Learning to Be

Body #1: Insides, Outsides, Passivity and Activity in a Visit to the Dentist

2011-12-13T17:15:00.000-08:00

Today I had to go to the dentist, mostly for a checkup and cleaning of teeth. My main attitude in this situation is to relax and sort of take a nap while I'm being worked on. I don't usually get opportunities to lie down in a comfy chair mid-day, so why not, and this makes some of the unpleasantness of the dentist go away. Of course, this usually opens room for thinking, and then reflections on being made an object, i.e., on me being taken up not as a lived body (as Merleau-Ponty would put it) but as a thing.

This is especially so when I pay attention to and am appreciative of just what the dentist or hygienist is doing , which is scraping away toughly impacted tartar with great finesse and nuance without injuring me, and when I note how doing this requires the dentist or hygienist planting fingers on my jaw with a fair bit of force so as to give a firm platform for fine tool work. All this makes me experience myself not just as an object being operated on, but as a sort of ground or firmament for someone else's work, as if I were not just a thing being worked on by a carpenter, but the carpenter's bench as well.

Today I noticed something further on these lines, when the hygienist's use of my lower jaw as stabilizing platform led to my head being pushed back and forth. This made me realize how weak my neck is at holding my head against these forces. And then when the hygienist shift to my upper jaw, all of a sudden my head became more stable.

What was really interesting was at just this point I became aware of my body as if from the inside. I felt my neck bones holding up my skull, and my skull levered off the front of this neck post, and my lower jaw hinging down from my head. The feeling was somewhat kin to feeling, in the dark of a hotel room, how a cupboard you are trying to open is in fact a folding according door and thereby feeling how solids are hinged together, or again, feeling the flexibility of different thickness and kinds of rope in flopping them about. Only in this case, the feeling was for the insides of my own body, insides that I don't usually feel as material objects at all. I inhabit the world from the position of my head, I don't feel the bony scaffold that holds it up inside. But in this moment I did.

What is notable here is that feeling arose through my being passive to the hygienist's manipulations. It was someone else manipulating me as object who gave me for a feel for these inside articulations. To feel things we need to be passive to them. But we are not often passive to our own bodies, or the deep passivity one might have to the heft and workings of one's body is overwritten with living one's body toward the world.

Art #2: Statuary & Statutory Animacy

2011-12-07T19:59:00.000-08:00

In which the author learns about animacy from a statue.

Phenomenon: The strike by support staff at McGill is now over, so I've resumed my usual walk to work through McGill campus. It was nice to be back on old turf, and as I was walking through I found a familiar fellow catching my eye and then my whole attention, pulling me round to give a gander as I passed him by:

This is a statue of James McGill. What really caught me (and what my absence from campus let come to the fore, I hadn't quite noticed it before, it was all too familiar) is the flapping of his coat tails in the wind (not so much the gentle clapping of hand to head to keep his hat in place). This flapping isn't as noticeable in the photo; it's much more compelling when you're walking by on equal footing with him, in the round. (I noticed that right way: my iPhone screen caught him dead, took the wind right out of his sails.) [You should know that McGill himself is reported on various website to be a slave owner; this is also stated in the book James McGill of Montreal (search for slave/slaves). My affection here is for the statue, not for the fellow himself.]

Wonder: How is that I am caught by and see: coat tails blowing in the wind, not just a solid, fixed piece of bronze? How is that I perceive animacy in a statue? (Two related phenomena that I ran into many years ago in a Merleau-Ponty reading group that met at the Green Room in Toronto: I walk into meet the group and find myself skirting around a person so as not to have him step into me, only to realize the person is in fact a mannequin; and then I find the group, and think there are some more mannequins behind them, but it turns out they are real people, actors practicing freezes. This is a true story, with witnesses; the coincidences are explained by the fact that the Green Room wasan actors hangout with the mannequins as a deliberately theatrical prop.)

Insights and answers after the jump...

Methodological framework: This is a case in which a curiously compelling phenomenon gives an insight into something bigger, viz. waht the philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone would call the primacy of movement. Indeed, I think the phenomenon helps give insight into Sheets-Johnstone's concept of animacy. This is curious. Sheets-Johnstone is a philosopher of movement and also a dancer, and very often feels her way into animacy by describing dance and movement from within. How perverse, then, to appeal to a statue! But the wondrous and insight prompting thing is that the statue compels me to see it as moving. In fact, I think he caught me in a bit of dance this morning, wrong-footing me on my stroll as I got caught and wrenched round by him, until I figured out what the flap was all about. So bear with me.

It would be easy to say that the phenomenon is an illusion, in the sense of a mistake of perception. A mere trick, jiggery-pokery, wherein the sculptor (David Roper-Curzon) fools the eye into seeing movement where there is only inanimate metal.

But, I have read the philosopher Merleau-Ponty too many times to buy into seemingly easy claims about illusions. (Here I'll do a lit bit more technical stuff, to nail a methodological point, so you can skip this if you want.) Basically, Merleau-Ponty teaches us to start analyses of such phenomena by taking our sense of the perceived phenomenon on its own terms--and then let that teach us something about what it is that perception really perceives. In general what this shows is that we do not in the first instance perceive an objective world, and then overlay it with our own values or judgement: we perceive things as they matter to us. The ecological psychologist would say that we perceive what the world affords us, as creatures having a certain ecological relation to our surround.

Put another way, we grasp the world as already interpreted according to our evolved, habitual and culvitated interests. I'm certain that you, dear reader, have made errors in proof reading, and you realize that you've done so because you do not so much read the letters there on the page, as what you anticipate interpreting in what you are reading as a whole. Maybe you've read a sentence you've read a million times and have not actually seen the errors in it. Similarly with perception. E.g., Merleau-Ponty famously argues that in the case of the Müller-Lyer figure, it's not the case that vision as it were apprehends several line segments, wherein the horizontal ones are visually or objectively the same length, and then assembles these into arrow figures, and then mistakenly judges that the figure with open arrowheads is longer. When we become fluent readers we don't see, piece by piece, the letters that go into words, or the words that go into sentences. We chunk out words and sentences as a whole. Similarly, as fluent seers, we chunk the Müller-Lyer figure in two, wherein the top figure is (to lean on Melville a bit) is a squinchy, pinchy, crabby sort of fellow, scrunched in by the outward arrows with their inner closing arms, and the bottom one is a loosey, goosey fellow, flapped out through open arrow arms. And these two figures, in virtue of the way they fall together for evolved human vision compose themselves each with an altogether different sense of breadth and expanse than the other, such that if the eye must compare them, one is longer than the other. Compare a case of taking a musical piece composed as a stately adagio and playing it three times as fast as it should be played: it doesn't sound like an adagio played too fast, it sounds foolish or nutty; the very structure of the adagio sets up its own playing speed, its own stately standard. (By the way, did you catch the typo I deliberately introduced many sentences back?)

What we want to do here is not label the phenomenon as a mistake that our eyes make, but take the experience described on its own term, and figure out what this means. I perceive the statue as moving. I'm not an idiot. I know it's a statue. I know it's not moving. Yet: I perceive it as moving. The coat catches me as flapping in the wind, in the way that the mannequin in the Green Room caught me as person who might step into my way and that I ought not bump into.

What does it mean that my perceptual engagement with world can, as it were, squeeze animacy into what is not at all moving? (One thing to note here is that the phenomenon clearly involves various cultivated expectations. If we all started starching our coats like mad so they swept out behind us in duck tails, and I were habituated to this, no doubt I would see no movement in Mr. McGill's coat, and no wind breezing cross him. I would just see a fashionable fellow out for a jaunt.)

Insight: I think the phenomenon means this: we can encounter animacy not in something moving from point A to b in an already pre-established space. In our movement and moving engagement with the world, we are wont to encounter certain figures as in themselves animate, as from within themselves establishing and manifesting their own movement possibilities and space of movement. The blowing coattails do not objectively move. Yet in our moving round them, and given our habits of reading movement in things, we are wont to encounter them as having inner animacy. They are rather like a cat ready to pounce: the very coiled stillness of the cat is what registers its pounciness and its moving sequel. But the coattails go a little further: their very stolidity (their obstinacy against the pull of gravity, perhaps) already registers them as billowing and sailing in the wind.

But return to the key conceptual point: something does not have to actually change location from A to B for us to encounter it as animate. Rather, things that have a certain way of shaping, bearing and comporting themselves in our world, in our familiar environment, in relation to our moving bodies, can catch us as animate. (Another example: the shadow whose sudden increase in size on the wall is experience as a case of a 3d figure looming at us.) This helps show that there is a certain sense of animacy that can establish itself and that resonates with our bodies that is not founded on a change of location in an already given objective space, but is rather anchored in a kind of change that establishes or enacts its own space of movement. As a rough analogy, this is kin to a musical composition that itself establishes its own tempo of playing, prior to any given metric of time in which its event could be 'located' in clock time. In this space of animacy, movements have a sense that does not have to do with changes of location, but with movement in a much more primordial and strange sense, movement manifest in a pre-objective animate form that we might try to capture with terms like contractility, explosivity, etc., where the contraction itself establishes the terms of contraction. Pre-objective animate movement is what we catch in a rock ready to fall, the leaf trembling in the wind, the bird arcing in air, the hand ready to greet as beckoning and orienting us--before analysis. This is rather like the sentence chunked out as a whole before parsed into its elements--and note that usually if you just you stick with the sentence elements you lose its overall sense.

I'd wager that in addition to the sculptors, the folks at Pixar and Disney, and the magicians, know quite a lot about these pre-objective movement forms, because that's what we really see. For what the above further implies (once we add further evidence from phenomenology and science) is that it these pre-objective movement forms that we have evolved, grown, learnt, habituated and cultivated ourselves to catch and latch on to. These not only can catch us, but these are the movements that first of all catch us, that human infants first respond, to for example: smiles, or tongues sticking out, forms uncoiling and describing their own animacy, not points moving in space. We encounter the world not as inanimate things that move about, but as a having a more fundamental 'statuatory animacy' for our moving bodies. And this should not surprise us, for what moves is what most of all matters to us. What moves is what can get you or help you. Living through this educates us into parsing out the world into things, locations, changes of location. But that's not what we first of all encounter in living perception.

Finally, I've worked through this in order to help me get a better handle on what Maxine Sheets-Johnstone is working to articulate in her efforts to not have us not confuse animacy with motor changes, and when she tries to return us to movement in a primordial sense. If you go through the exercise of trying to catch what it is that moves in the statue, then I think this help you can catch on to what she is saying. No doubt I have not lived up to her rigour here, but this is a part of the process.

Further reading:
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement; for a synopsis of some central points in a recent and innovative article, see Movement and mirror neurons: a challenging and choice conversation.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. "Eye and Mind." In The Primacy of Perception. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (See especially the passage on the statue bestriding space, in comparison to the Mubridge pictures.)

Phenomenon #2: Pears, Pairing and Thinking Symbols in the Body

2010-01-23T09:56:00.000-08:00

In which the author learns about the bodily nature of symbols shopping for pears.

Description: I am at Segal's (aka 4001 St. Laurent), doing shopping, for the first time in too long a time. I see some pears (Bosc) and reach for them. Their sense for me in this reaching is not: pear-as-biological-fruit or even pear-as-produce, but pear-as-something-my-partner-particularly-likes-in-a-special-kind-of-way. I.e., I am not reaching for them as mere fruit, but as connecting me up with home, my partner, love, my life. The reaching is not mere motor-perceptual-movement here in this store, but emotional and futurally expansive (already involved in something far beyond this-here-moment, with that something beyond, its futurity, itself a theme, vs. the kind of extension beyond the moment inherent in any ongoing moment).

In this very reaching, something else appears. This is Vito Corleone's gesture (beautifully and compellingly acted by Robert de Niro in Godfather: Part II) of taking a pear (carefully wrapped in protective newspaper) from his pocket, unwrapping it and proudly, tenderly, concentratedly, affirmatively, and gently setting it on the kitchen table to surprise his wife with a gift, as if this pear, or this pear as enabling this giving gesture, is the centre of the world, or something on which a shared life can be centred. (This is after Vito has unjustly lost his job to Don Fanucci's nephew.)

And then at the same moment, in my feeling the pear, and having this 'image' appear, I also feel or notice (for what I think (I am thinking this at Segal's, in the moment of reaching) is the first time) something else. What I notice is the resonance between: this gesture of Vito's, the bulbuousness of the pear (which I am feeling bodily in-hand, in having this image, and as the way to this image) and its tender wrapping; with the moment later in the film where Vito, in preparation for assassinating Fanucci, carefully unscrews the lightbulb on the landing outside Fanucci's apartment, using a cloth (his handkerchief? the towel that he later uses to silence the gun and that catches on fire?) to keep his hand from being burnt. In both cases he is reached and holding the bulb (of fruit/light) from beneath, through a little twisting gesture. And I think (in Segal's in this very moment): here is yet another dimension of the film's imagery, and another instance of cross-cutting life and death through fruit, since I connect the pear with: the orange proffered by Johnny Ola, as a gift from Hyman Roth to Michael, as connected to the bag of oranges from Israel that Hyman Roth drops when he is assassinated at the end of the film. (Not to mention Michael's struggling to down orange juice to stave off diabetic shock in part III, Vito's carving up the orange to scare his nephew with orange teeth and then dying at the end of part I--and Vito being shot in part I as is he is trying to buy three oranges, presumably to give to his wife at Christmas time. (NB that he doesn't succeed in buying them, they are given to him by the fruit-seller.)

Observation: What's interesting here is the complex sense in this situation, and the way it depends on body, pairing of bodies, art and more--and the way my thinking about connections in the film happens in this bodily movement. I am figuring out things that I now think about the film in my lived-body as moving.

It would be too much to go into all the detail, but the sense "pear" here is for me not just in it (the pear) as object perceived through my psychophysical-sensory organism, but in my lived body as feeling-emotional, as living with my partner's bodily relation to pears; and then this is paired and overlaid with deeper senses of fruit, gestures of giving, sharing, as caught up in love, life, death, through a kind of pairing felt in my lived bodily reaching with Vito Corleone's lived-bodily giving gesture (i.e. the filmed image of Robert de Niro's acting body); and then all this opens something on my part that isn't just seeing-touching-feeling-emotion, but a thought about a film. So there is a striking continuity between bodies, perception, thinking here.

One other thought at this point is that it would not at all be outrageous to say that in this phenomenon the pear is appearing as what we would usually call a symbol. Its sense for me is not biological-fruit but fruit in its symbolic dimension as symbol of life, death, future, food, sharing, love, etc.; it is symbol of this insofar as it is, biologically, the protection and food for the biological seed.

But what this phenomenon suggests is that the "as" in this symbol-experience is not an intellectual "as". The fruit is not there as symbol of life, etc., because I am thinking that symbolic connection intellectually (as if I am inferring from its being a seed to what it might indicate on a symbolic register). Rather, I am feeling that connection in a lived-bodily way, in what I/we do with things like fruit with one another in life. Put another way, it is not because fruit, for some intellectual reason, through some sort of intellectual analysis, is understood to be a possible symbol of life, connection, sharing, that it becomes such a symbol. Rather, it is because fruit invites the bodily-feeling gesture of, e.g., Vito offering it to his wife in the way that he does, that it gesturally concentrates certain feeling connections we have to one another in this way, that fruit can become symbol. To put it in Merleau-Ponteian terms, fruit is not in the first instance a symbol in virtue of an existing convention (via secondary speech/language). Rather it gains its symbolic sense in instances of expressive gestures such as we see Vito making (via primary speech/language), and in these gestures it is the fruit itself, in its role in life, that invites symbolic investment.

Of course, all the above is complicated by the fact that my experience and the movie is coming out of a culture/history in which it happens to be fruit (rather than say, grains or vegetables) that have come to bear a particularly central symbolic weight with respect to these issues (via, especially, the Adam and Eve story, where "apple" in the Hebrew really just means fruit; and note that "apple" in English originally did just have this meaning, hence the "apple of my eye," meaning the round sphere of it, "pineapple"; and "pomegranate," and similarly "pomme de terre" for potato in French and "pomodoro" for tomato in Italian.) This is to say that historically and culturally instituted senses are at play here--not simply lived-bodily institutions.

But the insight that I think is at issue here is that the symbolic sense of things might have as its first institution the lived body, as paired with others, as part of life, etc., as touching and handling nodes of meaning in things around.

This would be another way of approaching thinking as inherently bodily. And insofar as many have argued that thinking is inherently symbolic/metaphorical, and also thereby bodily, there may be something important being noticed here. Have to perhaps go back to Sheets-Johnstone on the Roots of Thinking here, and Lakoff and Johnson, and perhaps Cassirer too in his study of symbolic forms.

Art#1: Spatial Music, the Music of Space

2009-11-13T17:56:00.000-08:00

Description: There's a new art work (or at least new to me) installed outdoors in the Place des Arts in Montreal. It's on the side of the building on the north west corner of St Urbain and Ste Catherine. The building is one of those well, let's say, kind of ugly, probably late 60s vintage buildings, when concrete was the new thing, and blocky cubiness was good. The concrete in the outer walls is vertically ribbed and textured. For the installation thin vertical strips of what look to be LEDs are placed in the crevices between the ribs, on the wall running along St. Catherine and up St. Urbain. They are illuminated in rhythmed patterns, that involve all the strips, both turning them off and on, and dim and brighten them in what look to be a relatively large number of levels. Sometimes the strips flash in simple alternation, but then more complex patterns develop. In the small time I watched, one thing seemed to be that there weren't any traveling patterns, i.e., successive strips lighting up in successively different positions, so there were no effects like lights appearing to circle around a theatre marquee. (I couldn't find anything about this installation on the web.)

What was striking about this phenomenon is that after about a minute of watching this, I clearly experienced it as music. Music without sound, but clearly having the sort of rhythmed countour of a bunch of people playing jazz with one another, or perhaps drumming together, playing a minimalist piece like Terry Riley's In C, or playing in hocket style, as in the polyphonic music tradition of the Banda, in which music a group of players who are playing instruments that can only play a small number of notes, throw their few notes back and forth, create complex polyphonic patterns.

Question: So, first: interesting to experience light as music. But second: I've watched many animated films that aspire to manifest music in visual form, e.g., the work of Oskar Fischinger, but inevitably experience this as an effort to translate music into something else, that doesn't work. Perhaps this is because such films typically have the music playing along with the visuals.

But I wonder if this might be because of the spatial layout and breadth of the installation. When watching an animated film that aspires to visually show music, one grasps one picture that is internally articulating and morphing. The experience of this sculpture is more like watching independent things in the world resonating rhythmically with one another, synching, desynching, lagging, splaying spatially and temporally. I wonder if this might have to do with the phenomenon. If there's anything right to this, I wonder what this might say about music. Does music catch us because synched up spatially distributed movements of the world--the leaves blowing and pulsing across the orchard, the grass swaying and ruffling, the kids playing, the dancers dancing, the dogs circling, the gazelles stotting and bouncing, the horses galloping with legs in counterpoint--also catch us? Might there be a music of space, a way in which we sense our way through it because of its cross rhythms? This might be conceptualized as an elaboration of the sort of affordance offered by vection of the visual field in Gibson's accounts. And something like this might be at play in the visual rhythm of the colonnade, and so on.

Phenomenon #1: Digits vs. the Visual Expanse they Occupy

2009-10-24T20:35:00.000-07:00

In brief: The legibility of digits in a crossed out or highlighted series appears to block quick location of the next digit in the series to cross out.

Description: Today I was helping a friend do a manual tally of her teaching evaluations. To do this I set up a Word document with a table. In the table there was a row for each question we were to tally, with blank boxes in the row for each score on the rating scale (Excellent, Very good, etc.--lots of excellents in fact!). The plan was to record, in each box, the number of evaluations with a given score, as she read the scores aloud. Specifically, the plan was to use the tallying strategy where you make a vertical stroke for each item, up to four strokes, and then make a horizontal stroke through the group, to count five. I thought this would make for easier totalling at the end.

But it turns out that when you're doing multiple counts in different boxes, and looking from box to box, it's hard to quickly see whether there are four strokes in the group, i.e., whether a horizontal stroke is called for. (It's very different if you're doing just one count, in which case the four vertical strokes, then one horizontal, system works well.)

So, I came up with another idea. In each box, I typed the following:

0 :               1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1 :            0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
2 :            0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
3 :            0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
4 :            0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
5 :            0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

That way, all I had to do was cross off the digits in sequence, and at the end of the tally, I could read off the count. (E.g., if the digits up until 3 in the third row were crossed off, the count was 23.)

But still there was a perceptual problem. I was doing multiple counts, in a table with six rows and six columns. And to fit the numbers in, they were very small and crowded together. Searching for the right box, and then quickly, without thinking, seeing and locating the next number to be crossed off was still difficult. Crossing out ticked off numbers with a diagonal stroke in blue ink didn't work very well in making the location of the next number stand out. Too hard to see the numbers stroked out. So, I tried a highlighter. Much better. As you spotted, bingo-like, the numbers, a sort of bar extended across the counted numbers. But, it was still strangely hard to see instantly where the next number to be marked off was. More, the highlighters was a bit splotchy. So, I tried diagonal strokes with a red pen, and then scratch outs with a red pen.

Then, by luck, I tried the thing that worked, and had a pragmatic and conceptual epiphany. Making a sort of gamma shaped loop in blue ink through a digit (like a fish with its head pointing down and its tail up the page) made the task very easy.

Observation: I think the key here is that the gamma shaped loop made the digit unreadable. I think this is because the loop crossed the digit's figure in enough--and the right--places to make that figure illegible as a digit. Like camouflage making an animal body be hard to see, it broke up the boundaries of the figure.

So the digit no longer appeared as: crossed-out digit; or: differently-coloured-digit; but: as not a digit at all.

What's interesting here is that the highlighted digits had a different gestalt than the unreadable digits: the former were: a row of digits with a bar of coloured dots over top; the latter, a series of other figures, followed by a digit. And in the former case it was harder to search for the next digit to mark.

Now this is a bit odd, because the bar of coloured dots is pretty clearly visible, and its pretty clearly visible where it stops, and yet it was hard to land with precision on the next number, and to see the numbers that had been dotted as counted off or used up.

I would suggest this is because in a sequence of digits (say 1 2 3 4 5) with pink highlighter over them, two things were visually overlaid: 1) A series of legible digits, which extended into the next digits, 6 and 7, and so did not mark off the 6 as different than the 5, and thence as: the next digit to be marked off. 2) That series of digits as grouped by colour into a gestalt. But, there is a sort of rivalry between these two things: the legible digits still call to be read as digits, over and above the visual expanse they occupy, or the tinting of that expanse, or that expanse as a gestalt.

So, methinks I should search for literature on rivalry and distinctions between visual and digit/letter perceptual channels.

Also: I wonder if people with number-colour synaesthesia might have a different experience of the problem I've outlined above. Also: I wonder if part of learning to read is learning to have this sort of rivalry, i.e. if you can't read digits as such, then the digits won't compete with highlighting. But then we could also test for things that would compete. I'd bet that for infants, little happy faces would compete.

Also, this reminds me of a dissocation in which subjects who experience themselves as inverted on entry into microgravity experience an instrument dial as inverted, but the numbers on it as non-inverted.
This suggests something like: seeing digits is different than seeing the position they occupy, since seeing the highlighted but legible digit grabs your attention.

Experiment #1: Bilingualism & Biworldism

2009-10-18T15:18:00.000-07:00

Experimental Result: For a while now, psychologists have known that being bilingual correlates with improved performance in certain perceptual situations.

Consider a situation where you are asked to indicate whether the arrow in the centre of the following two arrays is pointing to the left or right: 1) »»»»» 2) ««»««. Results show that bilingual people are better at this task; they aren't as thrown off, we could say, by the arrows pointing in incongruent directions.

A recent article, "On the Bilingual Advantage in Conflict Processing: Now You See It, Now You Don't" (Cognition 113(2009) 135-149), probes this "bilingual advantage" in more detail, with experimental results that indicate that the relative advantage of bilinguals over monolinguals is apparent when tasks of the sort illustrated in 1) and 2) are presented in relatively rapid alternation ( vs. when blocks of the 1) task are followed by blocks of the 2) task). Also the advantage is more in response time than ability to perform the task. The discussion focuses on why this is the case: why does bilingualism confer this advantage? Is it based in some better ability to resolve conflicting information, or in better ability to attentively monitor situations, so as to apply the right kind of attention to it? The authors incline to the latter, although they can't settle the issue.

On their view, bilinguals who are able to switch between one language and another quickly, sometimes even within a conversation, need to develop an ability to monitor their linguistic/auditory context and attend to it in the right way, e.g., not listen to conversations in other languages that are going on in the background, listen to this conversation as in language X, not Y.

Discussion: This raises interesting questions about the relation between language, perception, and inhabiting the world in different ways. Putting aside questions of underlying mechanisms, this result and the phenomenon are interesting for several reasons.

First, the issue of perceptual flexibility/plasticity. Merleau-Ponty, "In the Child's Relation With Others" talks about experiments in which children are shown a cartoon in which a dog, say, gradually turns into a cat; some children are able to see that this has happened, others not. The issue being probed in the above experiments is a related one, namely ability to look at and see things in different ways, e.g., to not be caught up by certain elements in a context (surrounding arrows pointing a certain way) such that they preclude seeing other elements (the central arrow pointing in another direction). What's interesting here is the connection between perceptual flexibility, and perception in general, and language. Merleau-Ponty would especially be interested to see this connection between the linguistic and the perceptual, since he sees language as elaborating our motor-perceptual engagement with the world.

Second, this reminds us that language is part of the domain of perception--it's something we in the first instance hear (or see or touch, in the case of sign language). The sort of monitoring that's under discussion can be nicely illustrated by the phenomenon of having your ear 'captured' by a particular voice, whisper or tone, of the diner at the other table, or (perhaps you've had this happen to you) overhearing a language that you know spoken in a restaurant where you don't expect to hear it, and finding all you can hear is that conversation in the other language. (There's a lot going on in our ability to hear just this one conversation amongst all the others at a party or in a restaurant, and the phenomena just mentioned are no doubt of a piece with this ability.) And being grabbed by the overheard, other language gets you to inhabit the world in a different way, to orient to the world according to that language and its ways of conceptualizing and bearing towards things. If you can really speak French and English, you find yourself being a little bit different speaking French than English, not just making different sounds; someone hearing their native language spoken, will tune to it and can get pulled along with it into being in their 'native'/home way. If you've ever talked to someone grabbed in this way, you may notice them responding to you differently.

Perhaps an underlying issue here is that people used to switching between one language and another are use to switching between different ways of being in the world (as the phenomenologist would put it). We're always moving, varying our way of being in the world--that's what emotion is, e.g.--but language switches, I think, are formalized, deepened, overall versions of that. Perhaps the bilingual has a cultivated talent for 'biworldism', which means cultivating a talent for attending to situations in multiple or shifting ways--and this helps her/him cultivate a talent for switching back and forth, say, between discerning the direction of an arrow as part of a block all pointing the same way, vs. discerning the direction by looking at each arrow individually. Bilinguals are tuned to the ways that various situations call for different modes of attunement. Which is not to say that only bilinguals have this capacity. We might think of a child caught between conflicting world views of the two different parents or caregivers, learning to see/respond to the world differently in the presence of these two different people.

Third, underneath this all is a really interesting point about attention that calls for further thinking: the way in which, in the experiment as discussed above, and in the linguistic situations described, the 'perceptual data' has two complexly intertwined roles: prompting paradigms of interpretation, and showing up as interpreted. There is, e.g., the sound that prompts us to hear it as not being of the language that we are listening for, the sound that is heard as: not-to-be-heard-as-language-that-makes-sense; and sound that is heard as sound that is to be heard as language, and is then/also heard as a language that makes sense. This also points to the dynamics of givenness.

Animal #1: In the Sway of Light: Animal Machines and Activity-Passivity

2009-10-17T09:39:00.000-07:00

"Bad Memories Written With Lasers" (BBC News) describes a technique wherein memories are written into fly brains with lasers. An article in the most recent Wired, "Powered By Photons" (not online yet) describes what I presume is some of the background to this sort of manipulation. Genes from an algae are introduced into the brain via viral vector, in anatomically selective regions, with selective uptake by various kinds of neurons. This allows fine targeting of the neurons that will take up the gene. The gene produces proteins that open channels in cells walls when photons hit them; another variety of such a gene-protein, responsive to a different light wavelength, closes channels. The upshot is neural firings can be controlled by light. (This area of exploration now has its own name: optogenetics.)

The Wired articles describes a mouse manipulated such that the scientists can control it, making it run counterclockwise, or stop doing so, using light controls. Techniques like these are being explored for helping with movement problems in Parkinsons.

These items remind me of the cyborg beetle described in Technology Review, which uses an electrical rather than light based technology.

Putting aside the usual sort of reductive directions that hover on the border of such reports (true, this helps us learn about basic mechanisms of memory in the fly; how much this will tell us about the complex phenomenon of memory as interacting with other aspects of perception and action in more complex creatures, or even the fly, remains to be seen), this raises some interesting questions.

For example, in what sense is an animal that has its locus of control in something outside it animal, in the sense of: moving itself animately?

But let's not think the answer would be easy, because, hey, come to think of it, it's not as if the locus of control in us is in us purely: the light out there in the world lulls and sways us via our eyes and ecological attunement to the surround. If you loom a shadow at me, or at an infant, I will duck away. What's the difference between environmental light shining on the retina producing a change in behaviour, and light shining directly on/in the brain, producing behaviour? Remember here that the eyes can be considered a prolongation of the brain. Also remember that the genes taken from the algae are ones that make algae light sensitive and thus able to respond to light. In evolution, features such as these evolve into light sensitive spots on outer membranes, and that's the beginning of the sort of evolutionary account that we reconstruct for eyes.

One difference is activity: there is a way in which we are active, in a whole body way, in setting up the sort of attunements in virtue of which the ambient optical array is ecologically salient. This is not the case if a machine control system is producing behaviours in an organism. But what about the Parkinson's case, should it work? Perhaps we could imagine someone pushing a button that helps get them moving, by shining a light that produces firings in part of their brain. But then they're controlling the machine that controls them. They are not mere patients of outside interventions. We should remember here that when people who are conscious and are undergoing neurosurgery have memories or perceptions stimulated in them by the neurosurgeon, they experience the memory or perception (I smelt an apple!) but experience it as strange (but it was weird, not like smelling a real apple!). Presumably this has something to do with the fact that they are mere patients of such sensations, not agents of them.

Questions of activity and passivity arise at this juncture--ones that Merleau-Ponty was thinking about in his later work.

Rewriting Memory, Rewriting Self

2009-10-17T04:32:00.001-07:00

This is my first blog. I am finding myself going back and editing previous posts. And adding new material. This seems appropriate given the exploratory dimension of the blog--it seems write to add questions, observations to old material. And it seems appropriate to the theme of learning to be--I'm in the process of learning to blog, learning to be this blogger.

But, I wonder if that's what others do too. So my impression of the blogs as an archive of things said in the fixed past is wrong? These are not publications, like newspaper articles, but ongoing growing things?

Question: A question about memory, then. Will I remember in the future that this record I am leaving behind is one that I went back to and rewrote? There isn't any edit trail, as at WikiPedia. What will that do to my memory of who I am or more accurately, who I will turn out to have been?

How often do we do this with other things we leave behind: rewrite, rearrange them, or rework what we remember them as being? Freud, Edward S. Casey (Remembering) and others would suggest quite a bit. While I don't advocate any sort of reductionism, the neural evidence at the moment suggests that remembering in many stages is not: activity outside of what is remembered; it is an activity that reworks what is remembered. Casey gets at and anticipates this in his concept ruminescence (reminiscing/ruminating). Here too we have the complex mixture of activity and passivity that Merleau-Ponty takes to be key to memory. A very powerful site of personal plasticity opens up here, with great potential for refuge, e.g., forgetting the traumatic in remembering it yet again.

Learning to be who one is marks an importantly temporal dimension of who we are, a dimension of plasticity. How might memory be key to this?

Waking #2: Cantonese Ear Worm

2009-10-17T04:04:00.000-07:00

Description: I wake up in the morning with an ear worm running through my head. This is a technical term, from the delightful German Ohrwurm, for a song that gets stuck running in your head. This is fine enough, not unusual, except that the song seems to be in a language I do not know how to speak, namely Cantonese. At least that is what I would say: I don't know any of the various Chinese languages, but the song I am hearing has the distinctive "shr she" pitched syllables that, when I hear spoken, get me to think "this is Chinese"; and I'm thinking what I most hear spoken in Toronto and Montreal when I hear Chinese is Cantonese.

Anyway, this appears to be a (let's say) Cantonese cover of "Killing Me Softly With His Song", the first two phrases. I think that this must have to do with the very convivial dinner I had with a bunch of friends in the Chinese Restaurant de Bonheur the other night. It's some sort of recent memory based ear worm. Significantly, at this dinner, one of my friends was speaking in Chinese with the waiters, and also saying how his Chinese wasn't very good, but I remember that at the time I was listening along with him in the way of wanting to be able to speak his language.

Question: What does this mean about the ear worm phenomenon and about our memory for song, voice, language? That I can remember a song in a language I do not know? It seems clear to me, and right in the experience of 'hearing' this ear worm in the morning and trying to figure out what the heck is going on, that I am not actually remembering "Cantonese as she is sung" (here playing on a Portugese-English dictionary/primer that James Joyce liked, titled English as She is Spoke), as I do not know the language, and if I had to sing my ear worm aloud, I should just be doing a crude parody of Cantonese. Yet, there is something distinctively Cantonese, or Cantonese recalling, about the tune. Part of it two is the voice--female, sweet, with, in terms of sound, the kind of echoey, rolley, overproduced schmalziness that would seem part and parcel of all covers of "Killing Me Softley" in any language. But there is also the tone and sound of a particular language in this ear worm of mine. This is Your Brain on Music links the ear worm phenomenon in particular to timbre. Is this phenomenon speaking to that kind of point: to have an ear worm is not to as it were have the score of song run through your head playing an internal MIDI orchestra, rendered in a language you know, but to be thrust into the timbre and sound of a song--including its language?

If so, this might suggest we have 'an ear for' the sound/timbre of language, caught up in our ear for music. Is this related to learning language? Babies wake up in the morning with ear worms for yesterday's spoken phrases? Do they first hear speech as prosody? Need to read up on the literature on 'motherese'.

In any case I highly recommend the hot pot with fish and Chinese pickled cabbage in spicy sauce at Restaurant de Bonheur. Unusual combination of ingredients, I think there's some anise or cumin in there together with the hot peppers, very spicey and cozy. I think it's the best soup in Montreal, great for winter, something like a substitute for soon tofu at Clinton and Bloor in Toronto, given that there is nothing nearly as good soon tofu-wise in Montreal, as far as my investigations have revealed. Should you have soon tofu recommendations for Montreal, please comment.

Waking #1: On the Spatiality of Equipment

2009-10-15T20:49:00.000-07:00

Description: I am making my morning espresso. I pull out the hopper full of ground coffee, put in the scoop, fill it to heaping, pull it out, reach for the spatula to level it off. The phone rings. I rest the scoop in the hopper, and go to answer the phone. I have a five minute conversation.

I go back to the counter and espresso machine, pull the scoop out of the hopper. I cannot find the spatula. Where is it? Eventually I see that it is right where it always is when I reach for it in the morning, on the flat top of the espresso machine. Why can't I see it, even though it is right there where it always is, where I usually look for it?

Observation: When I usually reach for the spatula, I am not reaching for it ‘where it is’, either in the sense of: where it is as located in such and such a measurable position, or: where it is in the sense of: in its own spot. It has its location in the overall movement pattern of: using scoop and spatula together in getting the espresso made. (The last phrase should be hyphenated: its one overall thing.) The activity and situation set up a space of relative location through rhythmed movement, etc. This is disrupted by the phone call. It is because I cannot locate it within my movement pattern that I cannot find the spatula. Likely, I do not really look for it where it is locatively (in terms of objective locations) when I reach for it in my usual routines. I may see it locatively, that may be part of the overall phenomenon; but that is not what guides my hand to it. Where it is for my right hand is likely already part of the movement of my left hand toward the scoop. Of course, this is not always so: it wasn't when I was learning to do this; it only is this way when it becomes routine.

This is adding a bodily/spatial aspect to Heidegger's points about the totality of equipment. And it is telling us something about how a spatiality beyond us yet in relation to us is ingredient in our learning to do what we do.

Meta-observation: I have the above observation, an epiphany, almost at the moment when I find/see the scoop. What would it be like to be in this situation without having that sort of epiphany which offers some account of why it is that the spatula could not be found? Would it be unsettling, like having a chasm crack open within one's sense of things, memory, self? Certainly there was some element of that in the initial phenomenon. Not only could I not find the spatula; I knew I ought to know where it is, that something wasn't right. Also, this epiphany, I think, depended on cultivating habits of phenomenological reflection. How might we otherwise cultivate such epiphany noticing habits? How many epiphany noticing moments pass us by?

Beginning

2009-10-15T20:31:00.000-07:00

This blog is devoted to the idea that the phenomenon of development is fundamental to life and human life. It seeks to explore development and related phenomena using the philosophical method of phenomenology, especially as developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

The aim is especially to show how embryogenesis, growth, maturation, aging, the development of movement, habits and learning—and the relation of all of these to the living, especially animal, world around us—are dimensions that crucially and ongoingly inform human life. We humans are remarkable animals: we are all born ‘pre-mature,’ continuing our gestation outside the womb. One is always still being born. The aim here is to show how one’s ongoing birth is never quite over—one is always learning to be, via one’s developmental relation with one’s social, cultural and natural environment.

But this is just the beginning. And the character of such a beginning, of a project on development, is that we still have to get there.