June 13th, 2011

every person creates his own mental fortress and apprehends the outside world through digital arrow-slits

Slate explores the potential brain-damper that is the ever more personalized internet. Is the internet becoming a place where we get just the things we are looking for, and are never confronted with things we didn’t expect to find or think about?

The first conversation I ever had about the Internet was in 1993 with Robert Wright, who was then a colleague at the New Republic. This “Net” thing was going to be a big deal, I remember Bob telling me, but it could create a few problems. One was that it was going to empower crazies, since geographically diffuse nut jobs of all sorts would be able to find each other online. Another was that it could hurt democratic culture by encouraging narrow-minded folk to burrow deeper into their holes. Wright spelled out those concerns in an article that stands as a model of prescience and a delightful time-capsule. (“People who ‘post’ on the Net’s many different bulletin boards—its ‘newsgroups’—know that their words can be seen from just about any chunk of inhabited turf on this planet.”)

Eighteen years later, our lingo has evolved, but the worries haven’t changed much. Wright’s first concern, about digital technology empowering terrorists and fanatics, has clearly been borne out. His second, about the Internet fostering mental rabbit warrens, remains an open issue. In his new book, The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser, the former director of the liberal activist group Moveon.org, argues that an informational dystopia is finally arriving. Thanks to advances in personalization, we are all getting more of what we like and agree with, and less that challenges our beliefs. Pariser sees these tools undermining civic discourse. “The filter bubble pushes us in the opposite direction,” he writes. “It creates the impression that our narrow self-interest is all that exists.” The loss of an informational commons, he frets, is making us closed-minded, less intellectually adventurous, and more vulnerable to propaganda and manipulation. Pariser’s qualms echo those expressed by Nicholas Negroponte and Cass Sunstein,who have warned about the Web turning into everybody’s narcissistic “Daily Me” feed.

Read further at Slate.

June 6th, 2011

imaginary translation (ii)

Previously I posted a video postcard of our first public ‘imaginary translation’ experiment, with no explanation. Now Giacomo Blume and I have created a longer, more explanatory video (above).

The video starts out silent and is best viewed full screen.

Imaginary Translation on vimeo

May 26th, 2011

the polyphonic truth

Michail Bakhtin’s ideas on the individual, via wiki:

First, is the concept of the unfinalizable self: individual people cannot be finalized, completely understood, known, or labeled. Though it is possible to understand people and to treat them as if they are completely known, Bakhtin’s conception of unfinalizability respects the possibility that a person can change, and that a person is never fully revealed or fully known in the world. Readers may find that this conception reflects the idea of the “soul”; Bakhtin had strong roots in Christianity and in the Neo-Kantian school led by Hermann Cohen, both of which emphasized the importance of an individual’s potentially infinite capability, worth, and the hidden soul.

Second, is the idea of the relationship between the self and others, or other groups. According to Bakhtin, every person is influenced by others in an inescapably intertwined way, and consequently no voice can be said to be isolated. In an interview, Bakhtin once explained that,

In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others. ~New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993.

As such, Bakhtin’s philosophy greatly respected the influences of others on the self, not merely in terms of how a person comes to be, but also in how a person thinks and how a person sees him- or herself truthfully.

Third, Bakhtin found in Dostoevsky’s work a true representation of “polyphony”, that is, many voices. Each character in Dostoevsky’s work represents a voice that speaks for an individual self, distinct from others. This idea of polyphony is related to the concepts of unfinalizability and self-and-others, since it is the unfinalizability of individuals that creates true polyphony.

Bakhtin briefly outlined the polyphonic concept of truth. He criticized the assumption that, if two people disagree, at least one of them must be in error. He challenged philosophers for whom plurality of minds is accidental and superfluous. For Bakhtin, truth is not a statement, a sentence or a phrase. Instead, truth is a number of mutually addressed, albeit contradictory and logically inconsistent, statements. Truth needs a multitude of carrying voices. It cannot be held within a single mind, it also cannot be expressed by “a single mouth”. The polyphonic truth requires many simultaneous voices. Bakhtin does not mean to say that many voices carry partial truths that complement each other. A number of different voices do not make the truth if simply “averaged” or “synthesized”. It is the fact of mutual addressivity, of engagement, and of commitment to the context of a real-life event, that distinguishes truth from untruth.

When, in subsequent years, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art was translated into English and published in the West, Bakhtin added a chapter on the concept of “carnival” and the book was published with the slightly different title, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. According to Bakhtin, carnival is the context in which distinct individual voices are heard, flourish and interact together. The carnival creates the “threshold” situations where regular conventions are broken or reversed and genuine dialogue becomes possible. The notion of a carnival was Bakhtin’s way of describing Dostoevsky’s polyphonic style: each individual character is strongly defined, and at the same time the reader witnesses the critical influence of each character upon the other. That is to say, the voices of others are heard by each individual, and each inescapably shapes the character of the other.

Thanks Levi, who referred me to Bakhtin in response to the D. H. Lawrence text I posted.

May 24th, 2011

the workings of the yeasty soul

I’ve wanted to share this text for a while, but I couldn’t find it online anywhere. I thought about just quoting the parts I like, but I felt like quoting most of it. So now I’ve typed out the whole text, a chapter out of the book The Use of Imagination by William Walsh (Chatto & Windus, 1959).

Even if you don’t agree with all Lawrence’s ideas (and in the latter part there is admittedly a rather questionable proposition for the realization of his philosophies), you can still even just appreciate the elegance of his expression, his clarity of vision, and the poetry of his words.

The book is a collection of essays exploring what some of the biggest names in literature have to teach us about imagination. The book is written for educators, but the insights are universal. This chapter is on D. H. Lawrence’s insights. The chapter is called The Writer as Teacher…

Read the rest of this entry »

May 23rd, 2011

intelligent communication

Interesting insights into the scope of words as language versus other ways of interacting with meaning and environment. Thanks Esther for the tip.

April 27th, 2011

the sacred

There wasn’t a time when things were any more spiritual than they are now. There wasn’t a time when there were all these gods around us in this spiritual world and now consciousness has evolved so we don’t need that any more. It’s always there. We happen to live in an age that doesn’t reflect it or encourage it or focus it in the way that cultures have done in the past where religion has been dominant. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not there.

(…)

It’s not that the sacred isn’t all around us, but there’s a problem about having the vision to see it. — Bill Viola

April 21st, 2011

lacanian gaze

Wiki: Hieronymus Bosch’s The Conjurer. While other figures observe objects within the painting, the woman in green observes the viewer. The painting thus makes the viewer aware of being on display.

Gaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses some sense of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object. This concept is bound with his theory of the mirror stage, in which a child encountering a mirror realizes that he or she has an external appearance. Lacan suggests that this gaze effect can similarly be produced by any conceivable object such as a chair or a television screen. This is not to say that the object behaves optically as a mirror; instead it means that the awareness of any object can induce an awareness of also being an object.

Wikipedia

Related: Men dream of women

April 21st, 2011

the matrixial borderspace

One of 11 videos on youtube in which artist/psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger talks about her matrixial theory.

April 17th, 2011

perceptions

An animated version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

March 31st, 2011

men dream of women

Men Dream of Women by Jonathan Beaton

I made some audio. It’s available to stream and download on SoundCloud (or above).

March 13th, 2011

an earring-wearing Incredible Hulk on a stationary bike.

The art of memory is credited to the ancient Greek poet Simonides, who was able to perfectly recall the scene in a banquet hall moments before the roof collapsed, simply by reviewing it in his mind’s eye. The “method of loci” assigns distinctive images to anything one wants to remember, placing the images in familiar rooms or buildings. Recalling, then, becomes a matter of traveling through those locations, or “memory palaces,” and noting the images assembled there. This seeming sleight of hand — memorize X in order to remember Y — takes advantage of a simple fact of human cognition: we naturally remember visual images. Take a moment to imagine your own living room; a detailed description of everything in sight is effortless.

Translating your shopping list into something memorable involves choosing good images and good loci — and then concentrating on them. The less banal, the better. Quotidian scenes are forgettable. What snags the cells of our brains are disgusting, bizarre and novel images.

Using a version of these ancient techniques, a past world memory champion named Ben Pridmore was set to prove he had memorized 50,000 digits of pi. (Trumped by a man who recited pi to 83,431 places, Pridmore spent the next six weeks cleaning the images of pi out of his memory palaces.) In joining their ranks, Foer develops various loci, including friends’ houses, his old high school, and Camden Yards. He mentally collects a population of images — often lewd or ridiculous — which he will assign to numbers, playing cards or whatever else he will need to memorize. (Hence his title, which represents the combination of images he uses to remember the four of spades, the king of hearts and the three of diamonds.) In this way, a long string of numbers becomes a farcical tour of fantastical images, distributed in a memory palace. They almost don’t need to be memorized, per se. Once you attend to them, it is hard to forget them. Dom DeLuise hula-hooping plays a pivotal role for Foer, as does an earring-wearing Incredible Hulk on a stationary bike.

Irregular images aside, Foer’s missteps are few. Discussing the neurological underpinnings of memory, he repeats some commonly held myths about it, for instance, that obscure facts — “where I celebrated my seventh birthday” — are “lurking somewhere in my brain, waiting for the right cue to pop back into consciousness.” In fact, not only are many such memories lost for good, even the memories we do have are often quasi-fictionalized reconstructions. Foer inexplicably devotes space to attempting to convince the reader that Daniel Tammet, a renowned savant who memorized 22,514 digits of pi, may not actually be doing it naturally, but only by using the same kind of mnemonic aids used by Foer and his fellow competitors (would it matter?).

Alexandra Horrowitz on Joshua Foer’s book Walking With Einstein, NYT.

February 18th, 2011

in brainbows

Proto magazine has some gorgeous images and representations of brain structures. Above is “Broad Overview [of a Human Hippocampus],” Tamily Weissman, Jeff Lichtman and Joshua Sanes, 2005.

It was the hippocampus as no one had ever seen it, illuminated in radiant hues. The image is called, aptly, a Brainbow, the colors serving a scientific purpose by highlighting specific neural structures. Yet their choice also reflects an artistic bent; scientists display the brain not the way it is (an undifferentiated gray) but the way we want to see it, “painted” with bursts of fluorescent color.

Below is “Olfactory Bulb [of a Dog],” by Camillo Golgi, pen and ink on paper, 1875.

More at Proto magazine.

February 5th, 2011

sculpting compassion and calm

Over the December holidays, my husband went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Not my idea of fun, but he came back rejuvenated and energetic.

He said the experience was so transformational that he has committed to meditating for two hours daily, one hour in the morning and one in the evening, until the end of March. He’s running an experiment to determine whether and how meditation actually improves the quality of his life.

I’ll admit I’m a skeptic.

But now, scientists say that meditators like my husband may be benefiting from changes in their brains. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The findings will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes.

…

In a 2008 study published in the journal PloS One, researchers found that when meditators heard the sounds of people suffering, they had stronger activation levels in their temporal parietal junctures, a part of the brain tied to empathy, than people who did not meditate.

“They may be more willing to help when someone suffers, and act more compassionately,” Dr. Hölzel said.

More at NYT.

February 4th, 2011

down here on earth

The Galaxy Song from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

January 17th, 2011

vulnerable planet

January 1st, 2011

Modern people are inwardly thoroughly bored.

D. H. Lawrence on wonder. From “Hymns in a Man’s Life” – Evening News, 13 October 1928:

Nothing is more difficult than to determine what a child takes in, and does not take in, of its environment and teaching. This fact is brought home to me by the hymns which I learned as a child, and never forgot. They mean to me almost more than the finest poetry, and they have for me a more permanent value, somehow or other.

It is almost shameful to confess that the poems which have meant the most to me, like Wordsworth’s Ode to Immortality and Keats’s Odes, and pieces of Macbeth or As You Like It or Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Goethe’s lyrics, such as Uber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, and Verlaine’s Aynte poussela porte qui clancelle — all these lovely poems which after all give the ultimate shape to one’s life; all these lovely poems woven deep into a man’s consciousness, are still not woven so deep in me as the rather banal Nonconformist hymns that penetrated through and through my childhood.

Each gentle dove
And sighing bough
That makes the eve
So fair to me
Has something far
Diviner now
To draw me back
To Galilee.
O Galilee, sweet Galilee,
Where Jesus loved so much to be,
O Galilee, sweet Galilee,
Come sing thy song again to me!

To me the word Galilee has a wonderful sound. The Lake of Galilee! I don’t want to know where it is. I never want to go to Palestine. Galilee is one of those lovely, glamorous worlds, not places, that exist in the golden haze of a child’s half-formed imagination.

And in my man’s imagination it is just the same. It has been left untouched. With regard to the hymns that had such a profound influence on my childish consciousness, there has been no crystallising out, no dwindling into actuality, no hardening into commonplace. They are the same to my Man’s experience as they were to me nearly forty years ago.

The moon, perhaps, has shrunken a little. One has been forced to learn about orbits, eclipses, relative distances, dead worlds, craters of the moon and so on. The crescent at evening still startles the soul with its delicate flashing. But the mind works automatically and says: ‘Ah, she is in her first quarter. She is all there, in spite of the fact that we see only this slim blade. The earth’s shadow is over her’. And willy-nilly, the intrusion of the mental processes dims the brilliance, the magic of the first apperception.

It is the same with all things. The sheer delight of a child’s apperception is based on wonder; and deny it as we may, knowledge and wonder counteract one another. So that as knowledge increases wonder decreases. We say again: Falimiarity breeds contempt. So that as we grow older, and become more familiar with phenomena, we become more contemptuous of them.

But that is only partly true. “It has taken some races of men thousands of years to become contemptuous of the moon, and to the Hindu the cow is still wondrous. It is not familiarity that breeds contempt: it is the assumption of knowledge. Anybody who looks at the moon and says, ‘I know all about that poor orb’ is, of course, bored by the moon.

Read the rest of this entry »

December 23rd, 2010

latent inhibition

Latent inhibition is a technical term used in Classical conditioning. A stimulus that has not had any significance in the past takes longer to acquire meaning (as a signal) than a new stimulus. It is “a measure of reduced learning about a stimulus to which there has been prior exposure without any consequence.” This tendency to disregard or even inhibit formation of memory, by preventing associative learning of observed stimuli, is an unconscious response and is assumed to prevent sensory overload. Latent inhibition is observed in many species, and is believed to be an integral part of learning, enabling an organism to interact successfully in an environment (e.g., social).

Low latent inhibition

Most people are able to ignore the constant stream of incoming stimuli, but this capability is reduced in those with low latent inhibition. It is hypothesized that a low level of latent inhibition can cause either psychosis or a high level of creative achievement or both, which is usually dependent on the subject’s intelligence. Those of above average intelligence are thought to be capable of processing this stream effectively, enabling their creativity. Those with less than average intelligence, on the other hand, are less able to cope, and so as a result are more likely to suffer from mental illness.

High levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine (or its agonists) in the brain have been shown to decrease latent inhibition. Certain dysfunctions of the neurotransmitters glutamate, serotonin and acetylcholine have also been implicated.

Low latent inhibition is not a mental disorder but an observed personality trait, and a description of how an individual absorbs and assimilates data or stimuli. Furthermore, it does not necessarily lead to mental disorder or creative achievement—this is, like many other factors of life, a case of environmental and predispositional influences, whether these be positive (e.g., education) or negative (e.g., abuse) in nature.

(wikipedia)

December 23rd, 2010

in company lies opportunity

For a century, people have been devising tests that aim to capture a person’s mental abilities in a score, whether it is an IQ test or the SAT. In just an hour or an afternoon, a slate of multiple choice questions or visual puzzles helps sift out the superstars — people whose critical thinking skills suggest they have potent intellectual abilities that could one day help solve real-world problems.

But separating the spectacularly bright from the merely average may not be quite as important as everyone believes. A striking study led by an MIT Sloan School of Management professor shows that teams of people display a collective intelligence that has surprisingly little to do with the intelligence of the team’s individual members. Group intelligence, the researchers discovered, is not strongly tied to either the average intelligence of the members or the team’s smartest member. And this collective intelligence was more than just an arbitrary score: When the group grappled with a complex task, the researchers found it was an excellent predictor of how well the team performed.

Read further at the Boston Globe.

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