Here are some quotes from a presentation by Yoky Matsuoka on neurobotics (thanks to joseter).
...we are so good with our hands, a lot of people say that our hands are the reason why we have this society. We can use tools, we can build buildings, we can even have this level of consciousness, some people believe, because we can gather amazing sensory information from our hands, and manipulate objects in a way that other primates don't do.
We want to build a mechanical device that's controlled by the original brain signals that would mimic our own limb, and nobody else could tell that its actually a robotic device.
This image is from Matsuoka's presentation. It's a monkey with electrodes in it's head. The brain area is interestingly masked off by a black blob. Dunno if that's to keep the audience from getting sad for the monkey, or if the tech is proprietary and they want to keep it secret, or what. Anyhow, the money's arms are tied down and he's controlling that robotic arm by thinking. But the grasping part of the action is being controlled by a human off to the side with a remote controller, because, as Matusoka says, "that level of detail we can't get yet." They currently working on some superdextrous robotic hands, trying to match up the machinery with the neurology.
Begs the question: if it's only electrodes why not use a human volunteer? Unless of course the monkey's skull has been opened and it's brain is actually exposed for this experiment. Does Matsuoka know any details?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/science/13brain.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
This is the most famous Human case so far. Way less intrusive, but also way less impressive. The monkey experiments looks like vivisection, even if technically it is not.
Morally I'm much more into the experiments on the human. He seems pretty into it.
There are people doing things with led sensors not probes. I "played" a simple flying game at Berkeley with my mind a couple of years ago, and this company http://www.emotiv.com/ seems to be taking that to the next level. Curiously, Emotive seems to be ignoring the obvious handicapped community in favor of the gaming people. Gamers are not going to be convinced for long unless the gameplay is really solid. Even wicked cool hardware needs a killer app. And they have no sense of the creepy factor either - in the video demo of their product they have a big sign that says "Emotive Systems (We know what you're thinking)". Were I in charge of the company making home brain scans I might tone down the BIG BROTHEResque rhetoric a bit.
From the site:
At Emotiv, we believe that future communication between human and machine will not be limited to the conscious communication that exists today. Users will demand that non-conscious communication play a much more significant role.
Our mission is to create the ultimate interface for the next-generation of human-machine interaction, by evolving the interaction between humans and electronic devices beyond the limitations of conscious interface. Emotiv has created technologies that allow machines to take both conscious and non-conscious inputs directly from your mind.
Applications for Emotiv technology spans numerous industries, however, our immediate target market is entertainment, with a focus on the electronic games industry.
Users will demand that non-conscious communication play a much more significant role? really?
Meanwhile, I happen to be big in Japan right now! (in the high paced telegraph key collector world)
http://sky.ap.teacup.com/ja7fyf/
I demand VR goggles. heh heh. those were days.
That big brotheresque implications don't seem to be much of problem for neuroscience PR. This quote from the Times article gave me a shiver.
One way to improve implant performance was suggested by another paper in the same issue of Nature. In a study involving monkeys, Krishna V. Shenoy and colleagues at Stanford University eavesdropped not on the neurons controlling arm movement but on those expressing the intention to move, which occurs earlier and would make the system work faster.
“Instead of sliding the cursor out to the target, we can just predict which target would be hit and the cursor simply leaps there,” said Dr. Shenoy...
I can imagine wanting to control the cursor with my brain (maybe). But I'm pretty damn sure I don't want the computer predicting what my brain will want to do and "leaping" there. And what I really really don't want is to be a soldier wired up to a weapon with my thought processes channelled into a preset range of motor responses. I'm not trying to be hyperbolic, it seems like a fairly predictable outcome of this technology.
According to this clip from Quirks and Quarks on "robo-monkey" (thanks to b. smiley) they are implanting electrode arrays in the monkey's brain itself, in the motor cortex. Sounds like the same thing they used on Mr. Nagle in the Times article. The guy says that the monkey is initially a "little spooked" by the robotic arm.
Telegraph phones is pretty funny, Joester.
Interesting that the man willing to have the brain implant in Joe's link above (it was a removed a year later...he was using voice control for his computer) is namend Nagle. It was Thomas Nagel who wrote the famous article on consciousness, "What is it like to be a bat?."
To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals. On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like.
I want a quantum cursor that's everywhere at once.
I want a cursor that tells me either it's speed or location but not both.
I wonder what "a little spooked" means to someone willing to do brain surgery on an animal that doesn't need it.
I agree with the military creepyness about this research. It's all done in the name of helping the disability community, but you know there's huge amounts of DARPA money pouring in there too.
Although, when you thing about it, "predicting" what the brain wants is what good design is all about. Apple has made a killing predicting what you want to do next. The Segway rhetoric is all about "you just think 'forward' and you go".
As illustrated so well by joester's segway gif:
"'predicting' what the brain wants is what good design is all about."
True. I'd want my wheelchair or walker or non-cerbral prosthetic arm or computer or garage-door opener to be designed by people anticipating what I might want.
MS Word auto-fomatting? That friendly little paperclip animation?
oooooh yeah. That's a darn good example. How'd you like one of them dancing in your cerebral cortex?
Anything involving open brains and electrodes in my cerebral cortex scares the bejeesus out of me. But maybe I've been re-watching too many episodes of the X Files lately.
Also, the idea of the computer predicting where you want to go or what you're thinking reminds me of the experiment they did in that John Colapinto article "The Interpreter" that Carol made us read (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto).
“Goddam Chomskyan, can’t even run an experiment.”That is a hilarious anthropological episode. I snipped the bit about the experiment:
Fitch’s experiments were based on the so-called Chomsky hierarchy, a system for classifying types of grammar, ranked in ascending order of complexity. To test the Pirahă’s ability to learn one of the simplest types of grammar, Fitch had written a program in which grammatically correct constructions were represented by a male voice uttering one nonsense syllable (mi or doh or ga, for instance), followed by a female voice uttering a different nonsense syllable (lee or ta or gee). Correct constructions would cause an animated monkey head at the bottom of the computer screen to float to a corner at the top of the screen after briefly disappearing; incorrect constructions (anytime one male syllable was followed by another male syllable or more than one female syllable) would make the monkey head float to the opposite corner. Fitch set up a small digital movie camera behind the laptop to film the Pirahă’s eye movements. In the few seconds’ delay before the monkey head floated to either corner of the screen, Fitch hoped that he would be able to determine, from the direction of the subjects’ unconscious glances, if they were learning the grammar. The experiment, using different stimuli, had been conducted with undergraduates and monkeys, all of whom passed the test. Fitch told me that he had little doubt that the Pirahă would pass. “My expectation coming in here is that they’re going to act just like my Harvard undergrads,” he said. “They’re going to do exactly what every other human has done and they’re going to get this basic pattern. The Pirahă are humans—humans can do this.”
Fitch called for the first subject.
Everett stepped outside the hut and spoke to a short muscular man with a bowl-shaped haircut and heavily calloused bare feet. The man entered the hut and sat down at the computer, which promptly crashed. Fitch rebooted. It crashed again.
“It’s the humidity,” Everett said.
Fitch finally got the computer working, but then the video camera seized up.
“Goddam Chomskyan,” Everett said. “Can’t even run an experiment.”
Eventually, Fitch got all the equipment running smoothly and started the experiment. It quickly became obvious that the Pirahă man was simply watching the floating monkey head and wasn’t responding to the audio cues.
“It didn’t look like he was doing premonitory looking,” Fitch said. “Maybe ask him to point to where he thinks the monkey is going to go.”
“They don’t point,” Everett said. Nor, he added, do they have words for right and left. Instead, they give directions in absolute terms, telling others to head “upriver” or “downriver,” or “to the forest” or “away from the forest.” Everett told the man to say whether the monkey was going upriver or downriver. The man said something in reply.
“What did he say?” Fitch asked.
“He said, ‘Monkeys go to the jungle.’ ”
Fitch grimaced in frustration. “Well, he’s not guessing with his eyes,” he said. “Is there another way he can indicate?”
Everett again told the man to say whether the monkey was going upriver or down. The man made a noise of assent. Fitch resumed the experiment, but the man simply waited until the monkey moved. He followed it with his eyes, laughed admiringly when it came to a stop, then announced whether it had gone upriver or down.
After several minutes of this, Fitch said, on a rising note of panic, “If they fail in the recursion one—it’s not recursion; I’ve got to stop saying that. I mean embedding. Because, I mean, if he can’t get this—”
“This is typical Pirahă,” Everett said soothingly. “This is new stuff, and they don’t do new stuff.”
“But when they’re hunting they must have those skills of visual anticipation,” Fitch said.
“Yeah,” Everett said dryly. “But this is not a real monkey.” He pointed at the grinning animated head bobbing on the screen.
“Fuck!” Fitch said. “If I’d had a joystick for him to hunt the monkey!” He paced a little, then said, “The crazy thing is that this is already more realistic than the experiments Aslin did with babies.”
“Look,” Everett said, “the cognitive issue here is the cultural impediment to doing new things. He doesn’t know there’s a pattern to recognize.”
Everett dismissed the man and asked another Pirahă to come into the hut. A young man appeared, wearing a green-and-yellow 2002 Brazilian World Cup shirt, and sat at the computer. Everett told him to say whether the monkey was going to go upriver or downriver.
Fitch ran the experiment. The man smiled and pointed with his chin whenever the monkey head came to rest.
“The other idea,” Fitch said, “is if we got a bunch of the kids, and whoever points first gets a lollipop.”
“That’s got an element of competition that they won’t go for,” Everett said.
The computer crashed. Convinced that there was a glitch in the software, Fitch picked up the machine and carried it back to the main house to make repairs.
“This is typical of fieldwork in the Amazon, which is why most people don’t do it,” Everett said. “But the problem here is not cognitive; it’s cultural.” He gestured toward the Pirahă man at the table. “Just because we’re sitting in the same room doesn’t mean we’re sitting in the same century.”
By the next morning, Fitch had debugged his software, but other difficulties persisted. One subject, a man in blue nylon running shorts, ignored instructions to listen to the syllables and asked questions about the monkey head: “Is that rubber?” “Does this monkey have a spouse?” “Is it a man?” Another man fell asleep mid-trial (the villagers had been up all night riotously talking and laughing—a common occurrence for a people who do not live by the clock). Meanwhile, efforts to get subjects to focus were hampered by the other tribe members, who had collected outside the hut and held loud conversations that were audible through the screened windows.
-sally (on the library computer, not bothering to log in)
Great story, give that scientist a Segway!
That is a heck of a story. It takes a big turn in the last couple paragraphs when he finally interviews the wife. Her take on the language seems much more complex because she's not trying to make it fit (or not fit) into a pre-defined theory. Of course she's trying to shoe horn them into another pre-defined theory, but from a linguistics perspective her take is refreshing.
I'm pretty ignorant about linguistics, but it makes me wonder if it's suffering from the same problems that semiotics suffered from. Has there been a good feminist critique of linguistics?
Yeah, I think it's very interesting how Everett's rejection of religion makes him blinkered. A little lesson for all those Dawkins acolytes out there.
"Has there been a good feminist critique of linguistics?" short answer: yes; slightly longer answer: I dunno who, though. Will look into it.
"...suffering from the same problems that semiotics suffered from." That's interesting, can you elaborate a bit?
:-) :>|:-(>:-):~/:-J:-]:-#:-O
...or tell me just enough so that I know why I can't use the term in grant apps like we did in the good ole days.
I'm SOOOOO not the guy to be talking about this. If someone with real book learnin' want to jump in I'd be more than happy.
But that said, my take on semiotics is that they were so interested in the model that they kinda lost track of how that model would play in the real world. It took a feminist critique to point out that to try to eliminate race, class and gender from a communication model is to misunderstand the problem. Or rather, you can do it, but what good is it? Like finishing a relay race without the baton.
In this case it's Karen's insistence that she stop what she's doing and relearn the language because the communication is not done simply with vocabulary but a whole range of singing and gestures.
“This language uses prosody much more than any other language I know of,” Keren told me. “It’s not the kind of thing that you can write, and capture, and go back to; you have to watch, and you have to feel it. It’s like someone singing a song. You want to watch and listen and try to sing along with them. So I started doing that, and I began noticing things that I never transcribed, and things I never picked up when I listened to a tape of them, and part of it was the performance."
Thanks Joester, I knew that already, I was just testing you.
ooooh, you're cruisin' for a bruisin'. Wait. Can I say that after I post about feminism? Heck I'm a white guy, I can do whatever I want!
btw, sally and LM, did you know that you are a surfing-club? You're so buzzword hip it hurts!
We are going to get best-before-dates tattooed on our foreheads. (or maybe a Peter Max tattoo, he's timeless)
|
Here are some quotes from a presentation by Yoky Matsuoka on neurobotics (thanks to joseter).
This image is from Matsuoka's presentation. It's a monkey with electrodes in it's head. The brain area is interestingly masked off by a black blob. Dunno if that's to keep the audience from getting sad for the monkey, or if the tech is proprietary and they want to keep it secret, or what. Anyhow, the money's arms are tied down and he's controlling that robotic arm by thinking. But the grasping part of the action is being controlled by a human off to the side with a remote controller, because, as Matusoka says, "that level of detail we can't get yet." They currently working on some superdextrous robotic hands, trying to match up the machinery with the neurology.
- sally mckay 6-04-2008 4:03 pm
Begs the question: if it's only electrodes why not use a human volunteer? Unless of course the monkey's skull has been opened and it's brain is actually exposed for this experiment. Does Matsuoka know any details?
- L.M. 6-04-2008 5:06 pm
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/science/13brain.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
This is the most famous Human case so far. Way less intrusive, but also way less impressive. The monkey experiments looks like vivisection, even if technically it is not.
Morally I'm much more into the experiments on the human. He seems pretty into it.
- joester (guest) 6-04-2008 6:30 pm
There are people doing things with led sensors not probes. I "played" a simple flying game at Berkeley with my mind a couple of years ago, and this company http://www.emotiv.com/ seems to be taking that to the next level. Curiously, Emotive seems to be ignoring the obvious handicapped community in favor of the gaming people. Gamers are not going to be convinced for long unless the gameplay is really solid. Even wicked cool hardware needs a killer app. And they have no sense of the creepy factor either - in the video demo of their product they have a big sign that says "Emotive Systems (We know what you're thinking)". Were I in charge of the company making home brain scans I might tone down the BIG BROTHEResque rhetoric a bit.
From the site:
At Emotiv, we believe that future communication between human and machine will not be limited to the conscious communication that exists today. Users will demand that non-conscious communication play a much more significant role.
Our mission is to create the ultimate interface for the next-generation of human-machine interaction, by evolving the interaction between humans and electronic devices beyond the limitations of conscious interface. Emotiv has created technologies that allow machines to take both conscious and non-conscious inputs directly from your mind.
Applications for Emotiv technology spans numerous industries, however, our immediate target market is entertainment, with a focus on the electronic games industry.
Users will demand that non-conscious communication play a much more significant role? really?
- joester (guest) 6-04-2008 6:49 pm
Meanwhile, I happen to be big in Japan right now! (in the high paced telegraph key collector world)
http://sky.ap.teacup.com/ja7fyf/
- joester (guest) 6-04-2008 6:57 pm
I demand VR goggles. heh heh. those were days.
I can imagine wanting to control the cursor with my brain (maybe). But I'm pretty damn sure I don't want the computer predicting what my brain will want to do and "leaping" there. And what I really really don't want is to be a soldier wired up to a weapon with my thought processes channelled into a preset range of motor responses. I'm not trying to be hyperbolic, it seems like a fairly predictable outcome of this technology.That big brotheresque implications don't seem to be much of problem for neuroscience PR. This quote from the Times article gave me a shiver.
- sally mckay 6-04-2008 8:00 pm
According to this clip from Quirks and Quarks on "robo-monkey" (thanks to b. smiley) they are implanting electrode arrays in the monkey's brain itself, in the motor cortex. Sounds like the same thing they used on Mr. Nagle in the Times article. The guy says that the monkey is initially a "little spooked" by the robotic arm.
Telegraph phones is pretty funny, Joester.
- sally mckay 6-04-2008 8:01 pm
Interesting that the man willing to have the brain implant in Joe's link above (it was a removed a year later...he was using voice control for his computer) is namend Nagle. It was Thomas Nagel who wrote the famous article on consciousness, "What is it like to be a bat?."
- sally mckay 6-04-2008 8:05 pm
I want a quantum cursor that's everywhere at once.
I want a cursor that tells me either it's speed or location but not both.
I wonder what "a little spooked" means to someone willing to do brain surgery on an animal that doesn't need it.
I agree with the military creepyness about this research. It's all done in the name of helping the disability community, but you know there's huge amounts of DARPA money pouring in there too.
- joester (guest) 6-04-2008 9:23 pm
Although, when you thing about it, "predicting" what the brain wants is what good design is all about. Apple has made a killing predicting what you want to do next. The Segway rhetoric is all about "you just think 'forward' and you go".
- joester (guest) 6-04-2008 9:36 pm
As illustrated so well by joester's segway gif:
- L.M. 6-04-2008 10:03 pm
"'predicting' what the brain wants is what good design is all about."
True. I'd want my wheelchair or walker or non-cerbral prosthetic arm or computer or garage-door opener to be designed by people anticipating what I might want.
- sally mckay 6-04-2008 10:16 pm
MS Word auto-fomatting? That friendly little paperclip animation?
- L.M. 6-05-2008 12:00 am
oooooh yeah. That's a darn good example. How'd you like one of them dancing in your cerebral cortex?
- sally mckay 6-05-2008 12:15 am
Anything involving open brains and electrodes in my cerebral cortex scares the bejeesus out of me. But maybe I've been re-watching too many episodes of the X Files lately.
Also, the idea of the computer predicting where you want to go or what you're thinking reminds me of the experiment they did in that John Colapinto article "The Interpreter" that Carol made us read (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto).
- Gabby (guest) 6-05-2008 3:59 pm
“Goddam Chomskyan, can’t even run an experiment.”That is a hilarious anthropological episode. I snipped the bit about the experiment:
Fitch’s experiments were based on the so-called Chomsky hierarchy, a system for classifying types of grammar, ranked in ascending order of complexity. To test the Pirahă’s ability to learn one of the simplest types of grammar, Fitch had written a program in which grammatically correct constructions were represented by a male voice uttering one nonsense syllable (mi or doh or ga, for instance), followed by a female voice uttering a different nonsense syllable (lee or ta or gee). Correct constructions would cause an animated monkey head at the bottom of the computer screen to float to a corner at the top of the screen after briefly disappearing; incorrect constructions (anytime one male syllable was followed by another male syllable or more than one female syllable) would make the monkey head float to the opposite corner. Fitch set up a small digital movie camera behind the laptop to film the Pirahă’s eye movements. In the few seconds’ delay before the monkey head floated to either corner of the screen, Fitch hoped that he would be able to determine, from the direction of the subjects’ unconscious glances, if they were learning the grammar. The experiment, using different stimuli, had been conducted with undergraduates and monkeys, all of whom passed the test. Fitch told me that he had little doubt that the Pirahă would pass. “My expectation coming in here is that they’re going to act just like my Harvard undergrads,” he said. “They’re going to do exactly what every other human has done and they’re going to get this basic pattern. The Pirahă are humans—humans can do this.”
Fitch called for the first subject.
Everett stepped outside the hut and spoke to a short muscular man with a bowl-shaped haircut and heavily calloused bare feet. The man entered the hut and sat down at the computer, which promptly crashed. Fitch rebooted. It crashed again.
“It’s the humidity,” Everett said.
Fitch finally got the computer working, but then the video camera seized up.
“Goddam Chomskyan,” Everett said. “Can’t even run an experiment.”
Eventually, Fitch got all the equipment running smoothly and started the experiment. It quickly became obvious that the Pirahă man was simply watching the floating monkey head and wasn’t responding to the audio cues.
“It didn’t look like he was doing premonitory looking,” Fitch said. “Maybe ask him to point to where he thinks the monkey is going to go.”
“They don’t point,” Everett said. Nor, he added, do they have words for right and left. Instead, they give directions in absolute terms, telling others to head “upriver” or “downriver,” or “to the forest” or “away from the forest.” Everett told the man to say whether the monkey was going upriver or downriver. The man said something in reply.
“What did he say?” Fitch asked.
“He said, ‘Monkeys go to the jungle.’ ”
Fitch grimaced in frustration. “Well, he’s not guessing with his eyes,” he said. “Is there another way he can indicate?”
Everett again told the man to say whether the monkey was going upriver or down. The man made a noise of assent. Fitch resumed the experiment, but the man simply waited until the monkey moved. He followed it with his eyes, laughed admiringly when it came to a stop, then announced whether it had gone upriver or down.
After several minutes of this, Fitch said, on a rising note of panic, “If they fail in the recursion one—it’s not recursion; I’ve got to stop saying that. I mean embedding. Because, I mean, if he can’t get this—”
“This is typical Pirahă,” Everett said soothingly. “This is new stuff, and they don’t do new stuff.”
“But when they’re hunting they must have those skills of visual anticipation,” Fitch said.
“Yeah,” Everett said dryly. “But this is not a real monkey.” He pointed at the grinning animated head bobbing on the screen.
“Fuck!” Fitch said. “If I’d had a joystick for him to hunt the monkey!” He paced a little, then said, “The crazy thing is that this is already more realistic than the experiments Aslin did with babies.”
“Look,” Everett said, “the cognitive issue here is the cultural impediment to doing new things. He doesn’t know there’s a pattern to recognize.”
Everett dismissed the man and asked another Pirahă to come into the hut. A young man appeared, wearing a green-and-yellow 2002 Brazilian World Cup shirt, and sat at the computer. Everett told him to say whether the monkey was going to go upriver or downriver.
Fitch ran the experiment. The man smiled and pointed with his chin whenever the monkey head came to rest.
“The other idea,” Fitch said, “is if we got a bunch of the kids, and whoever points first gets a lollipop.”
“That’s got an element of competition that they won’t go for,” Everett said.
The computer crashed. Convinced that there was a glitch in the software, Fitch picked up the machine and carried it back to the main house to make repairs.
“This is typical of fieldwork in the Amazon, which is why most people don’t do it,” Everett said. “But the problem here is not cognitive; it’s cultural.” He gestured toward the Pirahă man at the table. “Just because we’re sitting in the same room doesn’t mean we’re sitting in the same century.”
By the next morning, Fitch had debugged his software, but other difficulties persisted. One subject, a man in blue nylon running shorts, ignored instructions to listen to the syllables and asked questions about the monkey head: “Is that rubber?” “Does this monkey have a spouse?” “Is it a man?” Another man fell asleep mid-trial (the villagers had been up all night riotously talking and laughing—a common occurrence for a people who do not live by the clock). Meanwhile, efforts to get subjects to focus were hampered by the other tribe members, who had collected outside the hut and held loud conversations that were audible through the screened windows.
-sally (on the library computer, not bothering to log in)
- anonymous (guest) 6-05-2008 8:29 pm
Great story, give that scientist a Segway!
- L.M. 6-05-2008 8:38 pm
That is a heck of a story. It takes a big turn in the last couple paragraphs when he finally interviews the wife. Her take on the language seems much more complex because she's not trying to make it fit (or not fit) into a pre-defined theory. Of course she's trying to shoe horn them into another pre-defined theory, but from a linguistics perspective her take is refreshing.
I'm pretty ignorant about linguistics, but it makes me wonder if it's suffering from the same problems that semiotics suffered from. Has there been a good feminist critique of linguistics?
- joester (guest) 6-06-2008 6:17 pm
Yeah, I think it's very interesting how Everett's rejection of religion makes him blinkered. A little lesson for all those Dawkins acolytes out there.
"Has there been a good feminist critique of linguistics?" short answer: yes; slightly longer answer: I dunno who, though. Will look into it.
"...suffering from the same problems that semiotics suffered from." That's interesting, can you elaborate a bit?
- sally mckay 6-06-2008 6:27 pm
:-) :>|:-(>:-):~/:-J:-]:-#:-O
...or tell me just enough so that I know why I can't use the term in grant apps like we did in the good ole days.
- L.M. 6-06-2008 7:06 pm
I'm SOOOOO not the guy to be talking about this. If someone with real book learnin' want to jump in I'd be more than happy.
But that said, my take on semiotics is that they were so interested in the model that they kinda lost track of how that model would play in the real world. It took a feminist critique to point out that to try to eliminate race, class and gender from a communication model is to misunderstand the problem. Or rather, you can do it, but what good is it? Like finishing a relay race without the baton.
In this case it's Karen's insistence that she stop what she's doing and relearn the language because the communication is not done simply with vocabulary but a whole range of singing and gestures.
“This language uses prosody much more than any other language I know of,” Keren told me. “It’s not the kind of thing that you can write, and capture, and go back to; you have to watch, and you have to feel it. It’s like someone singing a song. You want to watch and listen and try to sing along with them. So I started doing that, and I began noticing things that I never transcribed, and things I never picked up when I listened to a tape of them, and part of it was the performance."
- joester (guest) 6-06-2008 9:19 pm
Thanks Joester, I knew that already, I was just testing you.
- sally mckay 6-06-2008 9:29 pm
ooooh, you're cruisin' for a bruisin'. Wait. Can I say that after I post about feminism? Heck I'm a white guy, I can do whatever I want!
btw, sally and LM, did you know that you are a surfing-club? You're so buzzword hip it hurts!
- joester (guest) 6-06-2008 9:44 pm
We are going to get best-before-dates tattooed on our foreheads. (or maybe a Peter Max tattoo, he's timeless)
- L.M. 6-06-2008 10:03 pm