"Same cells. A different question. And a different answer." - Ken Woodward
"Same cells. A different question. And a different answer.” - Ken Woodward
A friend told me about a question they were asked: What is your wake? My body jolted before I had a single thought. Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being had already broken that word open for me: the track behind a ship, the watch kept over the dead, coming up out of sleep. I couldn’t hear it as one thing anymore.
That sent me looking at other words I treat as single things, and I landed on one I use every day: brain. In September, a Stanford team published a study in Nature Neuroscience finding that the brain begins as two separate groups of cells, one building the front and one building the back. One organ, two beginnings. Their work points to how a familiar word and a long-held assumption can shape what we expect to find, and how a different question opened the answer.
From there I go back to the streets of Washington, D.C., and the word I wore on my chest for two years: Brown. Strangers kept stopping me to ask who it included, and each brought a meaning I hadn’t put there. Then back to my early twenties, standing lookout on a submarine in the Caribbean, watching a glowing green wake trail behind us. A memory that hasn’t changed, but no longer stands alone.
This episode is about the words we stop opening, and what we stop noticing because we already have a name for it. What word have I been letting stay one thing?
This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com.
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Episode Notes
00:00 Different Question And A Different Answer
00:42 Welcome To Curated Questions
02:02 Headlines Flatten The Finding
02:27 Sharpe And Wake
03:03 One Word Splinters
03:21 Opening The Word Brain
04:02 Brain As One Origin
04:51 The Old Embryology Model
05:33 Words Set Expectations
06:26 Mouse Embryos Two Pools
07:06 Tracking Cells To Birth
07:27 Stem Cell Switch Test
08:04 An Ancient Evolutionary Split
08:31 Composite Organ Not Two
09:19 Front And Back Jobs
09:40 Why Hindbrain Was Hard
10:07 New Recipe For Hindbrain
11:15 Different Question Different Answer
11:56 Headlines Flatten The Finding
12:38 Brown Lives Matter Sign
13:11 Who Counts As Brown
15:27 Brown As A Living Question
17:01 Submarine Watch And Wake
18:50 Caribbean Beauty And History
19:53 Returning To The Question
20:58 Final Three Hidden Questions