Reads.

My dance history professor from undergrad said graduate school taught her how to read.  At this point in the game I whole heartedly agree.  It shows in my fun reading -- I'm on my fourth book in a week and a half.  But I probably must also credit my Nook since I can optimize the font style, font size and line spacing to my preference.  Maybe its also all the time I had whilst without internet (which is up and running again -- whee!)....

1) Janet Evanovich, Smokin' Seventeen (2011).

Book eighteen came out in November, dropping the e-book price of Seventeen to what I consider a tolerable.  Excellent humor.  No required thought on my part.  Perfect.  Zoom.

2) Kathryn Stockett, The Help (2011).

I feared it would end up being a novel version of a chick flick.  Boy, was I ever wrong!  I am positive that anyone with even the teeneist smidgeon of awareness reads The Help with parallel examples running through their head, be they of personal experience or historical origin.  The notion profoundly applies that those who act unto others and make the biggest public stink are often directly and/or indirectly addressing their own personal issues.  Maybe its the overexposure to 17 Stephanie Plum novels since August, but I found myself wanting to text OMG to a few who have also read The Help when I vehemently never, never, never use such "acronyms."  (For the record, I also use punctuation and form actual sentences when texting unless limited by space constraints.)

3) Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices (1989).

Sacks is an incredibly sweet and humble doctor who is profoundly interested by both the pathological conditions and, more so, the patient themself.  The man has only one fault: using four times as many commas as is appropriate, second only to the comma usage of some writers from The New Yorker.  But for Sacks I am willing to forgive.

Seeing Voices is a discussion of prelingual deafness, meaning a child is born without the ability to hear or loses their hearing before having acquired any understanding of language.  The deficit is larger than most would expect.  The ability to form thoughts is dependent upon language, so much so that without it there is no of reasoning, no cause and effect, no concept of numbers, no concept of time, no concept of the ability to express ideas may exist without the brain having a basis for communication.  This is different from those who acquired at least some language before losing their hearing, or postlingual deafness.

The process of learning is very intricate and relies on principles of neuroplasticity, how your brain adapts to new events.  Spoken language is shown through research to be very left brain heavy, but the left side is a processor of the fine details of what is known.  Exposure to a novel event (i.e. new event -- learning words, hearing a new usage of a known word, etc.) requires processing by the right brain, where global understanding predominates rather than fine details, which then sends the information to the left side for storage and future use.  There are numerous fine details of the process, including whether long term potentiation is achieved through the limbic system (i.e. the process of an event becoming an actual part of your long term memory base), but we'll keep things simple for now.

Interestingly, American Sign Language (ASL) was only considered a true language within the last few decades.  ASL was for many years assumed to be crude pantomime and/or a series of shapes strung together.  In fact, as Sacks points out, ASL is its own language separate from signed english that has its own grammatical framework including word manipulations for tense/emotion/etc, it is highly spacial dependent for individual words and full thoughts alike, and has fluidity of thoughts and phrases.

The use of space while signing plays a huge roll.  Spacial orientation is classically a right brain activity.  It is acutely developed within signers significantly more so than in speakers, and yet because spacial orientation is linked so closely to "speaking" in ASL it becomes integrated into the left brain's language centers.  Apparently signed english is much harder to convey thoughts than with ASL, and studies cited by Sacks demonstrate that over time many using signed english organically manipulate its use to where it begins to resemble ASL and its unique grammatical constructs. 

4) Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010).

Henrietta Lacks died in 1951 of an aggressive cervical cancer, but the cell sample (named HeLa) taken from the tumor growth is still alive today.  Previously no human cells survived in culture past a few days.  It was not for many, many years until scientists discovered the likely reason why her cells divided at a rate 20 times of other cells ad nauseum.  The cells were then distributed across the world to anyone scientist who wanted to research using human cells for the first time, eventually leading to the polio vaccine, cancer and AIDS research, the effects of radiation and toxins, genetic mapping, drugs....

And yet a huge ethical construct exists.  Many have heard of the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, where blacks were used for research in a horribly unethical way.  Henrietta Lacks was not infected with cancer by her doctors, but cells were removed and distributed into what became a multi-billion dollar industry while her family was left with nothing, including no knowledge that cells were harvested in the first place.  Consent, disclosure, maleficence... you name it, the history of the HeLa cell line is wrought with it.

Next week will become a slow return to orthopedics.  I'll be working my way through all three semesters' worth of manual therapy notes and through my textbooks (like my new gait book by Perry and interventions book by Magee -- ya!) to wrap my brain around treating a patient population filled with runners and triathletes instead of normal folk's usual pathologies.  Hoping my memory is as robust as I *think* it is...