On July 14, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will fly by the former planet known as Pluto. Already, the spacecraft is sending back pictures that have scientists “drooling,” which is a bit like calling Marilyn Monroe a dumb blonde and then collecting every MM photo you can.
You see, back in 2006, a fraction of the members of the IAU (International Astronomical Union) voted to demote Pluto to dwarf status. (Something about size and crossed orbits and not owning its Kuiper Belt neighborhood, etc.) So even though tiny Pluto has five moons, it was out.
This did not sit well with the kind of Earthlings who champion the oppressed or are tiny themselves (card-writing schoolchildren, especially those who had to memorize “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles,” or some such to remember Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.) ...
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Read MoreA new German study on brain activity during creative writing has got me thinking about one of the great intellectual mysteries: How do you write? How do I write?
It’s something that’s difficult to teach – one of the many reasons I’m not a teacher – and impossible to portray. Think about it: Movies about writers (“All The President’s Men,” “The End of the Affair”) always depict them in the throws of action or passion – which leaves very little time for writing.
In the study, Martin Lotze and his University of Greifswald team conducted brain scans while reclining subjects wrote on a propped-up writing desk. (The scanner’s magnetic field would’ve sent a computer flying.)
The novice writers showed more activity in the visual centers of the brain, while the experienced writers – who were also asked to copy some text and then riff on a short story – demonstrated more action in the speech areas. This led Lotze to conclude that the novice writers were watching their stories play out like movies while the experience writers were narrating them as if hearing an inner voice.
OK, that stopped me cold, because one of the great pleasures I’ve had since childhood is watching my stories on my brain’s big screen, and I’ve been writing fiction since I was 9...
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Read MoreI’m reading “Divine Fury: A History of Genius” (Basic Books, $29.99, 312 pages), which is just the kind of book I like – one in which the author takes the intellectual ball and runs with it. Darrin M. McMahon must be good at it. He also wrote “Happiness: A History.”
Genius, as he notes in his introduction, has meant many things to many different times. The word comes from the Latin, but the Romans, who cannibalized Greek culture, were really borrowing from the Greek “daimon.” Your daimon was – is – your guiding spirit, the link to the divine. Indeed, “Daimon” is the title of my unpublished novel about Alexander the Great, who like the Emperor Augustus and a host of ancient luminaries saw his daimon – his genius – as proof of his divinity. It wasn’t until the 18th century that we got the modern definition of genius as extraordinary creativity and accomplishment and not until the 20th century that we got the IQ tests that sought to quantify it.
McMahon rounds up the usual suspects... Read more
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