HomeBrain Quote of the Month – May 2010
Norman Doidge – The Brain That Changes Itself
Culture can influence the development of perceptual learning because perception is not (as many assume) a passive, “bottom up” process that begins when energy in the outside world strikes the sense receptors, then passes the signals to the “higher” perceptual centers in the brain. The perceiving brain is active and always adjusting itself. Seeing is as active as touching, when we run our fingers over and object to discover its texture and shape. Indeed, the stationary eye is virtually incapable of perceiving a complex object. Both our sensory and our motor cortices are always involved in perceiving. The neuroscientists Manfred Fahle and Tomaso Poggio have show experimentally that “higher” levels of perception affect how neuroplastic change in the “lower,” sensory parts of the brain develops.
Comment: It is worth repeating this version of what Damasio puts forward in scientific detail in Descarte’s Error. A surprising number of scientists and specialists in consciousness get perception backward, and thus the entire theories they come up with about how our mind works are backward. We are not waiting, we are always moving forward into perception.
Brain Quote of the Month – March, 2010
Patrick Lane
The memoir arose out of the rather fragile wreckage of my life in the month following my release from a treatment centre for alcohol and drug addiction. I began writing about my garden because it was a safe place to explore. I worried that once sober and clean I wouldn’t be able to write anymore, so I avoided poetry and fiction, practices where I’d succeeded. There Is A Season was never intended to be a book, but was only an exercise, a way of re-entering my writing life. That it turned out to be a memoir, and a successful one, is fortuitous at best. The novel, Red Dog Red Dog, began a few weeks following the completion of the memoir. It was a natural segue and a desire on my part to actually finish a novel, three previous attempts in the 70’s and 80’s dying on the altar of alcohol and cocaine. And, no, I never ask why I’m writing. I sacrificed two families to poetry, my life to art. After fifty years of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, writing is as natural as breathing to me.
Comment: Yes. The way a fertile poet’s mind works and how a master poet moves from one project to another based on where his brain can and will go. And, yes, ‘writing is as natural as breathing’ to a writer. See, the following website for further comments: http://speakingofpoems.blogspot.com/.
Brain Quote of the Month – December, 2009
“Based on his work with plasticity, Taub discovered a number of training principles [for teaching stroke victims to speak again]: training is more effective if the skill closely relates to everyday life; training should be done in increments; and work sdhould be concentrated into a short time, a training technique Taub calls ‘massed practice,’ which he has found far more effective than long-term but less frequent training.” (Norman Doidge – p156, The Brain That Changes Itself)
Comment: Look under Lecture Notes, item 59: Invent your own language game. A plasticity game for poets.
Brain Quote of the Month – November, 2009
“The optimal definition (that has the least number of problems) of consciousness is: ‘consciousness is a mental aspect of a system or a process, which has two sub-aspects: conscious experience and conscious function.’ A general definition (that accommodates most views) is: ‘consciousness is a mental aspect of a system or a process, which is a conscious experience, a conscious function, or both depending on the context’, where experiences can be conscious experiences and/or non-conscious experiences and functions can be conscious functions and/or non-conscious functions that include qualities of objects. The term context refers to metaphysical views, constraints, specific aims, and so on. Based on this investigation, (i) qualia are properties of conscious experiences and/or qualities of objects, (ii) mind includes experiences, functions, or both, and (iii) awareness includes experiences, conscious functions, and/or pre- and sub-conscious functions. These are a posteriori definitions because they are based on observations and the categorization.” (Ram Vimal, 2009 October 29, personal communication).
Comment: And you thought consciousness was as simple as opening your eyes. Not so. When you get down to trying to say precisely what it means, the definition gets long and involved, as Ram Vimal, has noted on the Journal of Consciousness Studies listserve.
Brain Quote of the Month – September, 2009
Descartes’ Error – Antonio Damasio
At each moment the state of self is constructed, from the ground up. It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade unless something goes wrong with the remaking. The background feeling now, or the feeling of an emotion now, along with the non-body sensory signals now, happen to the concept of self as instantiated in the coordinated activity of multiple brain regions. But our self, or better even, our metaself, only ‘learns’ about that ‘now’ an instant later. Pascal’s statements on past, present, and future, with which I opened chapter 8, capture this essence in lapidary fashion. Present continuously becomes past, and by the time we take stock of it we are in another present, consumed with planning the future, which we do on the stepping-stones of the past. The present is never here. We are hopelessly late for consciousness.
Comment: we think of ourselves as consisting as a unique person with our own past memories and a singular conscious knowledge of that past which we mush into the concept of self. How interesting to know that the way it actually works is the opposite: the self is transitory, being recreated every instant that we live as an aspect of attention. Fascinating.
Brain Quote of the Month – August, 2009
Journal of Consciousness Studies – Tom Pokorny
Consciousness is not objectively observable. All our experiences with consciousness are subjective. For example, it is impossible to establish, as a scientific objective fact, that another is conscious, or is it possible? Is the question about Zombie’s and consciousness relevant to science? Are any of the philosophical questions about scientific practices relevant to scientists? Do all empirical scientists ignore such questions?
If I report to myself that I experience pain when I strike my thumb with a hammer, that is a subjective fact to me, isn’t it? If several people make the same claim, can we make the prediction that it is a fact that when you strike your thumb with a hammer, under ordinary circumstances, you will experience pain.
Is that scientific? Are there scientific subjective facts? Or, is the issue disputed? I mean I don’t know the answer. Is there one?
Are dreams a fact when many individuals report having dreamed, or is a dream only a fact when certain wave patterns are observed in the brain?
The dream scientist says you were dreaming last night. The subject says he wasn’t. Is anyone right? Is there a sense in which both are right?
Can there be a science of consciousness?
Comment: a fair summary of a philosophic point of view on the issue of what is consciousness.
Quote of the Month – July, 2009.
Descartes’ Error – Antonio Damasio
The somatic marker hypothesis postulated … that emotions marked certain aspects of a situation, or certain outcomes of possible actions. Emotion achieved this marking quite overtly, as in a ‘gut feeling’, or coverly, via signals occurring below the radar of our awareness (examples… would be neuromodulator responses, such as those of dopamine or oxytocin, which can change the behaviour of neuron groups that represent a certain choice). As for the knowledge used in reasoning, it too could be fairly explicit or partially hidden, as when we intuit a solution. In other words, emotion had a role to play in intuition, the sort of rapid cognitive process in which we come to a particular conclusion without being aware of all the immediate logical steps. It is not necessarily the case that the knowledge of the intermediate steps is absent, only that emotion delivers the conclusion so directly and rapidly that not much knowledge need come to mind. This is in keeping with the old saying which tells us that ‘intuition favours the prepared mind.’ … the quality of one’s intuition depends on how well we have reasoned in the past; on how well we have classified the events of our past experience in relation to the emotions that preceded and followed them; and also on how well we have reflected on the successes and faiolures of our past intuitions. Intuition is simply rapid cognition with the required knowledge partially swept under the carpet, all courtesy of emotion and much past practice.
Comment: this is pretty clear that emotion works hand in hand with the conscious reasoning part of our mind – right prefrontal cortex – and at times is preferred for some types of decisions.
(Quote of the Month – November, Panskepp, 197)
Quote of the Month – October 2008
What Art Does – Ralph Ellis
The limbic system ‘categories’ that motivate the ‘looking for’ of selective attention are categories of utility, to be understood in terms of emotional affordances whole-organism affective meanings. Art plays with this looking-for, using it to make us engage in different afforded actions that relate to different limbic (emotional) categories. The drawing of children and of the artistically untutored reveal this structure when we fail to ‘draw what we see’, drawing instead what we conceptualize that we ought to be seeing. Art teaches us to get beyond this almost complete dominance of habitual categories, and to see things more freshly – both in the perceptual and in the emotive sphere. Rather than reinforcing our preconceptions, it forces us to see how they affect our view of reality.
Comment: whew, lots of big words here, but what Ellis means is fundamental to the way that artists, by my arguments, look at the world, what art they create, and its effects on the viewer. The word ‘limbic’ is part of the subconscious mind that pushes consciousness to pay attention to what it receives from the senses. It does so by the innate and experientially derived patterns it expects us to see. Ellis correctly points out that art plays with our subconscious patterns, the very basis of our minds.
Quote of the Month – September 2008
The Nature of Consciousness – Greg Nixon
It is not that consciousness itself is oscillating but that the imbalance created by action and identity result in consciousness.
Now this is very interesting – and not all that far from the previous beginnings of a definition of consciousness as being related to reportability. McCard seems to suggest here that self-identity, much less in control of one’s actions than it likes to think, must spend a good deal of time accounting for those actions. Cs is more like a public relations officer than the chief executive officer, less rational than rationalizing. The implication izzat most of what we do arises from unconscious motives (which may simply be those of the body), just as psychoanalysis has long indicated, and one of the jobs of ego-consciousness (self-identity) is to make up “just so stories” – cause-and-effect narratives to preserve the illusion of self-agency .
Comment: Taken from the listserve of the Journal of Consciousness Studies (anyone can join and hear where the current academic pursuit of the study is at). This illustrates the point that much of what we humans do is from the subconscious and that consciousness more than a little is about making conscious what the subconscious has already or is actually doing, not the other way around.
Quote of the month – August 2008
Why Poetry – Margaret Atwood
… music, mathematics and poetry seem to be more closely allied than any of them are to ordinary conversational speech, to prose fiction, or to prose in general. Poetry involves pattern recognition – and so do those other forms of word assembly – but the nature of the patterns appears to be different – closer to those of music and math.
Comment: Check out Charles Limb’s MRI work in the bibliography on this site on the nature of where jazz comes from in a musician – from the I centre. I have asked him whether he will will be doing the same MRI work on poets and he said yes, but in a few years. (I will keep an eye on his research to update you, the reader). In other words, poetry comes from the I centre, and, I think that is why poets, artists identify so much with their art that they refuse to give it up in a world that wants them to get a job and raise a family.
Further, from Atwood:
[Our past] oral cultures swam in a sea of language – rich, aromatic, multiplicitous, exfoliating language. We on the other hand – as a culture at large – live on a comparatively dry shore. This is possibly why poets often feel – to themselves – obsolete, archaic, somehow not modern. They’re told that what they do is a remnant of something human beings no longer need – that we live by technologies and numbers now, and that these technologies and numbers represent the real world, as opposed to the dream world that poets live in, along with lunatics and lovers – of imagination all compact, each one of them – the implication being that the creatures of the imagination are not real.
Comment: The religious cult of science in its current paradigmatic form.
More Atwood:
“The arts”… are the heart of the matter, because they are about our hearts, and our technological inventiveness is generated by our emotions, not by our minds… it’s… the human imagination, in all its diversity, that directs what we do with our tools. Poetry is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling out into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are and what we want, and what the limits to those wants may be. Understanding the imagination is not a pastime or even a duty, but a necessity; because increasingly, if we can imagine it, we’ll be able to do it.
Comment: Pay attention to the art and pay attention to the science.
Quote of the Month – July, 2008
Introduction to the Boreal Poetry Garden - Marlene Creates, Newfoundland, Canada – 2008; See: marlenecreates.ca
I want to take you on a walk through the woods to the spots where the poems belong. They’re site-specific poems and, as a rule, I only read them in the particular spot where they arose – I won’t read them in a show-white gallery of a lecture hall. Only here. I hope the spoken words you will hear will enhance your experience and perception of this natural environment.
To some extent, I’m trying to work outside the institutions of the art world. I’m trying to integrate my life and my artwork in these 6 acres of boreal forest, which has resulted in the slightness of my artistic gesture. In responding to the landscape that surrounds me, my work is becoming more and more dematerialized.
All that is needed for the work I’m going to present is our perceiving, sensing bodies and the immediate experiential surroundings – the textures, colours, shadows, shapes and sound of this landscape. Mostly, my body has a silent engagement with these things. But more and more I have come to realize that I do not experience this place without local names sounding in my head. The expressive gesture of speech has texture and rhythm like the material landscape, and is often informed by and tuned to the sounds of the terrain and the beings in it. I find that many Newfoundland vernacular words fulfill a beautiful sonic relationship with this landscape.
Often words are the only means to convey things that my camera cannot capture, like sounds and other fleeting phenomena. My responses to these moments are quite various so I need to warn you that some of the poems are longer but some of them – those which are kind of like haiku – may be over before yo ustart to listen. I’ll tell you when it’s a short one and I’ll leave a space before I read it and a space after it’s over.
The present moment is often thought of as a tiny point between the enormous past and future. I’d like you to gaze around and try to bring all the present into your awareness – so that the present moment swells into a vast expanse while the past and future shrink down. Let the present balloon into something very large that takes in all of us and the circumstances of this place at this time. Take in the material landscape that surrounds us, including the sky above, and try to take it in through all your senses. Let the past and the future dissolve so only the immense present remains. Try to take it in through all your senses. Let the past and the future dissolve so only the immense present remains. See:www.marlenecreates.ca.
Comment: Two things: first, this kind of exploration has nothing to do with the scientific reductionists eight universal laws of art and beauty as suggested by Ramachandran. Marlene’s work may have beauty in it, but she is not searching for that – and it is an intense search, not to mention that as the forest is always changing, so the poems always change, something not addressed in the current scientific view of art: that art, this art, changes every day and over time, infinitely, and, is also cyclical.
As we were walking through the forest, listening to Marlene, Canadian poet, Don McKay and I were musing on the laws, I saying that the R-view says artists use his laws to make their art to make people like it and buy it, and saying that not only is this not in a gallery, that you have to come here, to NF, Canada, and to the land and also to have Marlene read you the poems, to get the art presented to you. And, as we walked on through the forest, Don pointed out, among many other things, that a frame for a painting in a gallery is simply an artifact of necessity because it’s only useful in a gallery. Of course this is true, but the reductionists don’t notice because their understanding of the nature of art is I am sorry to say, without depth. Why is it that intelligent people who grow deeply into their own specialty, think they know deeply another area that they have spent zero time trying to understand?
Second, note Marlene’s deep search into the nature of time and the suggestion that the past and the future need to be shrunk and then the present swells ‘into a vast expanse’. Not so strangely, I am reminded of Einstein, the Doppler effect, and that active perception deposits consciousness, seemingly as a continuous stream, rather than the other way around.