Limes with Orange

It's sometimes interesting to note where ideas come from. My screenplay collaboration is temporarily on hold due to this thing called life, but I'm picking up other story ideas from some unexpected places in the interim.

Last week, Jive Weekly had a story called "Wonder Woman" about a girl named Natalia Demkina who has "X-ray vision." There are no shortage of brief articles about her on the net: Teenage girl 'has X-ray vision' & Supergirl baffles scientists with her vision are just two such examples, but I can't find anything more substantial yet. Though I've become kinda curious about Yoshio Machi, the professor at Tokyo University who specializes in studying apparent superpowers in human beings. I wonder if this is something that can be used for the Superman-themed screenplay we're working on, or if it will inspire a story of its own some day. I won't know until it's percolated in my brain a little bit longer.

The next idea is also from Jive Weekly (in case you're wondering, I read it every week while waiting for my regular Vietnamese sub at Kim Anh). This week, there was a "Say What?!" that caught my eye: "Electrical storms will make a person dream more frequently in sleep." Since many of my story ideas have to do with the power of dreams, this is definitely a fact that I can use. It may just end up being added into the novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo, or it may end up as a full fledged story idea somewhere else. I'm not sure yet. But I like it.

The other two ideas both came from some research I was doing for one of the puzzles on The Stone. While Googling for keywords such as "MRI," "brain" & "cortex," I found an abstract of an article claiming that "susceptibility to migraine attacks appears to be related to brain hyperexcitability." Now, I've always been drawn to story ideas about "illnesses" being "powers," such as schizophrenics actually being religious prophets or brain tumours allowing a person to see or hear things that get "edited out" by most brains, etc. Having frequent migraines myself, those sorts of story ideas related to migraines have great appeal. So while I'm not quite sure how I'll apply the research connecting migraines to brain hyperexcitability, I know it'll be something along those lines.

That same Google search landed me on a page entitled "How the Brain 'Creates' God: The Emerging Science of Neurotheology." I haven't read the full text yet, but I'm intrigued by what I've read so far. Again, I'm not sure where this spark will lead, but I sense a story in there somewhere.

Labels: math and science