This Is Not About #Adoption: Chapter 1: Home Trip

thisisnotaboutadoption:

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In 2005, I decided to go to Korea to teach English. I had just finished a cold and magical year in Prague, and I didn’t want to return to the States yet. I was figuring something out. Some of my friends in Prague were going on to Poland, or Turkey, or the Stans. I looked farther East. I was…

Matthew Salesses, whose forthcoming novel-in-stories I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying (excerpt here) will publish in February, has started writing a book (on Tumblr) “(not) about adoption.” As Salesses notes in the blog’s first post, his new project “is not to be a memoir, or an op-ed, or a travel narrative, or an answer to anyone …This is to be the story of finding out.”

powells: Fall has arrived: the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting colder… It’s the perfect season to cuddle up in a cozy corner with a book. We can’t wait! And you shouldn’t either… Now through Monday, September 24, enjoy free unlimited shipping on Powells.com when you use coupon code FREEFALL at checkout. No minimum purchase is required, and you can use the code as many times as you like. Do it!
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powells:

Fall has arrived: the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting colder… It’s the perfect season to cuddle up in a cozy corner with a book. We can’t wait!

And you shouldn’t either…

Now through Monday, September 24, enjoy free unlimited shipping on Powells.com when you use coupon code FREEFALL at checkout. No minimum purchase is required, and you can use the code as many times as you like.

Do it!

“In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for ‘perfume’ and ‘coffee,’ their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean ‘chair’ and ‘key,’ this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like ‘a rough day’ are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like ‘The singer had a velvet voice’ and ‘He had leathery hands’ roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like ‘The singer had a pleasing voice’ and ‘He had strong hands,’ did not.” — The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction by Annie Murphy Paul
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“In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for ‘perfume’ and ‘coffee,’ their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean ‘chair’ and ‘key,’ this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like ‘a rough day’ are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like ‘The singer had a velvet voice’ and ‘He had leathery hands’ roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like ‘The singer had a pleasing voice’ and ‘He had strong hands,’ did not.”

— The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction by Annie Murphy Paul