Posted inNonfiction, Quotes

‘I Started to Think About the Prospect of Documenting a Culture That I Understood.’

After my internship, my first assignment for National Geographic was a story about the Zinacenteco Indians in the highlands of Chiapas. The subject was interesting but very challenging. As a woman, my access was mostly limited to other women who only spoke the Maya language I was struggling to learn. Once I traversed the language barrier, it […]

Posted inNonfiction, Quotes

‘We Don’t Know What Is Changing in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers.’

A study by neurologists at University College London found that the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for spatial navigation, of a London cabby is significantly larger than those in the rest of the human population—a result of the intense memorization and route-finding undertaken while doing The Knowledge. The study involved taking regular brain […]

Posted inQuotes

Blast Force: The Invisible War on the Brain

After the First World War, family and friends said that sometimes, boys came back from overseas “not right in the head.” Nearly 100 years later, the American military is only just starting to understand the effects of bomb blasts on soldiers’ brains and the prescience of those casual observations. Caroline Alexander reports in National Geographic […]

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