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Jason Castro Identity

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Questions Raised By Sci-Fi/Fantasy Text Essay In “Where Does identity Come From?” by Jason Castro and “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed” by Ray Bradbury, both raise the question about whether or not your life would be different on if a few things were changed and your life were started over again. On the other hand there is the possibility that it is destiny for all of the events of the universes to come to pass no matter what the circumstances are and despite those changes the same events will still happen. In both passage they show a change in the normal lives of species in order to see if their lives will be different. Castro demonstrates this where he says, “In their experiment, Freund and her colleagues housed 40 genetically identical …show more content…

Castro shows this where he says, “Initially, the mice were fairly uniform in their roaming entropy. As the weeks progressed, however, the population started to diverge, with some mice being markedly more exploratory than others. If we take the tendency to explore as a kind of crude trait, then this is one trait that elaborates over time, in a way that isn’t strictly determined by genes or available resources.” Bradbury shows this by stating, “He put out his sun-browned hand and gave a small cry. He touched the blossoms and picked them up. He turned them, he touched them again and again. Then he shouted for his wife. …“Do you see? They’re different. They’ve changed! They’re not peach blossoms any more!” “Look all right to me,” she said. “They’re not. They’re wrong! I can’t tell how. An extra petal, a leaf, something, the color, the smell!” In these passage the authors show the beginning signs of the differences in the lives of the species that aren't in the regular lives of the others. This is deliberately put into the stories in order to foreshadow the coming events of the future, and that the question raised will be …show more content…

These changes have a greater impact on the subjects and change them and their lives in multiple ways. Castro demonstrates this where he says, “The most interesting part of the study, however, came when the researchers examined the brain changes that paralleled the changes in exploratory behavior. Before ending the experiment, the mice were injected with a compound that’s selectively incorporated into dividing cells, and hence labels adult-born neurons. While most neurons are fashioned during early development, there are a handful of well-studied brain areas in which new neurons are continuously produced even in adulthood. Strikingly, the mice which were the “wanderers” at the end of the study were also those who experienced the greatest proliferation of adult-born neurons. While the usual caution of correlation not implying causation applies here, the result is still intriguing. Even after the genetic die are cast at conception, and after the bulk of the neural scaffolding is laid down in early life, the brain maintains a trickle of raw potential through its ability to grow a limited number of new neurons. The authors conjecture that these neurons are involved in tailoring and tuning our behaviors, applying context-specific corrections and adjustments to the more hard-coded aspects of our behavior. In their words,

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