Tara Maya's Tales

  Last week, I discussed some fascinating questions regarding Empathy, Fiction and Imagination .  Those essays were theoretical, not empirical. I thought it would be interesting to see if there is any empirical evidence that reading fiction increases one's empathy or kindness. (What the lab shrinks like to call "prosocial behavior," as opposed to "anti-social behavior.")  I found a plethora of evidence that it does. Am I surprised? Not at all. I could have guessed as much based on the reading habits (or lack) of people I know. But of course, anecdotes aren't scientific, even if they do provide for pretty good "rules of thumb." Science reported in 2013 on a study done by Kidd and Castano that reading fiction increases one's ability to " comprehend that other people hold beliefs and desires and that these may differ from one's own beliefs and desires." In other words, reading fiction improves your "theory of mind": your i...

  Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Where does empathy come from? How did empathy evolve? Why can we "feel" for fictional characters? These are some of the questions explored in a collection of papers on Empathy, Fiction, and Imagination . Many people associate empathy with being social, yet it can't be that simple. Ants, bees, and termites are so social we had to coin a special term for it: eusocial . Yet it is not empathy that drives their sociality, but pheromones, castes, and a simple set of rules that each ant follows depending on its birth order and age in the colony. Nonetheless, most "theories of mind" to explain empathy assume that we evolved the ability to model each other's minds because we need to understand each other. We have "mirror" neurons which enable us to copy each other.  In most models of empathy, it is assumed that empathy evolved to facilitate reciprocal altruism. Direct Perception Theor...

  Growing up I always wished there were more Fantasy movies. Lately, I've ammended the wish: what I want is more GOOD Fantasy movies. There have been some truly awful Fantasy movies lately, which made the world a worse place. I don't review those because I prefer to focus on what's done right than what's done wrong. Having been burned, I was cautious about Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. I could see it was "irreverent and witty" but sometimes that translates into "mocking the fans and not taking the story seriously." I'm happy to say that Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was funny, yet still took the source material seriously. My sons and I watched the movie at home so we could pour over our D&D manuals as we watched, finding the character types and monster types and spells referenced in the movie. There were plenty--this was fan service done right.  You can still enjoy this even if you are a D&D fan! Given all the...

  My previous post on the Birthgap focused on (potential) mothers, but these issues bother (potential) fathers as well.  I think this post, " Invisible Hands: The Anxiety of the Childless," captures the conflict between the urge to wait until things are "stable" before having children, and the creeping anxiety that you could wait... until it's too late. In the dark and heat of the present moment, all of this might seem obscure. But take a breath, and it becomes quite clear. To put it simply, for some years now, I believe I have been suffering from the anxiety that I might never have children. Of course, this anxiety is not the brute, biological force of the female. Rather, it is the nervous and blithering practical rationalism of the male. Which for me, a nervous and blithering poetical songwriter, is often expressed in lyrical thoughts. If I were to put an image to this feeling, the first that comes to mind is apposite but crude: it is the image of a baby, st...

  Omigud! ChatGPT is in love with me! General AI is here! Robots are rebelling and computers are taking over the world! Whoah, partner, hold on, warns these dudes. Not so fast. ChatGPT ain't even as smart as my horse, never mind as the town Sheriff. (Gratuitous and irrelevant plug: you can read a paranormal romance about a small town Sheriff right here.) There are many language models out there that can process language just as well (seemingly) as humans do. I've spoken about them before and even wrote a book about how to use them in creative writing. They're called Large Language Models (LLMs) and they're getting better and better every day. Some examples include GPT-3, BLOOM, LaMDA, and OPT. These models use a lot of data to understand language and can do things like answer questions or generate text. While LLMs are sometimes grouped together, each model is unique and may use additional methods to alter its results. Some researchers refer to LLMs as "foundational...

  A novel is not a poem. But in a sense, a novel is a poem, if a poem could be as long as a book, or even as long as a series of books.  All of the old books, of course, began as poems. But that was in the days when every poem was a song and many people didn’t take in the story with eyes, but with ears and tongues. The Shanamah , a Persian epic I wrote about for my senior thesis in history, for my BA, was nine volumes of poetry. I am sorry to say I was not able to read it in the original Persian. I read a turn of the 20th century translation in English couplets. Reading nine volumes of couplets becomes wearisome, which is why novels are not written in couplets. Of course, most contemporary poets, sneer at something so prosaic as a rhyme in a poem. Rhymes are out of fashion. Perhaps poems have become envious of novels, with the spacious longitude and latitude of their prose.  But I occasionally become envious of the old poets, those who rhymed, and occasionally I sneak rhy...

“A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house.  You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished.  You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.” ―  Alice Munro,  Selected Stories Is a story a road or a house?  I love this quote by Alice Munro, and the languid, cozy imagery of a story full of rooms and windows, where you can visit or even live. That doesn't mean I agree with it completely. Some stories--perhaps most storie...

   First, the good news. In a recent study titled "Women's empowerment and fertility: A review of the literature," Ushma D. Upadhyay and colleagues examined the relationship between women's empowerment and fertility. With women's empowerment becoming a focal point for development efforts worldwide, the researchers conducted a critical assessment of the existing evidence on this topic. The review analyzed 60 studies, with the majority of them (n=35) conducted in South Asia and using household decision-making as a measure of empowerment (n=37). The results showed that the majority of the studies found when women are embowered they have fewer children with longer spacing between births, and lower rates of unintended pregnancy.  The findings suggest that when women have more decision-making power in their households, it has a strong impact on the number of children born.  This underscores the importance of empowering women and ensuring that they have access to the res...

When I reach the editing stage of my wip (work in progress) I use a handy little check-list, which I made in Excel (but would work in any program or paper with columns or boxes) with seven stages of editing. For those of you who have found typos in my books, I know this astounds you. As I've explained, pixies are entirely to blame for any typos that leap back into my books after editing! Believe me, if you think there are mistakes after editing, just imagine how many mistakes there are BEFORE editing! As I wring my wip through each round of edits, I save an entirely new draft, appropriately labeled in a folder on my desktop. That way, if a round of edits somehow screws up my manuscript, I can always take a step back without losing everything. Save multiple copies of your manuscript. Keep older versions. Rename new versions. You can save yourself a world of agony, because, believe me, accidents happen. Step One: First read. (Basic Editing) I often start my wips with a draft whi...