Peception, brain and affect

Yesterday, Emily mentioned briefly the science behind seeing, with light entering the eye and the cones.  I didn’t get a chance to comment, but I had wanted to bring up how some communication scholars are working with cognitive scientific approaches to perception and visual engagement.  I have a short section in my thesis that addresses the difference between seeing and perceiving, and thus I’m going to copy and paste some of the ideas.  Ann Marie Barry proposes a theory of perception that suggests perception is first an affect and then a mental thought.  She remarks that “perception theory” is linked to “the primacy of emotions in processing all communication, and particularly targets visual communication as paralleling perceptual process dependent on primary emotion-based systems of response” (45).  Barry challenges the assumption that immediate visual experience includes any mental conception, and as a Communications scholar she turns to neurology to illuminate that “sight may indeed begin with light hitting the retina, [and] vision occurs deep within the brain; . . . [but] perception, the process by which we derive meaning from what we see, is an elaborate symphony played first and foremost through the unconscious emotional system, with neural equipment evolved over millions of years” (46).  Before the conscious recognition of a visual situation, Barry breaks down the visual experience neurologically: light/visual information from the environment passes through the cornea, pupil and lens and hits the receptors in the retina; next, that light/information is converted into electrical impulses; the optic nerve then communicates these impulses to the “brain’s visual thalamus and onto the visual cortex where vision actually occurs” (48).  It is in the thalamus where the electrical impulses divert into two routes: the thalamo-amygdala pathway and the cortical pathway.  The former connects to the amygdale, the emotional center of the brain; the latter connects to the cortex and begins the state of awareness.  The thalamo-amygdala route has a shorter distance than the cortical route.  Hence, by the time we become aware, our emotions have already been stimulated by the visual environment, as Barry notes, “Emotional reactions are therefore faster than conscious ones, and emotional memory frames all conscious response.  The cortex also sends a second signal to the amygdale, adding conscious input to emotional reaction and emotional response to thought” (49).

           

Although Barry reverts to a cognitive understanding of visual experience, she appears to express in her perception theory and definition of perception a form of affect theory.  As the emotional center of the brain gets stimulated from the visual environment, the brain and the body can act in ways a prior consciousness (Barry 49-55).  Barry defines perception as “the process by which we derive meaning through experience, is a dynamic, interactive system that utilizes built-in genetic programming to synthesize sensory input, memory, and individual needs.  The eyes are only an initial part of the equation, and can, in fact, be bypassed altogether” (48). In addition to the eye, the brain is also only one component to perception, and as James J. Gibson contends, “it is not necessary to assume that anything whatever is transmitted along the optic nerve in the activity of perception. . . . We can think of vision as a perceptual system, the brain being simply part of the system” (original emphasis 61). In other words, perceiving is neither an eye nor a brain-mind centered experience; rather perceiving is an eye-brain-mind-body affect. Perception is not simply cognitive, but embodied affects.

Emily (and AE too) expressed some of these same ideas.  In connecting this blog post to my previous, I find it interesting how Descartes addresses the mind-body problem, in which he privileges the mind over body, and how I’m addressing the brain, thinking, and a scientific understanding of experience. Possibly this may be my attraction: thinking and what happens when we experience something (as well as not experience something, but simply think).

Barry, Ann Marie. “Perception Theory.” Handbook of Visual Communication. Eds. Ken Smith, Sandra Moriarty, Gretchen Barbastsis, and Keith Kenney. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2005. 45-62. Print.

Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. 1979. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlabaum Associates, Publishers, 1986. Print.

Thinking

The text in my past that hit me affectively has to be Rene Decartes Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on Method, two works that are closely aligned in Decartes’ inquiries to metaphysics and the existence of God.  I read Discourse on Method, which was published in 1637, and then shortly after read the former, published in 1641.  Particularly where I was at in my life, which I will post in the next week or two, these works inspired and amazed me because of Descartes thought process. These works made me want to read more philosophy, made me want to write about philosophical ideas, and made me want to be a philosopher (or simply develop a way to think).  Descartes and his philosophical ideas (particularly the mind-brain problem) have had and continue to have immense influence in the twenty-first century among various disciplines and cultural narratives. I plan to explore in future posts those ideas as they function and are disseminated within Western thought and life. 

                     

 

                                      

What is a piece of literature that has created an affective moment in my past?  Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, and Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" come to mind, but what is the particular moment escapes me.  I'll have to think more about it.  

Developing an Emblem with Proprioception

Yesterday, I finished Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist’s Eye and I want to reflect on some ideas that Francesco Bonami has.  Bonami remarks, “We experience life through encounters, images, objects, and spaces.  Our memory is composed of varied, mostly irrelevant, short experiences: new images, new flavors, new sounds, new touches, and new smells” (14).  Bonami directs our attention to the traditional five senses as universal to human experience.  These senses construct ideologies and paradigms for how we behave within the world.  Tourism though homogenizes these sense experiences across cultures, yet Bonami also articulates that it can “help counter more traumatic events and balance complex cultural differences” (14).  I’m wondering though if we can shift outside the traditional five senses (mostly because I’ve been writing in my thesis about proprioception also known as the kinesthetic sense) for understanding ontology and well-being.  And how important is proprioception to tourism and traveling? Does proprioception get homogenized in tourism (surely it does), and where and when do travelers use the proprioception to engage with not the feeling they are not “moving into a known territory,” (20) but “into a known world to find the unknown [or] to enter into an unknown world to find the familiar, the known” (15)?

So how can proprioception be used in our class project (or should it even be used)?  I believe we are developing an image (a pastiche), but how can an image enable one to physically move through space and time.  Or rather should I consider how a particular past moment of mine required me to move my body through space and time, and then develop an emblem from that experience? What comes to mind right now is when I worked on cars about ten years ago.  After high school, I moved to Phoenix, Arizona and secured a job with Goodyear.  As a mechanic, I constantly had to use my body (and obviously hands) to perform the job, yet for years such performance always felt awkward to me.  Of course not always, but I often felt in my body that I should be doing something else in life, engaging in conversations about philosophical ideas, doing something more for others, and contributing to communities.  In other words, did I feel the “becoming what you are”, or lack of it, as I moved under hoods, undercarriages, and around fenders?  Maybe my emblem may connect to my time at Goodyear and this proprioceptive experience.

Socialbook

Although I finished Avatar Emergency early Tuesday morning, and there is much to extract from Ulmer’s testimony, I would like to simply post some comments on AE’s platform ― Socialbook ― which I’ve been using the past two weeks.  Socialbook does have potential, but in these early stages of development, I encountered similar frustrations as Jake has articulated in his blog post.  I see Socialbook as a limited platform due to some obvious adjustments that need to be made if it desires to serve as a meaningful and collective engagement space. (1) Needs to have page numbers of the text. (2) Needs to have an index. I have to sift through comments upon comments, some of which are simply highlights by readers, to find important remarks about the text.  Possibly a sidebar, similar to how the “community” tab appears and functions, would enable “group” comments to be better organized and easier to browse through. In addition, I have to continually browse through all my comments to see if another reader has responded to my comment (no notification of new comments or responses).  Also, when I comment on someone else’s annotation, I have to continually check back, as well as sift through their annotations, to see if they responded to my comment (again, no notification via email). (3) I think a “bookmarking” feature would be helpful (if page numbers are absent).  As I’m reading a page on 50% and decide I would like to revisit ideas from earlier pages, let’s say at 10%, I have to write down the beginning of a paragraph on 50%, go back and reread earlier pages or comments, and then return to 50% and find the paragraph.  It would be better if I could bookmark the last page I’m on at any given time and be able to return to the bookmark easily.

But more importantly than these basic issues is the clarity for how socialbook functions with “group” and “community” tabs.  As Greg remarked that he couldn’t get into the “group” tab and thus couldn’t access many of those comments, I had to be “signed in” as “Avatar Emergency – Just Me” (which is confusing because that assumes my comments will be inaccessible by other readers) and annotate with the “community” mode. Ulimately, many of my “group” comments did not transfer to the “community” tab, and hence Greg was not able to see or respond to all my comments. The instructions in the “Help” tab aren’t clear either, so better articulation for how Socialbook functions and commenting/annotating works would be beneficial. 

This issue with the “group” and “community” tabs and comments caused an important conversation to be inaccessible to Greg.  Since Greg is working within the “community” tab and not all comments and thread conversations from the “group” tab are appearing in the “community” tab, he missed, and we lost his insight into, a conversation that may help us understand better the group project. Nevertheless, I think Socialbook has potential and using it for the past two weeks has been an interesting experience.  Particularly with AE, I think if these problems were resolved, we (our class) could find the dialectical engagement more fruitful.

AE chapter 1 summary, instructions, and note

This first blog posting for Ulmer’s Ubiquitous Imaging/Digital English course will primarily consist of a summary for chapter 1 Prudence in Avatar Emergency.

Ulmer’s testimony illuminates the foundation for how an avatar emerges, particularly as an (digital) emblem rather than as a written self or oral spirit.  That emblem, which requires the inventor to use flash reason ― a logic based on an immediate decision making ― and consider collapsing past, present, and future experiences into a singularity, functions as a way for the inventor to feel insights/epiphanies.  When the inventor engages in the digital, he or she has an experience of their own potentiality, an event that unveils to the inventor their own life path and decisions.  And this is the key to an avatar and how it functions: as (affective) experience to decisions (not the effects of the decisions) one has made, is making, and will make.  An experience of event (when the potentiality of avatarness appears), particularly as a digital event, generates affect ― feelings (and not emotions) ― and catalyzes creativity.  Avatar inspires creative thought and action (and possibly proliferates or grows with invention?).  For 2011 Ulmer, his affect experience occurred while he was watching Avatar and conjured a memory of twenty-one year old 1966 Ulmer in a Spanish olive orchard.  In that past time-space continuum, Ulmer recalls a particular decision he had made, a pivotal one that shifted his scholarly research, as well as structured what he considers the virtue of avatar: prudence.  Prudence, as Ulmer defines at one moment, is “a time-wisdom, a capacity to make an appropriate decision in an instant by taking the measure of a particular situation in its temporal context.”  Prudence is the capability to make a decision, but when we make the decision, we use flash reason, which, I think, is primarily based on those body affects. Furthermore, those body affects are situational and contextual: one’s surrounding landscapes (e.g. the pines and bay in Nietzsche’s moment, the auditorium filled with the drifting descent of glowing Woodsprites in Ulmer’s 2011 moment) and proprioception (e.g. Nietzsche’s walk, Ulmer’s digital movement through the film).

Our emergence within digital technologies and development of our avatars mean that the public sphere and social body have to be reconfigured.  No longer can modes of literacy structure the collective unit (national, religious, et al.) and commonplaces .  Rather, electracy offers a rethinking of the collective body, one that is not necessarily based on spectacle, but uses spectacle (and pop culture)  and flash reason to potentiality offer collective epiphany.

Finally, key to this chapter is the “becoming what you are” and the emergence of avatar.  But when do we recognize those becomings and avatar?  They appear to only exist mentally after an event.  Hence, the reason why Ulmer posits that “electrate avatar knows more than you or I do, it knows better than you or I do about what will have happened in our various respective situations” is because only retroactively can subjects understand what their experience means. Avatar understands, which is experience. Yet, understanding shouldn’t be sought; rather, the undergoing of avatar, of action to decision in an unplanned, unforeseen occurrence, of experience of affect, of process in digital and physical reality should be sought . . . and we undergo in order to invent and create new epistemological frameworks and metaphysical realities and learn “electrate wisdom.”

In addition to this summary, I’d like to outline some possible instructions for our group project:

• Pastiche: As Jake noted, pastiche will be essential to the project.  Jake remarked: “Mix/Pastiche of content: A family incident, cultural mythology and legend. We are to tie the family incident somehow to cultural mythology or legend; thus, creating an interface between our own history and the larger collective subject.”

We need to use both image and written text (the motto or maxim or proverb). Should we integrate (sensory) taste or tactile experience? I’m also wondering what would be our collective’s family incident.  Do we create an interface that connects the individual to the collective: first, we each construct our own family incident to the cultural mythology; next, we create a medium that connects the two (individual to collective). Or, do we simply create an interface that presents the collective family incident to the cultural mythology and legend.  In other words, we would each create our own individual project and then bring our production to the group and figure out how to integrate seven family incidents into one, which will be the final project.

• Work with pleasure-pain images (show pleasure in pain, pain in pleasure).  Ulmer contends, “Electracy is the apparatus of joy/sadness . . . In electracy this pair [individual attitude and the world] is not an either-or, since attitude now is ontological (world-creating).” Also, because Ulmer remarks, “The relationship or ratio between love and knowledge has to be adjusted in each epoch, not to mention for each apparatus, with implications for individual experience and behavior,” we should consider what love and knowledge mean within digital experience, both individually and collectively, and how that love and knowledge (or past understandings of love and knowledge) is suppressed and/or proliferated by digital technologies. Consider love and death.  Ulmer remarks, “Love and death (family) are integral to the rhizome managed by concept avatar.” Also, quick thought: could we consider how to experience love in death and death in love (pleasure in pain and pain in pleasure)?

• Work to be (new) idiots and receptive to event.  The idiot is the private thinker; the teacher is the public thinker.  The old idiot wanted truth; the new idiot wants to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought – in other words, to create.  Idiot à connotations of (wise) fool.

• Work on Style.  Style gives access to embodied (sensory aesthetic) thought.  Create a concept persona supporting judgment (decision) conducted in an aesthetic style.

• Integrate audiovisual media into our collaborative project

• Not only inventing and then circulating the project, but archiving it within a established system, or attempting to archive it within a new system (that has traces of the previous system(s)). 

• Being, having, and doing ought to be integrated into one performance. Ordinary people, both ourselves and our audience, need to perform with these three actions as we/they experience the project.  Not sure yet what that looks like or how to open space for such a performance, but something we should keep in mind.

And finally, some random notes to remember:

Avatar (emblems) : electracy                 electracy- the Moment of Now

Self (to be) : literacy                             literate apparatus- linear time

Spirit (immaterial) : orality                   oral apparatus- cyclical time

Avatar as experience is an event of counsel, an uncanny encounter with one’s own possibility (potential).  It personifies attitude (which is concerned with the state of mind within which the thought happens), concerning belief or desire directed toward our Target (the practice of judgment or decision).  It emerges from anxiety.  It opens further subject formation (a sampled and mixed subject in circulation).  Its purpose is as consultant for decision, with the relation player-avatar constituting a passage between idiot and collective subject.

The function of avatar is to advise my decision (my flash reason). The functionality of avatar concerns the ability of the persona and anecdote to materialize the attitude or stand (position, gesture) of thought as event.

Concept avatar: takes after reflective judgment, which works in the middle voice (auto-affection).

                        attempts image metaphysics

                        assists our transition from the discursive to the momental

Avatar emergency is praxis.  Avatar emergency concerns precisely the relation between attitude and action.

Moment happens in the middle voice, in the practice of flash reason. 

Epiphanies must be constructed.  They don’t happen.

Process of becoming human:  Affective experience (Ulmer’s sensory judgment) à Cultural mythology (Ulmer’s belief through custom, social forms ordering human relationships) à epistemology (Ulmer’s knowledge, learning the sciences of form) à Mindboy existence, Avatar presence (Ulmer’s wisdom, intuition of form).  Wisdom proposes that we work on our attitude rather than on the world.