[new media digest]

Want to do some thinking? Follow these links:

• Neuroplasticity: we can rewire the brain with the power of thinking and technology. Read Norman Doidge's The Brain that Changes Itself. A documentary will be aired on the 30th of July on CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/natureofthings/2008/brainchangesitself/
  
• Some suitable trending twitter topics today (nice alliteration eh?):
  

Apollo 11

Moon

Neil Armstrong

• Exercise, community participation and higher literacy skills mean less chance of cognitive decline with age. Read about the study here.
• Time people are spending on Facebook is up 700%
• Businesses going *online* and having a FB profile or tweeting isn't necessarily (the right kind of) participating...but putting thought into why the business is online and actually connecting with the audience/client is key. Read more about social business design.

[enactive cinema with pia tikka @ the ioct]

From the IOCT blog:

"PIA TIKKA

Enactive Cinema
The Future of Creative Technologies
IOCT Lab
24th October 2008, 4.30pm

***

A New Concept in Cinema

The Enactive Cinema project introduces a novel kind of interactive cinema genre, which is described as enactive cinema:

How the narrative unfolds, and how rhythm and soundscape emerge, depend on how the spectator experiences the emotional dynamics between the characters. Enactive cinema emphasizes unconscious interaction between the cinema spectator and the cinema. Instead of the spectator directly manipulating the narrative, its unfolding is affected by the spectator’s emotional participation. The project suggests that unconscious and conscious experience interact in an inseparable and complex manner. The cinema experience is more than seeing and hearing. It is about sensing and re-living of one's own experience in what happens to the 'others'. This is, ENACTIVE CINEMA.

• Wanted to reinterpret Eisenstein's dynamic organic film theory of montage
• how to capture the dynamic nature of his theories in today's new media
• so used parachronic reading which is outside of time, recurise: linearity of historical time as put into brackets, or substituted by recursive dynamics of experience, a nowness involving events in a spiral manner.
  
• biomechanics: early Eisenstein and montage of attractions (1923)
• ecstasy : holistic experience auditory and visual
• She jumps over the other people important to Eisenstein - hegel, darwinism, karl marx, vygotsky, alexander bogdanov (political rival of Lenin, retired himself from political scen and in 1928 he died but founded "techtology"

"unifying all social, biological and physical sciences, by considering them as systems of relationships, and by seeking the organizational principles that underly all systems. His work "Tektology: Universal Organization Science", finished by the early 1920s, anticipated many of the ideas that were popularized later by Norbert Wiener in Cybernetics and Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the General Systems Theory. There are suggestions that both Wiener and von Bertalanffy might have read the German translation of Tektology which was published in 1928. In Russia, Lenin (and later Stalin) considered Bogdanov's natural philosophy an ideological threat to the dialectic materialism and put tectology to sleep. The rediscovery of Bogdanov's tectology occurred only in 1970s."

• Pia's theoretical background - emotion dynamics, cognitive ecologism (Ulric Neisser), recent neroscientific views of the human mind (Gallese), emmbodied simulation (Gallese), emotions as cognition (Antonio Damasio), homeostasis theory of cinema viewing (Torben Grodal)
• gallese draws on merleau-ponty: the body is...that strange object...
• Gallese and george lakoff collabor5ations on embodies role of experience, semantic studies and neuroscience (see this excellent article that i read the other day)
• toolbox for authoring and describing intersubjective cinematic understanding derived from Theory of Metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999)
• a way to get a hold of the cinematic experience via the tracking of sensorimotor aspects and spatial dynamics
• gap between phenomenology and how we describe the experience or gap between the phenomenological and the neurological - how to build a bridge between these
• embodied metaphors
• "My goal is to shed light and define novel perspectives especially on the categorization and attribution of emotions within the cinematic narrative. The artistic and scientific outcome is an “intelligent” cinematic system that anticipates and makes inferences about emotional narrative paths suggested by the spectator-participants' bodily actions. "
• enactive cinema - how the narrative unfolds depends on how the spectator experiences emotional dynamics between the characters
  

• dynamic emotion ecology refers to the dynamic interactinon between spectator and psychophysiological states
• emphasises unconscious interaction between narrative and emotional participation, the invitation to enact is very gentle. 5 chairs invite the spectator to sit down, there are also other biofeedback sensors measuring emotional level etc...

Listening to Pia Tikka's talk i'm wondering what happens with spectators who don't have high or normal functioning mirror neurons (perhaps as has been suggested in the case of autism? And what about gender issues. Some cognitive/neuroscience studies suggest there are gender differences with mirror neurons, deepening the stereotype that women are more empathetic because women's mirror neurons showed signs of stronger stimulation (for one example, see this article - "Gender differences in the human mirror system: a magnetoencephalography study")


Data that was monitored - heart rate, breathing rate, activity monitoring, non-body contact - all of this information can go into a toolbox for authors on how to create a narrative.

Have a look at the following video for an interpretation of Eisenstein's visual "vocabulary"

[mirror neurons and literacy]

Proof that humans are "wired" to connect with others:

"Scientists have recently been decoding how "mirror neurons" in our brains work. They've realized humans are wired to connect with others, to live vicariously through others' experiences, in much stronger ways than we once thought. The brain doesn't differentiate much between watching someone do something, and doing it yourself - which is why there are so many obsessed sports fans in the world. Most important for teachers, these mirror neurons are also a key to how we learn. Just watching someone read a book teaches us more than we ever realized about the reading process. And we use our emotions to readily connect those experiences to other related tasks (either physically or emotionally). I will never be a gymnast (beyond the contortions I go through to get through airport security screening). But I can connect to the feelings of almost, not quite reaching a goal again and again, and finally succeeding. What teacher hasn't experienced weeks or months of helping a struggling student almost, but not quite, grasp a concept? It makes those breakthrough moments all the more sweet.

Mirror neurons are also the reason modeling in classrooms is so essential. When students see the strategies teachers use to tackle difficult texts, no matter the genre, their brains don't differentiate between their experiences and ours. The teacher's strategies become part of the mix that fires up whenever a student approaches a new text. Likewise, all those whole-class activities to build community around reading and writing early in the year become ingredients in the chemical soup in our students' brains as they read and write on their own. The consequences of broken mirror neurons can also be dire, as any teacher who has worked with an autistic child knows.

What about mirror neurons in staff settings? Simply put, our moms were right - we shouldn't hang out with the wrong crowd, and we need to choose our role models carefully. Mirror neurons imitate and absorb what they see around us whether we like what we're seeing or not. If you're surrounded by negative, unhappy people, it's human nature that you're going to absorb that outlook over time. Sometimes toxic environments or people can't be avoided, but it's important to note when it comes to "emotional contagions," negative environments have more powerful effects than positive ones. If you have a colleague or two who are always resentful or angry, you owe it to yourself and your students to limit your time with them. If you have to spend time with them, even decreasing eye contact or verbal interactions can help limit what your brain's mirror neurons pick up."

Read more here.

[synesthesia]

I've been reading Cretien Van Campen's The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science. In it Van Campen wonders how it might feel like to "hear music in colour, or to see someone's name in colour." Me too though sometimes when speaking to listening to people speak (not singing though) I imagine words or letters...not sure if that counts. According to Van Campen, synesthetes "perceive the colours of words and letters only when they read themin written or printed form." Brain scans of synesthetes show that even when blindfolded and listening to spoken words, the areas of the brain responsible for hearing AND colour vision light up simultaneously. This is unlike nonsynesthetes where brain activity is generated "only in the areas known to be responsible for hearing."



For those of you who are not synesthetic you might be interested to try the "synesthesia on demand" application at hypertextopia. My attempt as a synesthete resulted in this:



(text from Van Campen p. 58)