Brain Imaging/Neurosciences/Cultural Theory

The Elekta Company has a machine which is called a magnetoencephalograph or MEG for short "…is presently regarded as the most efficient method for tracking brain activity in real-time for many reasons. Compared to EEG, MEG has unique sensitivity capabilities."

Real-time brain mapping allows scientists to "watch" the brain in action under controlled conditions. The Allen Institute for Brain Science (named after one of the founders of Microsoft, Paul Allen) has just completed an atlas of a mouse brain. "The goal of our inaugural project, the Allen Brain Atlas, is to create a detailed cellular-resolution, genome-wide map of gene expression in the mouse brain."

So, why is this important?

1. As more knowledge is gained about the human mind through scanning, the role of culture and images changes. Images are no longer just representations or interpreters of human actions. They have become central to every activity that connects humans to each other and to technology — mediators, progenitors, interfaces — as much reference points for information and knowledge, as visualizations of human creativity.

2. My main concern is the role played by images as the output of scanning procedures and the many different ways in which those images are appropriated within our culture to explain the intensity of our attraction to and dependence upon image-worlds as ways of explaining consciousness.

3. For better or for worse, depending on the perspectives that you hold and the research bias that you have, images are the raw material of scanning technologies like MRI’s and MEGS. In other words, the brain is visualized at a topological level, mapped according to various levels of excitation of a chemical and electrical nature and researched and treated through the knowledge that is gained. This is primarily a biological model and leaves many questions unanswered about the mind, thought and the relationship between perception and thinking.

4. The use of images entails far more than the transparent relationship of scanning to results would suggest. The biological metaphors at work make it appear as if the interpretation of scanning is similar to looking at a wound or a suture. The effort is to create as much transparency as possible between the scans and their interpretation. But, as with any of the issues that are normally raised about interpretive processes, it is important to ask questions about the use of images for these purposes from a variety of perspectives, including and most importantly, a cultural one.

5. The use of scanning technologies does not happen in a vacuum. Scientists spend a great deal of time cross-referencing their work and checking the interpretations that they make. (Many issues around image quality arise in the scanning process. These include, contrast, resolution, noise and distortion. Any one of these elements can change the relationship between images and diagnosis.) The central question for me is how to transfer the vast knowledge that has been gained from the study of images in a variety of disciplines from cultural studies to communications, into disciplines like the computer sciences and engineering which have been central to the invention and use of scanning technologies. In the same vein, how can the insights of the neurosciences be brought to bear in a substantial fashion on the research being pursued by cultural analysts, philosophers and psychologists?

The digital revolution is altering the fabric of research and practice in the sciences, arts and engineering and challenging many conventional wisdoms about the seemingly transparent relationship among images and meaning, mind and thought, as well as culture and identity.

 A complex cultural and biological topology is being drawn of consciousness in order to illuminate and illustrate mental processes. I labor under no illusions that this topology will solve centuries of debate and discussion about how and why humans think and act in the world. I do, however, make the point that images are a central feature of the many conundrums researchers have encountered in their examination of the mind and the human body. One example of the centrality of images to the debate about human consciousness has been the appearance of increasingly sophisticated imaging and scanning technologies that try to ‘picture’ the brain’s operations. The results of research in this area have been impressive and the impact on the cultural view of the brain has been enormous. In general this research has led to a more profound understanding of the rich complexity of the brain’s operations. Since I am not a specialist in these disciplines, I do not comment in detail on the medical or scientific claims that have been made about the usefulness of the research. My main concern is the role played by images as the output of scanning procedures and the many different ways in which those images are appropriated within our culture to explainthe intensity of our attraction to and dependence upon image-worlds. 

For better or for worse, depending on the perspectives that you hold and the research bias that you have, images are the raw material of scanning technologies like MRI’s. In other words, the brain is visualized at a topological level, mapped according to various levels of excitation of a chemical and electrical nature and researched and treated through the knowledge that is gained. This is primarily a biological model and leaves many questions unanswered about the mind, thought and the relationship between perception and thinking. In particular, the issues of how images are used to explain biological processes should not be marginalized.

Johan van der Keuken (2)

In a series of writings published on the occasion of the 42nd San Francisco International Film Festival, Van der Keuken said the following:

"The idea of the truth 24 times a second is erroneous. The acceleration that takes place in the mechanical process creates a gap between the function of mechanical repetition and its form as a continuous flow that is only perceivable in a purely subjective experience of time. "

Van der Keuken was referring to Jean-Luc Godard's statement: "Photography is the truth, and cinema is the truth 24 times a second," which was made in reference to his film, Le Petit Soldat.

Van der Keuken goes on to say, "The important thing is not the reproduction of a three-dimensional reality, but by way of the time elements in a film, the creation of an autonomous space."

An autonomous space — this means that the flow of a film creates its own time and space, because the viewing experience is never simply a function of what is shown or seen.

Vision — the cultural approach to seeing and thinking, privileges objects of sight, as if they will provide some clear answers to the dilemmas of viewing and understanding, as if the questions, indeed possible contradictions of autonomy, need not be addressed.

For example, hallucinations and dreams are sights not in the control of the conscious mind. It is more difficult to trace their origin because they suggest autonomy without specifiable external or experiential causes.

This could be reason for excitement, visible evidence so to speak, of the mind reconstructing and redeveloping conscious and unconscious relations. Instead, autonomy, which I am not suggesting is the only process at work here, is more often than not recontextualized into an objectivist language of description and analysis. In fact, the sense of estrangement attributed to hallucination or dream cannot be divorced from the hesitations which we feel in describing the “inner workings of vision — the often obvious way in which the reflective autonomy of thought challenges preconceptions of order and disorder.

So, van der Keuken is talking about the unique circumstances through which the cinema makes it possible to experience the world and those experiences are a product of the viewer's own consciousness as much as they are evidence of the world we inhabit.

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There is a superb interviewwith Bill Joy originally published in New Scientist that is worth a read.

The context for learning, education and the arts (4)

(This entry is in five parts) One, Two, Three, Four, Five)

So why explore the intersections of human thought and computer programming? My tentative answer would be that we have not understood the breadth and depth of the relationships that we develop with machines. Human culture is defined by its on-going struggle with tools and implements, continuously finding ways of improving both the functionality of technology and its potential integration into everyday life. Computer programming may well be one of the most sophisticated artificial languages which our culture has ever constructed, but this does not mean that we have lost control of the process.

The problem is that we don’t recognize the symbiosis, the synergistic entanglement of subjectivity and machine, or if we do, it is through the lens of otherness as if our culture is neither the progenitor nor really in control of its own inventions. These questions have been explored in great detail by Bruno Latour and I would reference his articles in “Common Knowledge as well as his most recent book entitled, Aramis or The Love of Technology. There are further and even more complex entanglements here related to our views of science and invention, creativity and nature. Suffice to say, that there could be no greater simplification than the one which claims that we have become the machine or that machines are extensions of our bodies and our identities. The struggle to understand identity involves all aspects of experience and it is precisely the complexity of that struggle, its very unpredictability, which keeps our culture producing ever more complex technologies and which keeps the questions about technology so much in the forefront of everyday life.

It is useful to know that the within the field of artificial intelligence (AI) there are divisions between researchers who are trying to build large databases of “common sense in an effort to create programming that will anticipate human action, behaviour and responses to a variety of complex situations and researchers who are known as computational phenomenologists . “Pivotal to the computational phenomenologists position has been their understanding of common sense as a negotiated process as opposed to a huge database of facts, rules or schemata."(Warren Sack)

So even within the field of AI itself there is little agreement as to how the mind works, or how body and mind are parts of a more complex, holistic process which may not have a finite systemic character. The desire however to create the technology for artificial intelligence is rooted in generalized views of human intelligence, generalizations which don’t pivot on culturally specific questions of ethnicity, class or gender. The assumption that the creation of technology is not constrained by the boundaries of cultural difference is a major problem since it proposes a neutral register for the user as well. I must stress that these problems are endemic to discussions of the history of technology. Part of the reason for this is that machines are viewed not so much as mediators, but as tools — not as integral parts of human experience, but as artifacts whose status as objects enframes their potential use.

Computers, though, play a role in their use. They are not simply instruments because so much has in fact been done to them in order to provide them with the power to act their role. What we more likely have here are hybrids, a term coined by Bruno Latour to describe the complexity of interaction and use that is generated by machine-human relationships.

Another way of understanding this debate is to dig even more deeply into our assumptions about computer programming. I will briefly deal with this area before moving on to an explanation of why these arguments are crucial for educators as well as artists and for the creators and users of technology.

Generally, we think of computer programs as codes with rules that produce certain results and practices. Thus, the word processing program I am presently using has been built to ensure that I can use it to create sentences and paragraphs, to in other words write. The program has a wide array of functions that can recognize errors of spelling and grammar, create lists and draw objects. But, we do have to ask ourselves whether the program was designed to have an impact on my writing style. Programmers would claim that they have simply coded in as many of the characteristics of grammar as they could without overwhelming the functioning of the program itself. They would also claim that the program does not set limits to the infinite number of sentences that can be created by writers.

However, the situation is more complex than this and is also subject to many more constraints than initially seems to be the case. For example, we have to draw distinctions between programs and what Brian Cantwell Smith describes as “process or computation to which that program gives rise upon being executed and [the] often external domain or subject matter that the computation is about. (Smith, On the Origin of Objects, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998: 33) The key point here is that program and process are not static, but are dynamic, if not contingent. Thus we can describe the word processor as part of a continuum leading from computation to language to expression to communication to interpretation. Even this does not address the complexity of relations among all of these processes and the various levels of meaning within each.

To be continued........

The context for learning, education and the arts (3)

This Entry is in Five Parts. (One, Two, Three, Four, Five)

This initial creativity was soon lost in the final version of “Understanding Media published in the 1964. In the book the medium becomes the message through the operations of an instantaneous sensory recognition of meaning. McLuhan explores affect by claiming that cubism in its elimination of point of view, generated an “instant total awareness [and in so doing] announced that the medium is the message? (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994, p.13.) I am not sure what ‘instant total awareness’ is, but one can surmise that it is somewhere between recognition and self-reflexive thought. In choosing this rather haphazard approach McLuhan eliminates all of the mediators that make any form of communication work.

Take the World Wide Web as an example. Few users of the web are aware of the various hubs and routers that move data around at high speed, let alone of the complexity of the servers that route that data into their home or business computers. They become aware of the mediators when there is a breakdown, or when the system gums up. The notion that we receive information instantly is tied up with the elimination of mediation. So, the arrival in my home of a television image from another part of the world seems instant, but is largely the result of a process in which radically different versions of time and space have played significant roles (the motion and position of the satellite, transmitting stations, microwave towers and so on). I won’t belabour this point other than to point out that the notion of instant recognition has played a significant role in the ways in which our culture has understood digital communications. This has tended to reduce if not eliminate the many different facets of the creative and technological process.

But let’s return to the more interesting and potentially creative idea that the subject is the message (mnetioned in an earlier post). As the sense-ratios alter, the sum-total of effects engenders a subject surrounded by and encapsulated within an electronic world, a subject who effectively becomes that world (and here the resonance with Jean Baudrillard is clear). This is not simply the movement from machine to human, it is the integration of machine and humans where neither becomes the victim of the other. As mediums we move meanings and messages around in a variety of creative ways (hence the link to speech) and as humans interacting with machines we are the medium within which this process and processing circulates. I repeat, this does not mean that we have become the machine, a concept that has inspired a great deal of criticism of technology in general, rather we end up sharing a common ground with our own creations, a mediated environment which we are explore everyday and try to make sense of the information that we are learning.

Interestingly, Derrick De Kerckhove, the Director of the McLuhan Centre at the University of Toronto who has been described as the successor to McLuhan wrote a book entitled, The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality (Kogan Page, London: 1998). He said:

“With television and computers we have moved information processing from within our brains to screens in front of, rather than behind, our eyes. Video technologies relate not only to our brain, but to our whole nervous system and our senses, creating conditions for a new psychology. (De Kerckhove: 5)

To Kerckhove, human beings have become messages (and this is different from being mediums) with our brains emulating the processing logic and structural constraints of computers. Here we do become the machine. We no longer signify as an act of will. Agency is merely a function of messaging systems. Agency no longer recognizes its role as a medium and as a result we seek and are gratified by the instantaneous, the immediate, the unmediated. Now, the ramifications of this approach are broad and need extensive thought and clarification.

The important point here is that De Kerckhove has molded the human body into an extension of the computer, because we are already, to some degree, machines. Our nervous systems, which scientists barely understand and our senses which for neuroscientists remain one of the wonders of nature are suddenly characterized through the metaphors of screens, vision, technology and a new psychology. The inevitable result are mechanical metaphors that make it seem as if science, computer science and biotechnology will eventually solve the ambiguous conundrums of perception (e.g., in the virtual world we become what we see), knowledge and learning. To say that we are the machine is a far cry from understanding the hybrid processes that encourage machine-human interactions. De Kerckhove has transformed the terrain here much as McLuhan did, so that humans lose their autonomy and their ability to act upon the world, although his is a far more sohisticated examination than McLuhan's.

As I said, this is not an article about McLuhan and so I will not explore the report that he wrote any further or the vast literature that has grown up around his thinking. As you can no doubt tell, I am concerned with the rather mechanical view that our culture has of the human mind and am fascinated with the ease with which we have taken on McLuhan’s simplified versions of affect and effect. It is not so much the behavioural bias that concerns me (although it is important to be aware of the influence of behaviourism on the cultural analysis of technology) but the equations that are drawn among experience, images and technology.

These equations often reduce the creative engagement of humans with culture and technology, to the point where culture and technology become one, eliminating the possibility of contestation. In large measure, many of the complaints about digital technologies, the fears of being overwhelmed if not replaced are the result of not recognizing the potential to recreate the products of technological innovation. The best example of this is the way video games have evolved from rudimentary forms of storytelling to complex narratives driven by the increasing ease with which the games are mastered by players. The sophistication of the players has transformed the technology. But none of this would have been possible without the ability of the technology to grow and change in response to the rather unpredictable choices made by humans.

If we turn to the computer for a moment, the notion that it has the power to affect human cognition is rooted in debates and theories developed within the fields of cybernetics and artificial intelligence. The “…popular press began to call computers ‘electronic brains’ and their internal parts and functions were given anthropomorphic names (e.g., computer memory)… (Warren Sack, “Artificial Intelligence and Aesthetics pg. 3)

The notion that a computer has memory has taken root in such a powerful way that it seems impossible to talk about computers without reference to memory. So, an interesting circle has been formed or it might be a tautology. Computer memory becomes a standard which we use to judge memory in general, hence the fears about Deep Blue somehow replacing the human mind, even though its programming was created by humans! The problem is that there is a long tradition of human creativity in the development of technologies and this history is embedded in every aspect of our daily lives. Deep Blue is just one more extension of the process. The fact that we can use the computer to judge our own memories certainly doesn’t eliminate anything. It merely means that we now have a tool that we can use to examine what we actually mean by memory. In fact, recent neuroscientific research into memory suggests that we have profoundly underestimated our own minds let alone the digital ones that we are creating.

The very idea of a computer program is linked to the power to do. (Sack: 5) Again, there are certain debates that cannot be developed here, including the significant one between Daniel Dennett and John Searle, a debate explored by Stephen Pinker in his new book, How the Mind Works. Pinker is a supporter of cognitive psychology and also suggests that the brain operates like a computer. His argument is more subtle than that however, because he is quite worried about creating too great an equivalence between the brain and the mechanics of the computer. I bring this up because it is the cultural attraction of the metaphors which interests me. It is important to understand that computer programs are carefully constructed artificial languages that have great difficulty dealing with the unpredictable, with the tentative, the contingent or the irrational. Computer programs are codified according to a strict set of rules and I think that we can make the argument that common sense is not. I will briefly return to this discussion later on.

To be continued......

Remix 06: Blending, Bending and Befriending Content

Innovative Content Development in New Media has some of the following characteristics (This is by no means a comprehensive list.):
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Imaginative storytelling (Breaking the rules and building new ones)
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Not derivative (but can be a copy—mush — experimental cinema and music as models)
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Aware of aesthetics, form and feel (Use OF Technology — Not Used by Technology)
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Creating new knowledge and information (Play in every sense of the word.)
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Aware of collage, montage and other techniques of bricolage (Stories can make the impossible real — photo-realism is a dead end)
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Talent (Learning and Education and Research)
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Decentralized modes of information gathering, exchange and distribution (Open Source)
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Interactivity (Video games create the illusion of interactivity — interactive game play should be about a complete transformation of the game by the player — interactivity becomes creativity)
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Bring body movement into the video game storytelling equation (Hands are not enough — Wii)
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Link popular culture, games, books, magazines, fans, television and the web into content development (Specialized studios need cultural analysts and ethnographers as much as they need creators)
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Work with audiences not against them (Fan movements, fansites, fan literature)
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Assume that trends will shift as quickly as they are recognized — old style marketing will not work (Time is compressed but that does not mean that clip stories will last — marketing becomes discovering stories as well as creating them)
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Non-linearity, complexity and chaos are at the center of digital content creation
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Simulations are only as effective as the stories that underly them — Algorithms are culture
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Telepresence and visualization need haptics and vice versa (Dreams are the Royal Road into Storytelling)
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Narrowcast not broadcast (P2P will become C2C)