Monthly Archives: March 2008

Resonance…….

Gibson thought the world of ‘resonance’, but he never cared to define it, nor could he have. It is intuitively appealing. A dynamic, resonant character to … experience. But it bears thinking of a little more literally. The graveyard of fools, I am well aware. A tune that resonates. Popcorn. Who owns it? I can objectify it, but it is still within this weird privileged world of subjective experience. Things in there typically ‘are’ me. They are not objectifiable.

But hold on. I can objectify that tune.  In fact, my difficulty in stopping it at will is proof (!) that I can objectifiy it.  It is not part of me.  But it is unquestionably an activity, a behavior, of my nervous system.  A resonance.  A real phenomenon, transmitted between P-worlds.  A part of subjective experience that is not really so personal, but has a shared quality.  A repeating echo, faltering from one repetition to the next, but always playing out in real unreal time.

Teleology…

..in pre-frontal cortical working memory. That’s the claim in this video. The information that is stored is unique to the goal, or prospective action. He goes on to say that the structure of WM is largely the same as that of LTM, such that a sensory stimulus to be retained in WM activates an LTM history, with all the associations of that stimulus. That looks like Proust to me, not teleology. The wispiness of the P-world as the present resonates with the past. Intriguingly, he links the cortical dynamics of WM to the perception/action cycle. That’s very Gibsonian in character.  But the  terms of the neuroscientist are becoming increasingly  odd-sounding to me.   Memory , as conceived here, is all in the brain.  If we view it instead as a resonance, or fit, between a neural dynamic and an environment, then the constrained environment in which typical WM tasks such as delayed-match-to-sample are done looks instead like an amplification of the neural pattern,  obtained by omitting, or clamping, the other halfof the equation.  I’m still working on my own vocabulary here, but ‘memory’ is certainly an area in which the received vocabulary appears to me to be in need of a severe overhaul. Continue reading Teleology…