Jonathon Friesen – Another example of victorious development of human abilities and potential by a courageous man.
Jerk, California,the story of teenager Sam Carrier was inspired by
Jonathon Friesen's own diagnosis with Tourette Syndrome, a disorder both he and his fictional character share.
As a first-time author, Friesen has found success by telling stories about something he knows.This was something he learned by writing his first two books, which were never purchased by a publisher.
“I was writing stories I thought other people would like,” said Friesen. “I was not writing things that were near and dear to me.”
But after he started writing “Jerk, California” everything changed, he said, because of his personal connection to the story.
“This is something I know, I can feel,” he said.
The book was released in September 2008 marking the debut of a teacher, turned full-time author.
Friesen taught for seven years in the Anoka-Hennepin School District – six of them in fifth-grade at Morris Bye Elementary School in Coon Rapids during the 1990s.
But while in the classroom he found himself jotting down anecdotes and found himself more and more being drawn to writing.
“I decided there might be other opportunities for teaching, but maybe not for writing,” he said.
With his wife’s blessing, Friesen quit teaching cold turkey in 1997.
Father of three, the Friesen house is a busy one.
After his departure from teaching the family moved to a 10-acre hobby farm near Mora.
The kids are home schooled by his wife Wendy, there are chickens to be fed and a horse is scheduled to arrive next year.
Wendy Friesen is no stranger to the county, growing up in rural Ramsey. But for Friesen, who calls himself a “city kid” from New Hope, it has been an adjustment.
Taking the leap from teacher to writer was a gutsy one – Friesen was the sole income earner for his family. This certainly served as an incentive to get a book deal.
And it worked.
It only took two chapters before Friesen’s Atlanta-based agent was able to sell it to Penguin Books.
It took two years to write those first two chapters and two months to finish story.
A CONVERSATION WITH JONATHAN FRIESEN:
Q: Your biography mentions that, like Sam/Jack from the book JERK, CALIFORNIA, you also have Tourette Syndrome. How much of Sam's/Jack's story is your own? What is your personal history with the disease? At what age did symptoms first appear? How did that affect you growing up?
A: Sam's story is completely fictitious, but his internal struggle with Tourette Syndrome mirrors my own quite closely. He is much more honest with himself than I was—I had a hard time accepting the fact that I couldn't stop my movements. Somewhere, I had picked up the idea that I should be able to stop them. My symptoms first appeared when I was five. Eye blinks and shoulder jumps. Early on, those movements didn't affect me much. My peers didn't make a big deal of them. But in junior high, those tics (and my dishonesty about them) began affecting relationships. By high school, school was a lonely place. But again, my attitude about TS, and not the syndrome itself, deserves a fair amount of credit for that.
Tics can be startling and upsetting for people with Tourette, as well as for their family members and others. But scientists now have a much better idea of what is amiss in the brains of people with Tourette syndrome. Their findings point to a combination of genetic and environmental factors: Tourette runs in families, and some cases may be influenced by damaging events in the womb.
Scientists made an important discovery in 2005 when they found alterations on a specific gene that appeared consistently in a small subset of people with Tourette. They knew the disorder could be inherited, but previous work had failed to pinpoint specific genes. In the 2005 finding, they noticed that the suspect gene controlled the early development of areas of the brain associated with Tourette such as the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia, which have several components that play an important role in coordinating movement. Normally, this gene aids the growth of nerve cells and allows for normal patterns of communication among them.
Researchers have also learned much by being able to take pictures of the living brain. Imaging studies have shown that the size of a child's caudate nucleus, a tail-shaped section of the basal ganglia that plays a role in the control of voluntary movement and more complex behavior, may be related to the severity of their symptoms later in life. In up to two-thirds of Tourette cases, tics peak in the early teens. Often, they fade by the time a person turns 20. Cases that persist into adulthood may be more severe: milder tics accompanied by bouts of wrist-biting or long-winded shouting of inappropriate words or phrases.
These and other studies have led researchers to speculate that Tourette syndrome is a disorder of systems in the brain that shape patterns of learning and habit-forming. This is supported by findings indicating that certain kinds of learning are impaired in people with Tourette syndrome. And the ability of certain drugs to stop tics suggests they occur when nerve cells in a part of the basal ganglia that regulates behavioral patterns, called the striatum, are flooded with the chemical dopamine. Another idea is that activity in certain brain circuits is disturbed, perhaps when parts of the basal ganglia, such as the striatum and the globus pallidus (see illustration), do not develop correctly early in life. Connections may strengthen with age, due in part to the growth of areas of the brain cell that transmit signals from cell to cell. As a result, tics and other Tourette behaviors fade.
Decades of research have helped clarify the role of the basal ganglia in Tourette syndrome. The basal ganglia play a critical role in initiating and regulating learned patterns of movements. The striatum, which consists of the caudate nucleus, the putamen, and the accumbens nucleus, receives information from the sensory cortex and processes signals that are then sent to areas of the cortex that coordinate movement. The striatum and the globus pallidus together make up the basal ganglia.
The striatum, the region primarily involved in processing information that enters the basal ganglia from other brain areas. This region contains the vast majority of the brain's neurochemical dopamine. Dopamine is released into the striatum by activity of cells that reside in a part of the midbrain known as the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc). A better understanding of the normal functioning of cells in the striatum (see picture below) and in the SNc will lead the way to better treatments for disorders of the basal ganglia.
A spiny projection neuron in the mammalian striatum, filled intracellularly with biocytin.
The basal ganglia in sensorimotor and cognitive functions based on a growing body of behavioural, anatomical, physiological, and neurochemical evidence accumulated over the last decades. This model proposes that the body and its surrounding environment are represented in the striatum in a fragmented and repeated way, like a mosaic consisting of the fragmented images of broken mirrors. Each fragment forms a functional unit representing articulated parts of the body with motion properties, objects of the environment which the subject can approach or manipulate, and locations the subject can move to. These units integrate the sensory properties and movements related to them. The repeated and widespread distribution of such units amplifies the combinatorial power of the associations among them. These associations depend on the phasic release of dopamine in the striatum triggered by the saliency of stimuli and will be reinforced by the rewarding consequences of the actions related to them. Dopamine permits synaptic plasticity in the corticostriatal synapses. The striatal units encoding the same stimulus/action send convergent projections to the internal segment of the globus pallidus (GPi) and to the substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNr) that stimulate or hold the action through a thalamus-frontal cortex pathway. According to this model, this is how the basal ganglia select actions based on environmental stimuli and store adaptive associations as nondeclarative memories such as motor skills, habits, and memories formed by Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning.
The basal ganglia, a group of interconnected brain areas located deep in the cerebral cortex, have proved to be at work in learning, the formation of good and bad habits, and some psychiatric and addictive disorders.Scientists have found that the neurotransmitter dopamine, already linked to the basal ganglia in movement disorders, also is important in learning via reward and punishment, as well as in disorders including schizophrenia and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. This new understanding of how the basal ganglia work has revealed possible avenues for treatment of these and other disorders.
Basal Ganglia Routine Working Memory Adventure
1 | Play familiar music or none at all | 1 | Select new music to enhance work |
2 | Sit more than move | 2 | Park away from doors – climb stairs |
3 | Discuss work related problems | 3 | Propose change to solve a problem |
4 | Read daily paper | 4 | Read an unfamiliar trade magazine |
5 | Dress in conventional ways | 5 | Wear new colors and styles |
6 | Take advantage of nature after work | 6 | Retrofit workspace as nature friendly |
7 | Enjoy lunch with friends | 7 | Invite person of other culture to lunch |
8 | Go with your strengths | 8 | Develop a weaker intelligence |
Genuine Gallo-Roman caliga that is on display at the French National Archaeological Museum. Caligae are a type of sandal worn by Roman soldiers.
Roman soldiers wore sandals with soles thickly studded with nails to protect their feet from the "landmines" of that time, concealed sharpened sticks on the ground.
Joice Meyer: Making the choice for peace
Do I live my life in a state where thankfulness is flooding, super-abundant, spilling or bubbling over -- or is it barely a trickle? Are there enough reasons to live a life of thankfulness or do the trials and frustrations of my daily walk crowd out the joys and the thankfulness? Do I take things for granted and just forget to be truly thankful? 
