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Machina Memorialis

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Machina Memorialis

Category Archives: Cognitive Studies

“The Unsucessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block'”

03 Thursday May 2012

Posted by John in Academia, Cognitive Studies, Rhetoric and Composition, Silence

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A couple of days ago, I wrote about my recent struggles with writing. As I indicated at the end of that post, I’ve decided to turn this experience into an occassion for scholarship, something we’ve started calling “the silence project.” To start with, I’ve found a few others wiling to talk about their experiences with severe writing difficulties and I’m organizing a panel for next year’s Conference on College Composition and Communication. Some where along the line, I need to see if I can work into my work this 1974 article, published in The Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis: “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’” (.pdf). It’s short and well worth the few minutes it’ll take you to read it. (( It’s a good thing that I can now laugh at all this, yes? ))

I’d like to thank Tim Laquintano (@tim_laq) who tweeted the link.

A Brief Introductory History to Embodied Cognition

08 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by John in Cognitive Studies, Memory

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A placeholder post to “A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain,” a Scientific American guest blog post by Samuel McNerney. A direct challenge to Cartisean dualism, embodied cognition argues that not only shouldn’t we believe in a mind/body split, the way we think is structured by the fact that we exist within bodies and is metaphorical in nature. Or, as McNerney explains:

What exactly does this mean? It means that our cognition isn’t confined to our cortices. That is, our cognition is influenced, perhaps determined by, our experiences in the physical world. This is why we say that something is “over our heads” to express the idea that we do not understand; we are drawing upon the physical inability to not see something over our heads and the mental feeling of uncertainty. Or why we understand warmth with affection; as infants and children the subjective judgment of affection almost always corresponded with the sensation of warmth, thus giving way to metaphors such as “I’m warming up to her.”

The post is based upon an interview with George Lakoff, one of the founders of embodied cognition.

There’s nothing new here, at least to me, but I’m sharing this for those who aren’t familiar with embodied cognition and for me to make us of later. As I’ve mentioned many times here on Machina Memorialis, such as in”Conceptual Blending and Metaphor,” embodied cognition and its concepts such as conceptual blending are intimately tied to practices of memoria, the least of not which being the places and images mnemonic of memory palaces and other forms of architectural mnemonics.

Memory and Spacial Boundries

03 Thursday Nov 2011

Posted by John in Cognitive Studies, Memory

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From Research Digest: Blogging on Brain and Behavior:

A new study led by Gabriel Radvansky shows that the simple act of walking through a doorway creates a new memory episode, thereby making it more difficult to recall information pertaining to an experience in the room that’s just been left behind. [Read more.] (( Radvansky, G., Krawietz, S., and Tamplin, A. (2011). Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64 (8), 1632-1645 ))

 

Of Time Machines and Memory, Part 2

02 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by John in Cognitive Studies, Memory, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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[Note: You may find this post less confusing if you first read “Of Time Machines and Memory, Part 1.” Among other things, I explain the difference between author Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (aka, the novel) and character Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (aka, the handbook).] (( Note: The first quote of this post has been sitting around for a few weeks in draft form. At one point, I thought I had something to say about it, but I only have the vaguest notion of what it might have been. As that’s the case, I’m releasing this to the wild, juxtaposed with a few additional quotes in the hopes that something will eventually emerge. ))

From the handbook’s entry on the TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device, which is the means by which people in Minor Universe 31 travel through time:

One notable quirk of the word recreational in the product’s name, which can be read either of two ways, with a hyphen or without, which some have suspected to be an implicit acknowledgement of the fact that “recreational” use of the machine is also, in a sense, “re-creational” use as well.

This idea is consistent with the current understanding of the neuronal mechanism of human memory, i.e., every time a user recalls a memory, he is not only remembering it, but also, from an electrochemical perspective, literally re-creating the experience as well.

Memory and imagination, recreation and creation, both seem to be intimately tied. Consider, for instance, these three passages, the first two from Mary Carruthers The Craft of Thought (( The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400 – 1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. )) :

The emphasis upon the need for human beings to ‘see’ their thoughts in their mind as organized schemata of images, or ‘pictures,’ and then to use them for further thinking, is a striking and continuous feature of medieval monastic rhetoric, with significant interest even for our own contemporary understanding of the role of images and thinking. (Craft of Thought 3)

and

Medieval memoria thus includes, in our terms, “creative thought,” but not thoughts created “out of nothing.” It built upon remembered structures “located” in one’s mind as patters, edifices, grids, and — most basically — association-fabricated networks of “bits” in one’s memory that must be “gathered” into an idea.  (Craft of Thought 23)

and the third from Mark Johnson’s “The Imaginative Basis of Meaning and Cognition” ((  Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation. Ed. Susanne Küchler and Walter Melion. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. 74-86 )) :

According to the view I am espousing, we must understand imaginative activity as including all sensory modalities, motor programs, and even abstract acts of cognition such as the drawing of inferences. In this very broad sense, imaginative activity is the means by which an organism constructs an ordering of its perceptions, motor skills, and reflective acts, as it seeks to accommodate itself to its environment. Imagination, so understood, thus includes the full range of organizing activities, from the forming of images (in different sensory modalities), to the execution of motor programs, to the manipulation of abstract representations, and even to the creation of novel orderings. (79)

All of this is quite interesting in light of research which finds that scene construction is a shared process common to both episodic memory and the creation of fictional experiences as reported by Demis Hassabis, Dharshan Kumaran, and Eleanor A. Maguire in “Using Imagination to Understand the Neural Basis of Episodic Memory” (( The Journal of Neuroscience, 26 December 2007, 27(52): 14365-14374 )):

Functional MRI (fMRI) studies investigating the neural basis of episodic memory recall, and the related task of thinking about plausible personal future events, have revealed a consistent network of associated brain regions. […]. By using previously imagined fictitious experiences as a comparison for episodic memories, we identified the neural basis of a key process engaged in common, namely scene construction, involving the generation, maintenance and visualization of complex spatial contexts. […]. We conclude that scene construction constitutes a common process underlying episodic memory and imagination of fictitious experiences, and suggest it may partially account for the similar brain networks implicated in navigation, episodic future thinking, and the default mode.  [Read full abstract.]

All of this seems to suggest that the active creation of one’s own mnemonic images is an important mnemonic practice, something we’ve already known. In other words, this is really just a post connecting contemporary cognitive research to long-established mnemonic practices.

Memory and the Digital

21 Thursday Jul 2011

Posted by John in Cognitive Studies, Digital Studies/New Media, Media Ecology, Memory

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Summary of some studies on the internet’s affects on memory:

A second experiment was aimed at determining whether computer accessibility affects precisely what we remember. “If asked the question whether there are any countries with only one color in their flag, for example,” the researchers wrote, “do we think about flags — or immediately think to go online to find out?”

In this case, participants were asked to remember both the trivia statement itself and which of five computer folders it was saved in. The researchers were surprised to find that people seemed better able to recall the folder. [Read more.]

Machina Memorialis and Verbal Networks of Meaning

21 Thursday Oct 2010

Posted by John in Cognitive Studies, Memory, Quotes

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From The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities:

When we see words on a page, do these words stand directly for external realities? No. As we gave seen, words and the patterns into which words fit are triggers to the imagination. They are prompts we use to try to get one another to call up some of what we know and to work on it creatively to arrive at a meaning. Blending is a crucial part of this imaginative work, and, as we have seen blending is not the mere addition of one existing meaning to another to get their sum. Words by themselves give very little information about the meaning they prompt us to construct. (146)

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