December 21, 2007 at 1:39 pm · Filed under Minds, Brains, & inbetween + Art Freak Culture
Read an interesting review of Jonah Lehrer’s book Proust was a Neuroscientist by Greta Munger of the blog Cognitive Daily (which in my opinion is one of the best ScienceBlogs.com blogs).
In her review, Greta mentions that in her classes “[students] have to write a few paragraphs to earn ‘culture points.’ They must consider how psychology connects to art…” In response her assignment, some of her students offer unique perspectives; however, most students tend not to get far beyond the visual aspects of the work: “I get a lot of discussion of the Gestalt grouping principles with paintings.”
As I’ve been going back to school for psychology myself, this intersection between psychology and art is fascinating for me. There are some interesting books, papers, and discussions out there on the topic, but often I find that psychologists often fall into the same trap as Greta Munger’s students do. Ramachandran may have some fascinating things to say about the Cognitive Science of Art but he too fails to get past the surface visual nature of the art.
This sorta thing happens a lot with people lacking knowledge of the arts. I’m speaking mostly of those whose only experience of art is the art history museum where contemporary art means having a couple pop art paintings. If they were introduced to a wider expanse of art — especially some of the rich history of performance art — they would realize that symbols, language, meaning, ritual, emotions, relationships, human nature, communication, sociology, politics, and fun are all part of the artistic palette.
I find the easiest way to break people out of their tired purely formalist perspective is to tell them to approach art like a it’s a form of communication. Often the artist is attempting to communicate something to the viewer; sometimes they are selective with the type of viewer and sometimes they are just talking to themselves (as most of the abstract expressionists were in my opinion). Alternately, they may not be communicating themselves but rather creating a space or moment to engender communication or connection between members of the audience.
The palette that the artist uses — color, shape, size, movement, position, symbols, emotion, words, beauty, shock, humor — are all tools for creating a communication that falls outside of what we typically recognize as language. All of which is ripe for discovery and criticism from a psychological perspective and it is in these intersections where my fascination dilates my pupils.
September 18, 2007 at 2:16 pm · Filed under Minds, Brains, & inbetween
Fabulous Article On Why Repetition Makes Things Seem Truthful
Fabulous Article On Why Repetition Makes Things Seem Truthful
Fabulous Article On Why Repetition Makes Things Seem Truthful
Fabulous Article On Why Repetition Makes Things Seem Truthful
Fabulous Article On Why Repetition Makes Things Seem Truthful
Fabulous Article On Why Repetition Makes Things Seem Truthful
Fabulous Article On Why Repetition Makes Things Seem Truthful
Fabulous Article On Why Repetition Makes Things Seem Truthful
August 23, 2007 at 6:20 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery + Minds, Brains, & inbetween + Art Freak Culture + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood
- dead simple and so easy you’ll barely know you’re using it (which is what really makes it work)
- a constant stream of banal life snippets of the world in 140 characters or less
- shouting out to no one and everyone with little expectation that anyone will read it or care
- a digital location-less replacement for the the social awareness of the village*
* In the village, you always knew
…that Agnes always went to the grocery store at noon on Sunday, and Old Fred’s hanging out at the tavern later than usual lately. In our messy chaos of busy urban life, we only run into most of our friends every week or so. We try to catch up but usually we only remember to mention the big things — not the little banal things which also make us who we are. As result, there’s something missing in our interactions, and we end up lacking that ambient social awareness that helps bring people together.
Not everyone “Get’s it”
While not perfect, Twitter somehow fills this gap in social awareness. You don’t feel it right away, which is why some people try it out for a week or so and then stop saying “I don’t get it!?!” However after a couple weeks of gleaning the stream of your friend’s twitters, you start to feel it. There it is out of the corner of you vision — you somehow feel closer to those people even though it’s hard to put your finger on why. And the next time you see them, the tension of “catching up” is softened.
What about LiveJournal?
For some LiveJournal works in this manner, but LJ is also as the name implies a journal, and it too often becomes a forum for melancholy narcissistic griping and the ubiquitous replies of *hugs* and commiseration. Not to mention, the flood of inane LJ memes (what CareBear are you?) which are a poor substitute for social bonding. It’s hard to really pour your heart out in 140 characters or less, and this limitation grants Twitter to fill a different role.
Floating In My Twitter Stream
I have to say that Twitter is more relevant when mobile (via sms or mobile browser; my iPhone is great for it), but it still fills it’s purpose on normal computer. I check my twitter stream every now and then and see my friends and my family (yes my parents have jumped on twitter and it’s fabulous). I also follow a couple other bloggers and people I find interesting or funny like Othar who writes what can only be described as Twitter fantasy fiction. With only the simplest perusing, I have a slightly stronger connection with all of their lives.
Links:
August 17, 2007 at 1:03 pm · Filed under Minds, Brains, & inbetween + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood
The Washington Post recently had an interesting article entitled, His Heart Whirs Anew, about a Peter Houghton, the first lifetime recipient of a Jarvik 2000 ventricular assist device (ie an artificial heart).
After being placed on the device, Peter Houghton has struggled with a deadening of his emotions. After reading this, my first reaction was: of course, now that his heart is just a whirring machine he no longer gets the quickening of the pulse of emotional arousal; thus, the sensory feedback is missing and he interprets this as a deadening of his emotions.
Strangely, the article never mentioned this rather obvious probable cause. Peter Houghton is a psychologist himself, so you’d think he’d be familiar with the James-Lange theory, which says that we experience physical arousal, and interpret this arousal as emotion. Alas, he’s a Jungian psychologist and a devout Catholic, which is potentially distorting his view of things.
Why blame the cart, when the horse has been replaced with a horse-droid?
As a Jungian psychologist and devout catholic, Houghton seems to view his artificial heart as symbolic entity effecting his soul rather than a physical one effecting is limbic system. In his search for a cause, he rambles on about becoming an “invented person trying to cope with it, trying to deal with the emotional context of it.” He also says that he now feels a certain emotional distance from those close to him and says he’s more cautious about his own emotions and tries not to invoke them.
Granted, this all could be simple post-operative depression and his obtuse search for meaning might actually further drive him into depression. He did go though a period of clinical depression with some suicidal thoughts. However, it’s also likely that this depression was precipitated by the mechanically steady heart shutting down of the sensory feedback so important to emotions.
Much like Capgras Delusion, where people are seen as impostors due to the lack of emotional recognition, his feelings of emotional distance are probably caused by a loss in empathy. While a smile from his grandchild may trigger his mirror neurons to create a shared emotional state, his heart remains steady as ever putting a halt on the emotional arousal. Thus, he rationalizes that his grandchildren should make him happy, but it’s not so he rationalizes that those close to him “can do without you.”
True it’s hard to tease this symptoms apart from general depression. Also this hypothesis is slightly weakened, as Johan Carlin points out by the fact that changes in pulse rate are more strongly effected by fear than happiness. The WP article does not discuss any other symptoms, so we really don’t know if he’s experienced this reduction in the sense of fear. It would be interesting to test his fear arousal state — but potentially useless without having test results from before the surgery.
Still I believe that his mechanical heart had some physical effect which flattened his emotional state. If we were all coldblooded and callous, we could of course test this by implanting some people with a mechanical heart and have a control group implanted a fake mechanical heart. However I somehow doubt that experiment would get past the IRB.
After writing this, I discovered that The Pineas Gage Fan Club wrote an excellent post discussing Houghton’s artificial heart and the James-Lange theory, entitled “Feel the heat… skips a beat” or the other way around? It’s a good writeup — better in some ways than mine — and I highly encourage that you read it.
May 31, 2007 at 2:42 pm · Filed under Minds, Brains, & inbetween + Art Freak Culture + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood + Politics
For those of you too busy to keep abreast of the latest internet kurfluffle, the LiveJournal community has been in a bit of an uproar over the mass deletion of journal accounts and communities. It seems in the rush to “protect children” Barak Berkowitz, chairman and chief executive of Six Apart, got a bit carried away.
“Our decision here was not based on pure legal issues. It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what’s not.”
–Barak Berkowitz, chairman and CEO, Six Apart
As with any broad swipe based on keywords, several child abuse survivor help groups and the like also got deleted in the process. The chairman has apologized for this and I’m sure this regrettable bit of collateral damage will be rectified.
However, more unknown is the status of the gray area content such as the slash fiction communities that got the cut. Slash fiction is SciFi/Fantasy/Comic fan fiction where one or more fictional characters has a sexual romp with another in all it’s lavishly detailed glory. It’s not really my cup of spanish fly, but whatever floats your panties.
That danged first amendment… or Liberals have morals?
Here in lies the problem of course, not everyone shares my liberal ambivalence with slash fiction and other harmless fetishes. Obviously most BoingBoing readers do as evidence by this hard-line first amendment quote:
“So the only policy that’s safe from turning into tyranny is to allow all speech, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you. Yes, people could be harmed; yes, even children. Freedom is more important.”
This stance nicely exemplifies the definition of liberal morality put forth by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt: The moral foundations theory, put forth by Haidt, states that there are five innate psychological morality systems. Liberals base most of their morals on the measure of Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity; whereas, conservatives balance these with the foundations of Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. This also can be described as a tendency to base morality on a individual rights basis versus a structural community basis. For more on this, I highly highly suggest you watch the fascinating video talk of Haidt on morality at the 2007 New Yorker Conference.
Rationality comes late to the game
Haidt also is known for his hypothesis that morality is largely instinctual and any rational statements are all developed post-hoc. This doesn’t mean that it is in-born only that one learns morality through mostly subconscious socio-emotional means rather than rational means. For more on this read “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment [PDF] and/or The Believer magazine’s interview with Haidt.
Haidt’s ideas are very interesting and they explain a lot more than George Lakoff’s strict father/nurturant parent model of conservative vs. liberal morality. Lakoff also has a lot of interesting things to say, but I’ve always been a bit skeptical of it’s veridicality because the metaphor is too convenient.
In any case, no matter which morality theory you side with, it’s obvious that conservatives and liberals have very different flavors of morality. If we want to develop a communication between the two sides, rather than pure chest pounding, we need both sides to better understand one another—and themselves. This stands true whether we are ones to fantasize about the Jesus references in Narnia or the homosexual subtext of Sam and Frodo.
April 9, 2007 at 3:31 pm · Filed under Art Freak Culture + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood
Sadly I haven’t been able to update Cat Cubed for a bit. I’ve been too busy with helping with all that is NifNaks, taxes, and financial hassles. UCSF has a server breach which potentially exposed all the payroll data for 46,000 employees—myself among them.
I have a few longer posts simmering at the moment, but for now here’s a few links of interest:
Also I’ve been using Google Reader lately, and I added on my sidebar a dynamic feed the recent postings I find interesting. A more complete list can be read on my public Google Reader Shared Items page.
p.s. If you live in SF and aren’t going to the Yuri’s Night party at NASA’s Ames Research Center there is something wrong with you.
