A&O 2023 meeting 12 – April 18

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ART & ORGANISM

A SEMINAR

2023 SPRING CALENDAR

notes for meeting 12

TUESDAY April 18, 2022

including likely agenda & comments from previous meeting

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• • CHECK-IN: this week, personal experiences including findings or progress on projects
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POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS: [EXAMPLE] presentation to evoke feedback that will improve your Final (written) Report. … 

• Your PowerPoint presentation should outline your final presentation–usually (1) a paper or (2) an art work with an extended “artist’s statement” –in all cases, showing how DEEP ethology can contribute connections important to your topic.

FINAL REPORT:  a document representing your scholarship and thinking (and/or creative artistry) to share with me–and with your permission to be posted on-line so other people will have access.

• IF a work of art dominates your FINAL REPORT, text can be reduced to an “Artist’s Statement” in which “projective and receptive aspects of art” are represented by a narrative of your experience of CREATION (reasoning and feelings) and APPRECIATION of artistic influences on your process; THEN a narrative of the developmental, ecological, evolutionary, and physiological aspects of the phenomenon you have described.    
• A mere 15 weeks doesn’t allow time to teach all the traditional ways of thinking … the rules (so you can break them).   I’ve provided all the free, safe time playing with ideas to encourage creativity about this problem of a semester project: Many of you know that frustration (in moderation) brings out your creative impulses.   BUT, at this point, here is a specific assignment you need to accomplish:   creating and presenting a Powerpoint presentation to your classmates –and then using feedback from them to improve your final presentation    
• DEFINING YOUR TERMS: Definitions should help bind all participants in a community of understanding (even as you are aware that understanding will never be total or complete): AS YOU DEFINE your phenomenon, treat your definitions (like all definitions and in the best traditions of science) as tentative, preliminary, provisional, and open to revision.  You need to start somewhere, more-or-less shared understanding is essential to intersubjective communication, but everyone should understand that ambiguity enables flexibility necessary for continuing dialogue, necessary to enlarging and deepening shared understanding.  This understanding is not—can never be—perfect. We cannot even be expected to agree with ourselves as our experience and understanding grows and our provisional definitions are commensurately adjusted.   

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EEP ETHOLOGY?  some people found looking at the Venn diagram introduced last week was helpful:

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ART and DEEP ethology has hopefully become familiar as a way of more fully understanding specific phenomena by now, but in the context of paleolithic art … or the artifacts of unknowable paleolithic artists, there are some points I wanted to restate, although in a form I hadn’t explicitly advanced to you before.   They suggest interesting questions that could make our experiences of our ancesters’ art more meaningful–more fully connected.  

• • RITUALIZATION as a process in the evolutionary history of a trait emphasizes how one of the collateral or incidental functions of a pleiotropic trait can be co-opted or used in a manner akin to BRICOLAGE.  In other words some fragent of its effects has had an adaptive use sufficient to confer an adaptive advantage.
  • ART may be such an epiphenomenon … a relatively minor side effect of a trait selected for one reason (say, enhanced respiration under stress) to serve another function(say, communication between individuals–conspecifics, predators, or even prey).  This minor trait could have emerged as highly significant over time as neurology and behavior are recruited in its support.  Look at the peacock’s tail.   Or our own respiratory apparatus adapted to make meaningful sounds–from gasps and sighs to poetry.         

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NEW:

• SAPIENCE & SENTIENCE– more about THINKING & FEELING:  compare a FLOWCHART to a MINDMAP.
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• How about art and DEEP ethology in more fully understanding DREAMS !  These evoke a diversity of important connections & questions:  
  • can you connect Story Telling and Pareidolia and  “Dreams“
  • the neurocognitive processes involved in “experience” overlap significantly and has given traction to the idea that all perception and conceptions are more-or-less “true” hallucinations has gotten traction in some circles. 
  • how do ARTISTS “hack our cognition”  
  • “Entopic” experiences are interesting: these originate wholly WITHIN the organism and are not stimulated or guided by influences from outside our body: Look at the A&O Notes on Stimuli with its section on perception of events that originate within us–like dreams? 
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• NEURAL PLASTICITY.  Obviously the brain changes throughout development, but what guides these changes: familiarize yourself with  OPEN- and CLOSED-GENETIC PROGRAMS (susceptibility to environmental influences, the development of “instincts.”) Can susceptibility be tweaked?)   

NEUROPLASTICITY in cultural context:  We have long known that exposure to poverty in early childhood negatively affects school age behavior  Five years ago, neuroscientists began looking closely at the possibility that infant and childhood experiences could have an enduring effect on brains.  ”The most consistent finding was that the stressful or traumatic life events experienced by children growing up in poverty were associated with a smaller hippocampus. The hippocampus is a key structure involved in the consolidation from short-term memory to long-term memory, and contains a high density of stress hormone receptors. Interestingly, parents’ caregiving style and the amount of environmental stimulation in the child’s home mediate the relationship between poverty and brain structure. Having nurturing parents and increased exposure to things such as books, trips, and musical instruments at home appears to reduce the impact of poverty on a child’s brain structure.” (Mirre Stallen reporting (2017)[i]We knew that childhood environment affects later behavior in experimental animals (mice with “enriched environments” and “opportunities to play;” monkey infants exposed to “maternal deprivation”), but in humans, the cultural and social effects are so complex that it was only in recent years that the organism itself was studied:  Luby et al. (2013)[ii]  sought “To investigate whether the income-to-needs ratio experienced in early childhood impacts brain development at school age and to explore the mediators of this effect.”  They found “Poverty was associated with smaller white and cortical gray matter and hippocampal and amygdala volumes. The effects of poverty on hippocampal volume were mediated by caregiving support/hostility on the left and right, as well as stressful life events on the left.”  

• • NEUROPLASTICITY in cultural context. 

We have long known that exposure to poverty in early childhood negatively affects school age behavior  Five years ago, neuroscientists began looking closely at the possibility that infant and childhood experiences could have an enduring effect on brains.  ”The most consistent finding was that the stressful or traumatic life events experienced by children growing up in poverty were associated with a smaller hippocampus. The hippocampus is a key structure involved in the consolidation from short-term memory to long-term memory, and contains a high density of stress hormone receptors. Interestingly, parents’ caregiving style and the amount of environmental stimulation in the child’s home mediate the relationship between poverty and brain structure. Having nurturing parents and increased exposure to things such as books, trips, and musical instruments at home appears to reduce the impact of poverty on a child’s brain structure.” (Mirre Stallen reporting (2017)[i]

We knew that childhood environment affects later behavior in experimental animals (mice with “enriched environments” and “opportunities to play;” monkey infants exposed to “maternal deprivation”), but in humans, the cultural and social effects are so complex that it was only in recent years that the organism itself was studied:  Luby et al. (2013)[ii]  sought “To investigate whether the income-to-needs ratio experienced in early childhood impacts brain development at school age and to explore the mediators of this effect.”  They found “Poverty was associated with smaller white and cortical gray matter and hippocampal and amygdala volumes. The effects of poverty on hippocampal volume were mediated by caregiving support/hostility on the left and right, as well as stressful life events on the left.”  

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THINGS TO THINK ABOUT — RECENT or NEW

• CONNECTING DEEP and ART:  A&O values connections between phenomena that depend on both sentience and sapience as sources of insight and ultimately meaning.  I hope we are more comfortable thinking about ART and its projective and receptive aspects, along with DEEP Ethology as a way of understanding behavior.  So, we think of artists–by disposition or training–as particularly skilled in gaining access to their own states of mind, and communicating that to their audience.  HOW do artists and their works of art do this?  (for example, you may want to learn how Leonardo applied the ethologist’s approach to how eyes provide us with information to his painting of the Mona Lisa) The ethological attitude here is crystalized in the ideas of identifying and coping with BIAS, and the application of the processes of reality testing (correspondence and coherence).  REMEMBER that as organisms, we are all more-or-less endowed with congenital and acquired biases –and bringing these under control so they do not distort or impair the validity of your perceptions and any actions based on them is a key part of the ETHOGICAL ATTITUDE. 

So by now you have at least some sense of the ETHOLOGICAL ATTITUDE (emphasizing being free of bias and looking from multiple perspectives simultaneously).   Most of you are already exercising that attitude in the service of a subject that has meaning for you—that is, it has personal connections because of interest in, or experience of, or feelings about it.   ______________________________________

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CONNECTIONS (it should be clear now that there are connections within and between levels of organization):

here are e-mails to provide another way of connecting with each other

ACCESS your Mindmaps at your class website (fourth column) — see where your interests overlap with those of other participants:

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What Next? IN LIFE:   picking a path …  here is a constellation of ways of characterizing how you feel about your activities (what you love, what you’re good at) and the contexts in which they hopefully prosper (what the world needs and what it will pay for).  I like Venn diagrams  (maybe that is a personal idiosyncrasy), and this one below is a good starting point used by many advisors and personal coaches.     READ ON: