The question I was trying to answer.was: Could optogenetics be used to identify the neural mechanisms involved in psychiatric illnesses where there are issues with reward seeking, like in depression, where there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure, or drug addiction, where there is not enough? This is not the first time her mother has succumbed, so memories of the first time return and the events that lead up to the disappointment(s) that became too much. The narrative moves back and forth in time, in the present she works in a lab, while at home her mother stays in bed all day. And yet I had to try and understand, to extrapolate from that limited understanding in order to apply it to those of us who made up the species Homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom. To know that if only I could understand this little organ inside this one tiny mouse, that understanding still wouldn't speak to the intricacy of the comparable organ inside my own head. In other words, the tendency towards addiction or depression. Gifty is a sixth year PhD student studying neuroscience, observing mice in order to better understand the role of the brain and neural circuitry in relation to the desire for and restraint of reward-seeking behaviour. But there was no war in my mother's stories, and if there was hunger it was of a different kind, the simple hunger of those who had been fed one thing but wanted another.
And if our story couldn't be a fairy tale, then I was willing to accept a tale like the kind I saw on television, back when the only images I saw of Africa were those of people stricken by warfare and famine.
I wanted her stories to about her life in Ghana with my father to be filled with all the kings and queens and curses that might explain why my father wasn't around in terms far grander and more elegant than the simple story I knew.
Though they leave their country behind, something of remains in them, and though they are determined to ascend in their new country, it comes at a price. In a sense that too is at the heart of Transcendent Kingdom, a family from Ghana immigrate to the US, the mother, the father (who the narrator the only one of the family born in the US, refers to as Chin Chin man), and their son Nana. However it was exactly the kind of book I love, thought provoking, taking the reader outside of their own culture but showing how the threads of an earlier culture have influenced where they are today. Homegoing was my One Outstanding read of 2017, and it was a book I initially avoided as it was the subject of much hype and expectation, which can cloud our ability to discern.
0 kommentar(er)
