Brain Science is everywhere these days. If you're interested, you can study neurocomputing, neuromarketing, neuroeconomics, neuromusicology, neuroaesthetics (which is what I'm studying) and more.
As I complained recently to Joester, its getting a little ridiculous with all the neuro-this and neuro-that, as if everything we've ever produced as a species wasn't influenced by our brains. That prompted Joester to coin a useful new term: neurobrains. Joester didn't define his term, but I'm going to take a stab at it. Neurobrains refers to the state of the human brain in a heightened mode of disassociation. It's a cognitive state in which all of the autonomic systems (the ones that regulate physiological activity without us having to think about it) are intentionally and theoretically isolated from thought and intention. Human volition and free will are treated like a pretension — a myth that needs de-bunking — while the autonomic systems are welcomed like long lost Moms and Dads ("tell us what to do!"). Neurobrains is a theoretical and scientific mode of analysis, obviously reliant on higher-order processing and cognition, but, ironically, it devalues higher order processing and cognition in favour of unconscious behaviour.
read more...
Art historian Barbara Stafford, in her book on neuroaesthetics — Echo Objects — worries that the predominance of research on unconscious brain systems reinforces a model that the brain is self-organising and autopoietic. She quotes Particia Churchland, who estimates that 90% of the brain is devoted to unconscious processes.* Stafford thinks that, given the spectrum of modern technologies that speak to isolated brain processes and produce immersive environments, we really had better devote more research to the remaining 10% that is devoted to the conscious outward direction of attention (Barbara Stafford lecture online here). I have to agree. What does it really matter what the ratio is? That 10% makes up the bulk of our experience as communicative social beings. You've got to figure it's pretty important.
One thing I've learned from reading up on the science of brain/mind is that modeling consciousness as the sum of a bunch of modular processes is getting to be kind of old hat, at least on the philosophical front. You can't make human (or human-like) intelligence out of mechanical bits and bobs. Human consciousness requires a brain, in a body, with a history, in communication with other human brain/bodies in a culture with a history in communication with other cultures with histories. You need contingency, variability, and feedback if you want to get to consciousness; but escaping from the challenge of contingency is what neurobrains is all about.
I'm not knocking neurobrains. It's extremely illuminating to learn about the autonomic systems. I don't doubt that much of our perception, and even our action, is dictated according to our neural structures. But those structures are in constant flux, responding to environmental stimuli. That's what brain plasticity is all about. I forgot to mention neural-Darwinism above. Check out this great interview with Gerald Edelman, who insists that the brain is nothing like a computer because the environment is nothing like pre-programmed software. Brains and society are co-evolved and can't be disentangled. In short, neurobrains is a useful analytic mode, but if you spend all your energy there you are missing out on the good stuff.
*note: Neuroaestheticians who focus exclusively on autonomic systems, like Semir Zeki and VS Ramachandran, tend to also speak pretty much exclusively about the formal properties of artwork. It's not exactly a surprise that the modernist impulse to formalism correlates so neatly with computational and modular conceptions of the mind/brain. Art historians, such as Rosalind Krauss, who have challenged the pure, transcendent opticality of modernist formalism invoke embodied perception — vision as a process of both physiology and cognition — as part of their arguments. More on this later...
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Brain Science is everywhere these days. If you're interested, you can study neurocomputing, neuromarketing, neuroeconomics, neuromusicology, neuroaesthetics (which is what I'm studying) and more.
As I complained recently to Joester, its getting a little ridiculous with all the neuro-this and neuro-that, as if everything we've ever produced as a species wasn't influenced by our brains. That prompted Joester to coin a useful new term: neurobrains. Joester didn't define his term, but I'm going to take a stab at it. Neurobrains refers to the state of the human brain in a heightened mode of disassociation. It's a cognitive state in which all of the autonomic systems (the ones that regulate physiological activity without us having to think about it) are intentionally and theoretically isolated from thought and intention. Human volition and free will are treated like a pretension — a myth that needs de-bunking — while the autonomic systems are welcomed like long lost Moms and Dads ("tell us what to do!"). Neurobrains is a theoretical and scientific mode of analysis, obviously reliant on higher-order processing and cognition, but, ironically, it devalues higher order processing and cognition in favour of unconscious behaviour.
read more...
- sally mckay 9-03-2009 1:59 pm
Art historian Barbara Stafford, in her book on neuroaesthetics — Echo Objects — worries that the predominance of research on unconscious brain systems reinforces a model that the brain is self-organising and autopoietic. She quotes Particia Churchland, who estimates that 90% of the brain is devoted to unconscious processes.* Stafford thinks that, given the spectrum of modern technologies that speak to isolated brain processes and produce immersive environments, we really had better devote more research to the remaining 10% that is devoted to the conscious outward direction of attention (Barbara Stafford lecture online here). I have to agree. What does it really matter what the ratio is? That 10% makes up the bulk of our experience as communicative social beings. You've got to figure it's pretty important.
One thing I've learned from reading up on the science of brain/mind is that modeling consciousness as the sum of a bunch of modular processes is getting to be kind of old hat, at least on the philosophical front. You can't make human (or human-like) intelligence out of mechanical bits and bobs. Human consciousness requires a brain, in a body, with a history, in communication with other human brain/bodies in a culture with a history in communication with other cultures with histories. You need contingency, variability, and feedback if you want to get to consciousness; but escaping from the challenge of contingency is what neurobrains is all about.
I'm not knocking neurobrains. It's extremely illuminating to learn about the autonomic systems. I don't doubt that much of our perception, and even our action, is dictated according to our neural structures. But those structures are in constant flux, responding to environmental stimuli. That's what brain plasticity is all about. I forgot to mention neural-Darwinism above. Check out this great interview with Gerald Edelman, who insists that the brain is nothing like a computer because the environment is nothing like pre-programmed software. Brains and society are co-evolved and can't be disentangled. In short, neurobrains is a useful analytic mode, but if you spend all your energy there you are missing out on the good stuff.
*note: Neuroaestheticians who focus exclusively on autonomic systems, like Semir Zeki and VS Ramachandran, tend to also speak pretty much exclusively about the formal properties of artwork. It's not exactly a surprise that the modernist impulse to formalism correlates so neatly with computational and modular conceptions of the mind/brain. Art historians, such as Rosalind Krauss, who have challenged the pure, transcendent opticality of modernist formalism invoke embodied perception — vision as a process of both physiology and cognition — as part of their arguments. More on this later...
- sally mckay 9-03-2009 2:00 pm