Stories of Sickness

Are evolutionary hypotheses for motion sickness "just-so" stories?

Vertebrates have evolved rapidly conditionable nausea and vomiting reflexes mediated by gut and brainstem receptors, clearly as a defense against neurotoxin ingestion. In 1977 Treisman proposed that sensory orientation linkages to emetic centers evolved for the same reason, and that motion sickness was an accidental byproduct. It was an "adaptationist" explanation for motion sickness, since it ...

Telling stories about stories.

I want to tell you a story. This is a story about stories. As in any good story, we’re going to wander down a few storied paths. One of the paths leads back to 3 award-winning stories.* Remarkable stories by remarkable physicians who take seriously the power of stories—who have written powerful stories. Another path is about the importance of stories for human health and well-being from the per...

Micro Stories and Mega Stories

Technology, especially multimedia technology, is changing the way we tell stories. We are all familiar with letters, articles, and books, but new Internet technology has led to two novel forms of storytelling that we call micro stories and mega stories. Micro stories are the short bits of text and images that we use to tell our friends about our daily life, what we had for lunch, and the funny ...

Thermal Stability of African Horse Sickness Virus

Agent Stories: Authoring Computational Cinematic Stories

Writers of stories for both print and screen have a deeply ingrained tendency to construct stories for an audience to experience the finished work in a fixed linear fashion. Although there are starting to be some examples of fixed non-linear multimedia works, viewing a cinematic story must always be linear, as a linear sequence of pictures and sounds conveying some meaning. However, it should b...