{"id":169959,"date":"2023-08-18T15:24:01","date_gmt":"2023-08-18T20:24:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/the-molecular-weight-of-loneliness-on-writing-fiction-influenced-by-neuroscience"},"modified":"2023-08-18T15:24:01","modified_gmt":"2023-08-18T20:24:01","slug":"the-molecular-weight-of-loneliness-on-writing-fiction-influenced-by-neuroscience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/the-molecular-weight-of-loneliness-on-writing-fiction-influenced-by-neuroscience","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe molecular weight of loneliness\u201d: On Writing Fiction Influenced by Neuroscience"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-molecular-weight-of-loneliness-on-writing-fiction-influenced-by-neuroscience.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019d heard that fear of the dark is a protein, Scotophobin A, which can be isolated from the brains of rats. My Chemistry teacher told us that 1-hexanol smelled like cut grass. I watched her draw it once, on the whiteboard. A colorless liquid that, I imagined, smelled like memory, summer term, sports day, an army of ants cresting the summit of a picnic blanket, damp loam after rain.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019d hoped that studying neuroscience would teach me all about things like that. I imagined watching sunlight refract through a conical flask, some clear liquid roiling inside. \u201cFear of abandonment is a sequence of seventeen peptides,\u201d our lecturer might say, \u201cisolated from the muscles of the heartbroken.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLook here,\u201d he would say, pointing to another vial. \u201cWe can synthesize these things in a lab now. This one is awe.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019d heard that fear of the dark is a protein, Scotophobin A, which can be isolated from the brains of rats. My Chemistry teacher told us that 1-hexanol smelled like cut grass. I watched her draw it once, on the whiteboard. A colorless liquid that, I imagined, smelled like memory, summer term, sports day, an [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}