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David McGavock

The dreams of readers | ROUGH TYPE - 1 views

www.roughtype.com/?p=4120

reading neuroscience mirror regions meditation

shared by David McGavock on 21 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Psychologists and neurobiologists have begun studying what goes on in our minds as we read literature, and what they’re discovering lends scientific weight to Emerson’s observation.
  • “aesthetic emotions” that we feel when we view art from a distance, as a spectator:
  • We create our own version of the piece of fiction, our own dream, our own enactment.” Making sense of what transpires in a book’s imagined reality appears to depend on “making a version of the action ourselves, inwardly.”
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • The scholars used brain scans to examine the cellular activity that occurs inside people’s heads as they read stories. They found that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative.”
  • When, for example, a character in a story puts a pencil down on a desk, the neurons that control muscle movements fire in a reader’s brain. When a character goes through a door to enter a room, electrical charges begin to flow through the areas in a reader’s brain that are involved in spatial representation and navigation.
  • More than mere replication is going on.
  • we really do enter, so far as our brains are concerned, a new world — one conjured not just out of the author’s words but out of our own memories and desires — and it is our cognitive immersion in that world that gives reading its emotional force.
  • ” A work of literature, particularly narrative literature, takes hold of the brain in curious and powerful ways.
  • there are the “narrative emotions” we experience when, through the sympathetic actions of our nervous system, we become part of a story, when the distance between the attendee and the attended evaporates
  • A 2009 experiment conducted by Oatley and three colleagues suggests that the emotions stirred by literature can even alter, in subtle but real ways, people’s personalities.
  • Norman Holland, a scholar at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida, has been studying literature’s psychological effects for many years, and he offers a provocative answer to that question.
  • when we open a book, our expectations and attitudes change. Because we understand that “we cannot or will not change the work of art by our actions,” we are relieved of our desire to exert an influence over objects and people and hence can “disengage our [cognitive] systems for initiating actions.”
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 21 Jan 14
       
      Theory of mind 
  • The central subject of literature is society, and when we lose ourselves in a book we often receive an education in the subtleties and vagaries of human relations.
  • reading tends to make us at least a little more empathetic, a little more alert to the inner lives of others.
  • can strengthen a person’s “theory of mind,” which is what psychologists call the ability to understand what other people are thinking and feeling.
  • That frees us to become absorbed in the imaginary world of the literary work.
  • Jeff Jarvis, a media consultant who teaches journalism at the City University of New York, gave voice to this way of thinking in a post on his blog. Claiming that printed pages “create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader,” he concluded that, in the internet era, “the book is an outdated means of communicating information.” He declared that “print is where words go to die.”
  • Society is growing ever more skeptical of the value of solitude. The status quo treats with suspicion  even the briefest of withdrawals into inactivity and apparent purposelessness. We see it in the redefinition of receptive states of mind as passive states of mind.
  • the arts of production and consumption, of getting stuff done, to which most of us devote most of our waking hours.
  • In a 2003 lecture, Andrew Louth, a theology professor at the University of Durham in England, drew a distinction between “the free arts” and “the servile arts.” The servile arts, he said, are those “to which a man is bound if he has in mind a limited task.”
  • free arts, among which Louth included reading as well as meditation, contemplation, and prayer, are those characterized, in one way or another, by “the search for knowledge for its own sake.”
  • We open ourselves to aesthetic and spiritual possibilities.
  • It may be that readers have to enter a state of languid pleasure, a dream, before they can experience the full spermatic vitality of a book. Far from being a sign of passivity, the reader’s outward repose signals the most profound kind of inner activity, the kind that goes unregistered by society’s sensors.
  • David McGavock on 21 Jan 14
     
    "The free arts, among which Louth included reading as well as meditation, contemplation, and prayer, are those characterized, in one way or another, by "the search for knowledge for its own sake." "
Charles van der Haegen

Jesse Schell: When games invade real life | Video on TED.com - 1 views

www.ted.com/...en_games_invade_real_life.html

Jess schell design games sensors psychology rewards points future behavior evolution reality

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 13 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 13 Jun 11
     
    "About this talk Games are invading the real world -- and the runaway popularity of Farmville and Guitar Hero is just the beginning, says Jesse Schell. At the DICE Summit, he makes a startling prediction: a future where 1-ups and experience points break "out of the box" and into every part of our daily lives. About Jesse Schell Beyond Facebook, beyond consoles and even computer screens, games are becoming the medium for everyday life, says game designer Jesse Schell. Full bio and more links"
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Charles van der Haegen on 13 Jun 11
     
    Rather flabbergasted by this 28 min video about how we could live in the future, disembodied by games directing us as cosumer automatons...
  • Bryan Alexander on 14 Jun 11
     
    Isn't it an amazing talk? It blew me away when I first saw it. And now you can see why it kicked off the gamification movement.
  • George Brett on 14 Jun 11
     
    Oh my. I need to think more about this one. It's a paradox with some of the privacy concerns of folks for Gowalla or Four Square versus Jesse's notion that our lives will be constant gaming and surrendering of personal info.
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