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'Your Brain on Fiction' By: Gina Dalfonzo|Published: March 23, 2012 5:00 PM
" Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life."
Read more: Annie Murphy Paul, New York Times |
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Comments:
Aha, aha. Managed to stimulate one brain. (Or was it the coffee?)
Anyway, that’s one reason, my dear friend, that I put my header in the form of a question. I’m wondering just how long before this kind of scenario becomes non-fiction.
Thank you, Gina. I will take this posting as a subconsciously overt invitation for me to stimulate some brains.
Not that I needed an invitation, you understand. But it does lend respectability to my otherwise shameless use of blogspace for occasional forays into fiction. Which, I’m quick to add, I can blame – make that “credit” – on one of BreakPoint’s own for what might otherwise seem pure audacity on my part. I refer you here: http://www.breakpoint.org/features-columns/renews/entry/30/19033
(Kim’s comment time-stamped November 16, 2011 8:31 AM). So to the cynical I reply (quoting my good friend, LeeQuod): “neener neener”.
Enough by way of intro. Let the show begin.
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“Party Animals”
STATE COUNSEL: Your Honor, if it please the Court, counsel intends to argue that the party of the Other Side should be disenfranchised on the grounds that it is unconstitutional.
JUDGE: You understand, don’t you, counsel, that the party of the Other Side won the election by a landslide?
STATE COUNSEL: Yes, Your Honor. But we submit that those results should be ruled null and void under US constitutional law.
JUDGE: What is the specific charge?
STATE COUNSEL: That the party platform of the Other Side is religiously based and stands in violation of the hallowed doctrine, Separation of Church and State.
JUDGE: The court will hear the evidence.
STATE COUNSEL: If it please Your Honor, counsel directs attention to Exhibit Number One which enumerates positions held by the party of the Other Side as documented in their own charter.
Number 1: Freedom of conscience. The party of the Other Side maintains there are “inalienable rights” such as freedom of conscience that supersede the laws of the State.
JUDGE: The court is aware. That is in the Declaration of Independence.
STATE COUNSEL: But the party of the Other Side further maintains that those rights are endowed by a Creator, which is to say by God. Counsel would note that, with all due respect to the Declaration that is a religious basis.
JUDGE: Proceed.
STATE COUNSEL: Number 2: Anti-abortion, which the party of the Other Side euphemistically calls “pro-life”.
JUDGE: The charge?
STATE COUNSEL: Again, your Honor, to allege that the unborn is a “creation” rather than a natural biological phenomenon which may or may not eventuate in a human being pits faith against science and flouts law in the name of religion.
JUDGE: Proceed.
STATE COUNSEL: Number 3: Anti-infanticide and anti-euthanasia. The party of the Other Side calls even clearly advisable instances of these practices, both of which have been capably defended in academe, “murder”. But their arguments are based on “thou shalt not kill”, a religious tenet from the Ten Commandments in the Bible.
DEFENSE: Your Honor?
JUDGE: Counsel for the defense may approach the bench.
DEFENSE: All positions held by the party of the Other Side have their foundation in the Declaration of Independence, as Your Honor has noted.
STATE COUNSEL: Objection! The defense counsel is attempting legal subterfuge.
JUDGE: Sustained. The Court is satisfied – and delighted – to render judgment without deliberation (which, after all, would be burdensome to the taxpayer, would it not?). To wit: the party of the Other Side, established as it is upon principles rooted not in American jurisprudence, but Judeo-Christian principles, is hereby declared unconstitutional. The results of the election are rendered null and void in law.
DEFENSE: But Your Honor, you said yourself, the principles of our party are consonant with the Declaration of Independence!
JUDGE: If so then clearly the Declaration of Independence is unconstitutional. Court adjourned. Oh, and the Clerk will strike the remark about the Court being “delighted”. Some forms of frank speech simply are not appropriate here.