I'm thinking of the organization of the new blog (and writing a whole lot… I promise the posts will become much more frequent in the coming weeks). Now that the blog is going to be so much more broad in terms of its topics, I feel a little wiggy about how open-ended that leaves things. So… I'm thinking I need to be a little more structured about the TYPE of posts, if the CONTENT will be so far-ranging. Here's my first attempt at thinking about the organization of the week's posts. Of course, this may completely change as we get going here, but your thoughts are, as always, very welcome.

I'd like to start off with one theme every week. Many themes will be far too large to keep to just a week, but we can always return to them later or go for a few weeks on any single topic (for example, I can imagine that discipline could be a HUGE topic that would require more than a week and maybe needs to be organized by ages and so on). This Monday, I'll "introduce" you to my partner in crime who will be regularly contributing to the blog. But after the preliminary 2 weeks or so, here's what I'm thinking:

Monday: Theme introduction with a substantive post and some links to research (led hopefully by a reader's question, but I suspect at first, we'll call for specific questions about the theme that we can subsequently answer throughout the week).

Tuesday: Readers' questions about the theme addressed and a call for commenters' perspectives

Wednesday: Second substantive post about theme

Thursday: Um… not sure. We'll keep this open.

Friday: Link love. (There's always so many COOL sites I come across or great articles that I read online and I'd love to be able to share those with you. Since Friday is notoriously a slow-read day for many people, the links will allow people to visit the site on Friday or over the weekend and read more about whatever the theme of the week was. I'd like to include links to substantive articles, but also light-hearted posts by other writers, some videos, jokes, pictures and whatever else just seems to connect to what we're talking about).

So… here goes. The first Friday Link Love. Here are some cool articles I've been reading which are either directly or at least tangentially related to brain plasticity:

• Here's a fascinating summary of a study published in Science that hints at new discoveries that will allow us to understand how new memories are formed (and what else is memory if it's not about  about "learning" after all?); how the brain is plastic enough to incorporate new stuff all the time, but all the while maintains some level of stability (so you remember who you are from day to day).
• And here's the abstract (summary) of an article in Psychological Science about early language acquisition and how the brain "holds on" to these experiences, even when we're not aware of it. EVEN when we don't use the language anymore, as long as we learned it early in life, we still retain traces of those memories. SO cool (although not directly about plasticity as much as "stability").
• Lastly, I leave you with two opposing pictures of the brain — one scientific and one more like how I'm feeling now, as the work-week comes to a crashing halt…

Thoughts, comments, reactions, criticisms, complaints or whatever else you've got, always welcome. Happy weekend, all.