ART & ORGANISM 2020
TUESDAY February 25, 2020
notes
Last week, January 14, these were IDEAS THAT STOOD OUT FOR YOU (from end-of-class check-in’s):
NEW
After watching Jill Taylor’s TED talk, there was a good question about neuroplasticity. There is a reading about that HERE and right in the middle I plugged in a new box about an article I just saw in my favorite science news magazine (New Scientist): A teenager is reported to be quite functional after having been born with NO LEFT CEREBRAL HEMISPHERE. Click HERE
The revelation that even these large collections of function dedicated circuits and structures can be so different from each other is a hint about the kind of thinking that we should apply to all brain “structures.” ALWAYS remembering how the PHYSIOLOGY that gets things done can be affected by DEVELPOPMENT and the brain’s local ECOLOGY: the chemicals in which different parts of it are -more-or-less bathed. EVOLUTION? When we look at RITUALIZATION we will see the extreme lengths to which natural selection can lead—it speaks of conspicuous outcomes (the peacock’s tail) and their sometimes very humble beginnings—but the processes are at play even when the outcomes are not so conspicuous.
Look at Henry James “web of consciousness” idea again, HERE
In an e-mail I posted a couple of days ago, I provided a link to Jill Taylor’s story HERE … you may want to watch it again: it is loaded with connections
development & physiology …
consciousness,
the relationship between subjective and objective realities.
multiple parallel processing and serial processing.
deliberately split brain where we might see one hemisphere acting without being balanced by or interacting with the other
AS AN ASSIGNMENT, before next week,
FOR THIS you’ll want to review some old suggested web notes, such as AMBIGUITY.
Ambiguity refers to a lack of resolution in aggregates of stimuli that evokes the processes that organisms use to impose order— There is a BIAS to try to accommodate information that isn’t easily assimilated (look at a figure from the notes on DEVELOPMENT to see how assimilation and accommodation work to enable LEARNING: FIGURE)
So, back to the question of how OBJECTIVE stimuli become SUBJECTIVE percepts. Along the path–our organs for the detection of stimuli through sensory pathways to areas in the central nervous system that can integrate the information with implicit or explicit feelings and thoughts and initiate or affect actions. (it is through actions that are known in the world). We have hints about how this works from looking at how the troubling nature of AMBIGUITY is resolved: most of it is virtually automatic, but often distinguishable phenomena: APOHPHENIA (connections and meaning where there is none; a “type-1 error” in statistics, a “false positive”) and a common version of apophenia, PAREIODLIA. (BOTH on the AMBIGUITY web page) [apophenia usually spoken of relative to pyschoses, pareidolia is common– and may even be VERY common in our construction of reality.
A nice essay at ARTSY (on-line magazine) HERE
examples of face pareiodalia in advertising HERE
Part (3) of assignments: be ready to comment on specific things you’ve found out while researching you potential project.