Human Echolocation

After another hiatus from blogging, I’m feeling the need to start back up again—this time for good. It occurred to me that brevity is actually as important as everyone says it is, and that I should be able to comment on something interesting each day with not too much effort.

It’s also time to revisit my reason for starting this blog in the first place. Online forums tend to evolve regardless of whether or not the creator decides that a shift in tone or motive is about to take place; sometimes only a very a nimble thread links consecutive thoughts or posts. At this point, though, I’m wondering if my interests are becoming so varied that it’s obvious I’m about to venture far from the epicenter of the original goal. As a production assistant for NOVA, I’m becoming more attuned to the science-y side of myself (I was a physics major too, after all)—but I still view everything in a way that’s pretty humanities-driven.

I want to widen the scope of what I write about on this blog. Why, then, am I still drawn to articles like this one [via NPR] when I search for topics to write on? Human echolocation… I guess it’s because taking a physical, “objective” phenomenon (echolocation in bats) and making it somehow, in some way applicable to our subjective experience and our daily lives, is really why I embrace the connections between science and the humanities. What are the patterns and the cultural myths behind (not about) science? In other words, what buoys science? How can something as basic as frequency in Hertz become a method of understanding our world subjectively as well as objectively? How can science and the humanities/arts come together to merge fact and fiction? How does a novel or a piece of music sometimes reveal more about “science” than a research paper might? And last, how can the things we learn about the world make us feel better equipped to handle our lives with richness and with vitality? How can science itself be a vehicle for human echolocation?

I still really have no clue what I’m talking about, and it’s probably apparent. All I know is that I want to start connecting science and perception and subjectivity and literature and the arts in a way that’s different from what other people do. And I want to comment on societal happenings and to engage with other writers and to continue to become more articulate.