that makes it readable by the general public. Memory is Kandel’s life work.

The Butterflies of Our Mind

I was first introduced to “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” when I was searching information about consciousness disorders. The book was written by Jean-Dominique Bauby, a patient with locked-in syndrome. Then the chief editor of French Elle, Bauby suffered the condition caused by a massive stroke. Only able to turn his head and blink his left eye, he was “imprisoned inside his own body” (4). To me, it sounds like the worst nightmare one can possibly experience – even worse than a complete loss of consciousness. I cannot imagine how claustrophobic it would feel, unable to give response to the outer world when I could still feel everything around me.

           Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm begins his tale in the medieval times where everyone knew their role in life, as a peasant or lord, and where people lacked individual freedom. Then an individual finds that they are a separate entity, separate from nature, and they began to discover the world1. With this emerged individual comes freedom, but with freedom comes a feeling of aloneness and a lack of purpose. The individual goes on a quest to fill the void of being alone. The path to maintaining freedom while filling in feelings of doubt and aloneness can lead to negative freedom and positive freedom.

Today, blogs are nearly as commonplace as keeping diaries and journals was in the 19th and 20th centuries—and even before that! The main difference though, is that while these diaries and journals for the most part were kept private (disregard those of Anne Frank and other popular diary publications) blogs are simply out there for the entire world to see.

A Little Bit of a Background

When we first began talking about what we wanted to do, all we had was a blur of ideas and random thoughts in our minds. We wanted our presentation to be creative, we wanted to involve the class and yet, we wanted it to portray a concept or an idea that we had not only taken from the class but that had shaped us and that we were still fascinated by. And when we set standards that high for ourselves, we suddenly didn’t know what to say. We floated between concepts like dreams (and how we as a class dreamt together), learning (and how we learnt to learn) and others similar to that.

An Introduction

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