Blogs

A Day at the BeachHere is a test.

I am posting this first-draft/notes for my proposal on the blog, because I can edit here. I wanted to get some ideas down fresh, and this way I am not wasting a post for smaller notes. I will add to this/link to it when the proposal is due (and this way you can all see how these ideas progressed --the point of our blog, right?).

Draft 2: (Draft 1 and Notes below in true blog style)

Neurocognitive linguistics offers an approach to linguistics which focuses on identifying the cognitive processes by which the brain acquires and uses language, the operations that underlie the language function, and the physical structures in the brain that account for language. Language acquisition represents the immense difficulties linguists have in explaining and proving assertions from the scarce linguistic data available today. Every cognitively normal child is able to, and if exposed to other speakers definitely will, develop and learn a language natively. This is because language is not a learned skill, but an instinct.

 Eve Gleichman

22 February, 2010

Neurobiology 202: Web Paper 1

Paul Grobstein 

Psilocybin, Hallucinations, and the Spiritual Enlightenment

Serotonin (5-HT) is a key neurotransmitter that regulates numerous functions such as appetite, sleep, memory and learning, mood, behavior, and sexuality amongst other operations of the central nervous system (CNS) (1). As such, its significant bearing on our lives is undeniable: with normal synaptic levels of serotonin, we can live as content, functioning human beings.

Over the summer, I struggled with gender identity issues—though I hate to describe it that way, both because it sounds like I’m pathologizing myself and because it felt less like a “struggle” and more like a long-needed exploration of some aspects of my identity that I’d heretofore neglected or perhaps repressed. I talk to some friends, did some research, and eventually “came out”—if that’s what it was—to a few people. Towards the end of the summer, I felt fairly certain that I wanted to be—would be happier as—a woman.

One night, a friend from out of town visited me, and we got into a pretty heated argument about gender identity. At the center of this argument was a simple question that he posed to me: how was it possible that I “felt like” a woman?

Normal.dotm 0 0 1 1222 5869 Bryn Mawr College 167 58 8558

          At first glance, blogs appear as only a medium, a different method to present textual information.  I once possessed this narrow view of blogs, and saw them as simply a new way of expressing oneself: once written in a journal, diaries had now moved to the internet forum.  I wasn’t considering the comprehensive scope of blogs in the beginning; now it is clear to me, through reading the analyses of blogs, such as in jo(e)’s posting, that blogs are actually an emerging genre.

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