Loose Leaf Notes

1. I’ve been scrolling for weeds in my garden.

2. My scarecrow has seen better days.

3. Time to weed the poem / to plant a row of words / to turn the phrases / that bloom the colors / to follow the root / to the source of truth / sustenance for the soul

4. “Poetry is like a diary without the lock.”  Billy Collins

5. When an idea becomes an ideal, it’s prone to ideology, which frequently manifests as a lack of new ideas.

6. News Reel or News Real?

7. I recently had to look up the term “smoke show” when someone used it to describe a girl he likes.

8. I can’t say enough good things about the Netflix movie with Sally Fields “Radiant Bright Creatures.” It’s very moving and also has a big payoff in the end when it reveals a mystery that I couldn’t figure out.

9. NASA scientists confidently identified tryptophan, an essential, complex amino acid, in samples retrieved from the asteroid Bennu. The presence of tryptophan in an asteroid supports the idea that the recipe for life might not have begun only on Earth. Seeing it form naturally in space tells us that these ingredients were already being made out in the early Solar System. That would have made it easier for life to get started. The space rock likely represents a chunk that broke off of a much larger asteroid sometime between 2 billion and 700 million years ago.

10. Audrey van der Meer, Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot… She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard… When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. More HERE. 

11. Is this why I have to write everything down?  Movement and cognition are deeply connected: Neuroscience reveals that the physical act of moving a pen across paper deeply anchors cognition. Unlike typing, which requires the exact same simple finger movement for every letter, handwriting requires elaborate, deliberate fine motor skills.

12. When at the computer, I often copy and paste something I want to save, and then I move on to something else, forgetting what I copied but holding the contents on the tip of my mouse finger, like holding something I’m trying to remember on the tip of my tongue.

13. In the weeds or growing like a weed? In my family of nine siblings, we grew up without much guidance OR hovering, like volunteer plants rather than potted ones. Both have their pros and cons.

________Thirteen Thursday