Biology 103 Book Commentary

            The book Born on a Blue Day, by Daniel Tammet is the autobiography of a man afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome, an autistic spectrum disorder.  Daniel Tammet is best known for his savant abilities in the field of mathematics.   His most famous feat was his memorization of pi to more than 22,000 digits.  One of the main factors allowing Daniel Tammet amazing mathematical skills is his ability to synesthetically “see” numbers and to visualize mathematical equations in ways that the majority of the population can only imagine.

“Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! Sing how it bloomed two and a half centuries ago on the slopes of mount Olympus…Sing how it passed down through nine generations, gathering invisibly within the polluted pool of the Stephanides family. And sing how Providence … sent the gene flying again…” (p 4).

Book commentary

Kee Hyun (Andy) Kim              

I Am Not Myself

Listening to Prozac by Peter D. Kramer

The Mystery Surrounding Our Layers of Skin

Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison’s book An Unquiet Mindprovided many examples of biological concepts that we discussed throughout thecourse in the context of an individual’s life.  Due to the intricacies of her condition and her acuteawareness of death, her story embodies, perhaps to an extreme, the complexitiesof what it is to be fully human and not just a creature of chemical processesmoving through life.

Wider Than the Sky

        This semester I read the book Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness by Gerald M.

Edelman, a writer who is also a Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist. This book explores the ideas of

consciousness—what it is, how it works and even whether consciousness actually exists. In the words of the

author, consciousness contains, “Many disparate elements—sensations, perceptions, images, memories

thoughts, emotions, aches, pains, vague feelings and so on. Looked at from the inside, consciousness seems

continually to change, yet at each moment it is all of piece—what I have called ‘the remembered

I have always been interested in language. When I was small, I discovered my love of etymology through vocabulary tests. I realized that I remembered words much more easily if I knew how these words were “built”, so to speak. For instance, the word “decimate” was much easier to memorize when I knew that it basically meant “to kill one in ten” in Latin. Eventually, my love for language grew; so much, that I am probably going to major in one, if not two foreign languages here at Bryn Mawr. So it was very fortunate for me when Professor Grobstein recommended that I

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos, Vonnegut acts as a first-person narrator who tells a story

of the evolution of people from the 20th to the 21st century. Vonnegut’s evolutionary story

mocks the human race, and more specifically the human brain and its intellectual in creating

technological machinery that is almost as useless as the brain.