A stroke of insight

My mother's brain is being eaten away by Alzheimer's. That's one reason why I found this video of brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor so fascinating. But not the only reason.

Taylor had a massive stroke and lived to tell about it. The experience gave her new insight into how our brains function, and into that place in the brain's right hemisphere that she calls "nirvana."

The video, posted on ted.com, is titled My Stroke of Insight.

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, is a nonprofit foundation that works to spread great ideas.

"There is no greater force for changing the world than a powerful idea."

Open-source science?

The collaborative, open-source approach that's worked so well online -- think Linux, Wikipedia, Wikileaks and countless other open source software and social media development projects -- is now being applied to scientific research.

That's the first thing that popped into my mind as I read an article about the Myelin Repair Foundation in yesterday's SF Chronicle.

The Myelin Repair Foundation is a nonprofit organization that's trying to speed up the development of new drugs and other treatments for multiple sclerosis (MS), a disabling autoimmune disease, by changing the way research is conducted.

The foundation has focused on one key aspect of the disease: the destruction of myelin, the substance that protects our nerve fibers. The organizers developed a research plan that focuses on the kinds of research needed to understand how myelin works, how MS disrupts it, and how to repair it. Then they found scientists with the expertise needed to do that research. The researchers share their results and brainstorm the next steps. The approach is collaborative, not competitive.

That's quite different from the typical scientific (or corporate) research model. Since scientists and research institutions compete for government funding (or with other companies), most are unwilling to share their research ideas and approaches. In this model, their results may be propriety or may be kept under wraps pending publication in a scientific journal.

The result: It can take years, decades even, for promising results to work their way through the system and actually become available as a new drug or treatment.

The folks at the Myelin Repair Foundation hope to get their research far enough along that a for-profit drug company can clearly see its potential and will be willing to complete the process. They also hope other non-profits will see the merit of this approach...and help produce faster results for all the people now waiting for a treatment or a cure.

Framing Science

I got an email from an editor last spring, asking if I'd be interested in writing an article on framing for Science & Spirit magazine. Oh yeah, definitely!

Actually, S&S Editor Larry Witham first contacted me several years ago, when he was still a freelancer and I had just started teaching, asking to use some material from my graduate thesis in a book he was writing.

I was happy to oblige...I mean, how often do you get readers for something titled Framing Reality: Shaping the News Coverage of the 1996 Tennessee Debate on Teaching Evolution? (Well, a condensed version was published in the Journal of Media and Religion in 2003, which I thought was seriously cool, but that's it.)

And that would have been the end of it...except in April Science magazine published a provocative article on Framing Science by Matthew C. Nisbet and Chris Mooney. That article prompted a lot of debate and discussion, both on the Science site and on Nisbet's Framing Science blog.

It also prompted Witham, who had just joined S&S as editor, to remember me and ask me to write an article on framing for them. And that's how I ended up spending the week after the end of the spring semester writing a magazine article.

My article, The Power of Framing: Pitching Science in a Mass Media Age, appeared in the July/August issue. I wish I could link to it, but it wasn't one of the articles they chose to post online. Rats! So the best I can do is show you a picture...yes, that's it -- that's my article!

Killing with kindness, musing on memes

I almost skipped it.

I was skimming the Books Update email from the NYT Sunday Book Review when I noticed a review of The Edge of Evolution by Michael J. Behe. His name sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it.

The promo blurb said, "In his second book, Michael Behe turns to genetics to poke holes in Darwin’s theory." That's when I noticed the reviewer: evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

Oh my, I thought, this is gonna be good.

It was. It's one of the kindest but most totally decimating reviews I've ever read. You can read it here.

____________________

One thing I hadn't realized is that Dawkins is the guy who coined the term "meme" to describe (as noted in his Wikipedia entry) "how Darwinian principles might be extended to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena."

One of the most thought-provoking books I've ever read is Thought Contagion, a book about memes and the transmission of ideas by Aaron Lynch. I read it at about the same time I read another influential book, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

Both Lynch and Gladwell consider how ideas, beliefs and even new products or fads are spread through society. That is, they try to explain why some ideas, beliefs or products catch on and become popular, while others -- that seem equally viable -- simply don't.

In Thought Contagion, Lynch identifies several "propagation advantages," which is how he describes the characteristics that tend to encourage people to pass on or "propagate" a specific idea or belief. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell looks at the factors that make ideas or products "sticky" and more likely to catch on with the public.

Both of these books could be helpful to folks in the advertising, marketing and P.R. professions -- to anyone who's in the business of persuading others, for that matter -- as well as to journalists and others who need to better understand the factors that shape society and debates on public issues.