Clockwork Android	Central Telephone Exchange, New York City, 1880
Philip Lieberman (cognitive linguist), Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain: The Subcortical Bases of Speech, Syntax, and Thought, (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 2002) Historically, the most complex piece of machinery of an epoch serves as a metaphor for the brain. The metaphor seems to take on a life of its own and becomes a neurophysiological model. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the brain was often compared to a clock or chronometer. During the first part of the twentieth century the model usually was a telephone exchange, and since the 1950s a digital computer. Mechanical-biological analogies, of course, are not limited to neurophsyciology. Physicians bled feverish patients in the early nineteenth century because of a false analogy between blood temperature and steam engines. Early steem engines frequently exploded as pressure increased at high operating temperatures. Safety valves then were invented that released superheated pressure. Hence it followed that bleeding would reduce temperature. As a result of this false analogy, the chances of survival for soldiers wounded at Waterloo were greater if they had not been treated by surgeons immediately after battle. In its own way, the analogy between biological brains and digital comptuers is as fatal for understanding the neural bases of human language." (pp.23-24)
The Medicinal Leech	Locomotive Steam Engine

this interests me. I've always thought the "mind is like a computer" analogy was a weak one, but did not realize there was such an elegant historical president.

My teaching research is leading me to try and fish out the interesting bits of Homo Ludens from the mucky racist sexist murk that is 1930 white male European academia. It's a chore.
In essence Huizinga is trying to say that religious rituals have play elements at their core. To soften this blow, he uses "lesser" "savage" religions and rituals as his example, then at the end of the chapter blows our minds by saying maybe our "civilized" religions are not so different ... but leaves this as a hanging open question. Of course inside of this racist argument are some really interesting points. What a fuckwad.

the steam engine/mind animation looks like Maxwell's daemon diagrams.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maxwell%27s_demon.svg
Maybe if you could combine the two you'd have a real model for the human brain? (or at the very least solve the energy crisis).


- joester (guest) 2-12-2009 8:53 pm

sorry for all the spaces at the end of the post. I had more to say that I erased, but left the returns somehow.
- joester (guest) 2-12-2009 8:55 pm

The cognitive psychology folks are definitely not down with the brain/computer analogy, and the neuroscience folks seem to be backing away slowly. The whole mind/body, mind/brain, brain/body split issue is huge. There are lots of folks in neuroscience insisting that you need to factor society and culture into the equation if you want to explain consciousness. It's groovy.

I read a bit of Homo Ludens on Google books. I didn't get to the racist bits yet.

no worries about the white space. Just pretend its a design feature.
- sally mckay 2-13-2009 12:51 am

I have the magical powers to fix the white space at the bottom of joester's comment but I'm leaving it in since it has embarrassed and humbled him.

I went to a lecture by Ursula Franklin years ago, she started it by requesting that we dispense with those useless (and at the time ubiquitous) analogies between computer technologies and human minds. What Ursula says goes.
- L.M. 2-13-2009 1:44 am

But leeches are back! What now?
http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2004/504_leech.html

- rob (guest) 2-13-2009 2:37 am

Oh yeah- once I recalled a dream I had where I was buying coffee, and the guy in the shop put down a big bucket of live leeches to go put a fresh pot of coffee on, and then I remembered I wasn't remembering a dream. it was real. I was in Minnesota.
Oh yeah^2: I have your Audels steam engine book, Sally. You probably want that back.
- rob (guest) 2-13-2009 2:41 am

That's a good non-dream, Rob! Leeches I could handle better than medical maggots.

Audels...big ticket e-bay item?
- sally mckay 2-13-2009 3:09 am

never has my mouse hand quivered more than over the "medical Maggot" link. Phew, all text. easy peasy (not that I read it. yuck!)


- joester (guest) 2-13-2009 6:44 am

Homo Ludens is actually not that bad. Huizinga trying to insist that "play" is a basic human condition, not a means to an end. We don't play to learn how to fight or have sex, or prey or create society. We play, and in doing so our play informs all those things. Play, however, is at the root of the human condition, before we impose these extra roles upon it. Pretty heady stuff for it's time and the bible for game design since.
To back this up, he uses the language of anthropology that white European males tend to use in the 30's ie. lot's of "Noble Savage" shit. That he is actually empowering rather than disenfranchising these "nobel savages" he's talking so abusively about is a hard to teach, because the language is so hard to get past. Believe me I, have 25 unhappy students who would rather be making pong remakes to show for it. :(

(links to fun pong projects will be sent to the proprietors of this blog, however, I cannot guarantee that they will be posted. Hopefully they will, but sally mckay and L.M. are a fickle bunch. Britney Spears pong with a baby as the ball anyone?).
- joester (guest) 2-13-2009 7:03 am

I did a google images search for medical maggots and instantly regretted it a great great deal. I really really really hope I never need that particular service. YES to fun pong projects. NO to maggots.
- sally mckay 2-13-2009 4:20 pm