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Tag Archives: Cognition
Mock Interview About the Narrative Impulse
[Anthony?] Storr drawing on Winnicott writes: Transitional objects gradually loose their emotional charge as the child grows older. Often such objects become linked with a variety of other objects and are used in play. Children easily transmute a broomstick into … Continue reading
Disabilities of the Mind
This description of Jip from Richard Frost’s Brain and Body is marked by keen observation of being unable to find “the here and now embedded in and explained by what immediately preceded it”. The more I learn about him, the … Continue reading
Object, Gift, Memento
Candida Pugh in a September 2007 review (appearing in the Annex Gleaner) of Kyo Maclear’s The Letter Opener chooses to highlight the following: Naiko’s mother languishes in a nursing home, slowly losing herself to Alzheimer’s. The journalist Kana, Naiko’s globe-trotting … Continue reading
Time Machine Brain: dancing dendrites
Paul Bouissac in “Three Mini-reviews: Focus on the Brain” quotes from Donald Pfaff Brain Arousal and Information Theory: Neural and Genetic Mechanisms Brains are foretelling devices and their predictive powers emerge from the various rhythms they perpetually generate. At the … Continue reading
Rest is not Rusting
James H. Austin in Zen-Brain Reflections gives pause to ponder. We consolidate memories mostly when we are either at rest or asleep, because these are quieter times when we are not processing any new external events. What evidence suggests that … Continue reading
Counting and recounting
In A Beautiful Mind, the biography of John Forbes Nash Jr. by Sylvia Nasar, one finds the following passage Margaret Wertheim, author of Pythagoras’ Trousers, a history of numerology, has pointed out that “people look to the order of numbers … Continue reading
Filmic Matters
A quotation and three diversions. Barthes. “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on some Eisenstein Stills” trans. Stephen Heath in Image, Music, Text pp. 66-67. If, however, the specific (filmic of the future) lies not in movement but in an inarticulable … Continue reading
Feed Me
The brain is only 2 percent of the body’s weight, but it consumes 20 percent of the body’s energy. So using mind consciousness is very expensive. Thinking, worrying, and planning take a lot of energy. Thich Nhat Hanh, “The Four … Continue reading
Mental and Manual
The key move in this sentence from Boris Rybak Anachroniques is the coinage of the term “psycho-manuel”. La recherche scientifique est une mobilisation psycho-manuelle constante du chercheur Scientific research is constant mobilization of the researcher’s mental and manual faculties “Psycho-motor” … Continue reading
Woolf II
In the back matter of Woolf by Madalyn Eastus is an epigraph drawn from Michel Foucualt. The human intellect, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes greater order and equanimity in things than it actually finds; and while there are many … Continue reading