How causality relation and invariant are perceived by the brain; (Dec. 24, 2009)

We are born with 25% of the total number of synapses that grown up will form.  Neurons have mechanisms of transferring from one section of the brain to other parts when frequent focused cognitive processes are needed. A child can perceive one event following another one but it has no further meaning but simple observation.  A child is not surprised with magic outcomes; what is out of the normal for a grown up is as valid a phenomenon as another to him (elephant can fly).

The brain attaches markers or attributes to impressions that it receive from the senses.  Four markers that I call exogenous markers attach to impressions as they are “registered” in the brain coming from the outside world.  At least four other markers, I label “endogenous markers” are attached to internal cognitive processing and are attached to information when re-structuring or re-configurations are performed during the dream periods because massive computations are needed to these endogenous markers. There are markers that I call “reverse-exogenous” and are attached to information meant to be recorded on external means such as writing or performing art work. Maybe animals lack these reverse exogenous markers since evolution didn’t endow them with external performing limbs for writing, sculpting, painting, or doing music.

The first exogenous marker directs impressions in their order of successions. The child recognizes that this event followed the other one within a short period of occurrence. His brain can “implicitly” store the two events are following in succession in a qualitative order (for example the duration of the succession is shorter or longer than the other succession). I label this marker as “Time recognizer” in a qualitative sense of sensations.

The second marker registers and then stores an impression as a spatial configuration. At this stage, the child is able to recognize the concept of space but in a qualitative order; for example, this object is closer or further from the other object. I call this marker “space recognizer”.

The third marker is the ability to delimit a space when focusing on a collection of objects. Without this ability to first limit the range of observation (or sensing in general) it would be hard to register parts and bits of impressions within a first cut of a “coherent universe”. I label this marker “spatial delimiter”

The fourth marker attaches a “strength” of occurrence as the impression is recognized in the database.  The child cannot count but the brain is already using this marker for incoming information. In a sense, the brain is assembling events and objects in special “frequency of occurrence” database during dream periods and the information are retrieved with a qualitative order strength of sensations in frequency.  I call this attribute “count marker”.

The fifth marker is an endogenous attributes: this marker is attached within the internal export/import of information in the brain. This attribute is a kind of “correlation” quantity that indicates same/different trends of behavior of events or objects.  In a sense, this marker will internally sort data as “analogous” or contrary collections on a time scale. People have tendency to associate correlation with cause and effect relation but it is not. A correlation quantity can be positive (two variables have the same behavioral trend in a system) or negative quantity (diverging trends). With the emergence of the 5^th marker the brain has grown a quantitative threshold in synapses and neurons to starting massive computations on impressions stored in the large original database.

The sixth marker is kind of a “probability quantity” that permits the brain to order objects according to “plausible” invariant properties in space (for example objects or figures are similar according to a particular property, including symmetrical transformations). I label this the “invariant marker” and it re-structures collections of objects and shapes in structures such as hereditary, hierarchical, or circular.

The seventh marker recognizes interactions among variables and interacts with reverse exogenous markers since a flow with outside perceptions is required for comprehension. I label this the “design marker”.  Simple perceived relationships between two events or variables are usually trivial and mostly wrong; for example thunder follows lightning and thus wrongly interpreted as lightning generates thunder.  Simple interactions are of the existential kind, the Pavlov reactions, where an existential rewards, such as food, are involved. Interactions among more than two variables are complex for interpretations in the mind.  Designing experiments is a very complex cognitive task and not amenable to intuition: it requires learning and training to appreciating the various cause and effects among the variables.

The brain is very performing for rhetorical associations and cognitive methods are basically formal decoding the various alternative procedures that brain may process information.  Whatever is created or conceived by any individual the brain has already the mechanism of processing it.

I need more time and reflection to figure out the reverse exogenous marker. This is a first draft to get the project going. I appreciate developed comments and references

Note: This article was not meant to analyze sensations, emotions, or value moral systems.  It is very probable that the defined markers are valid for the moral value systems with additional markers that might be needed to store and retrieve data from the special moral system structured .  In general, rational thinking retrieve data from specialized databases that are already processed and saved for pragmatic utility.   I conjecture that emotions are generated from the vast original database and the endogenous correlation marker is the main computation method: the reason is that emotions are related to complex and almost infinite interactions with people and community and the brain prefers not to consume time and resources on complex computations that involve thousands of variables. Thus, an emotional reaction in the waking period is not necessarily “rational” but quick and dirty resolutions. In the dream sessions emotionally loaded impressions are barely processed because they are hidden deep in the vast original database structure and are not refreshed frequently to be exposed to the waking conscious cognitive processes and thus they flare up within the emotional reaction packages.

Okay I’ve never seen Bobby “the brain” Heenan Wrestle, but I have to make a smart a** remark here.

It’s nice to see a WRESTLER with a BRAIN. LOL

Most of the guys seem kind of dopey in their interviews and on TV.

But your’e hearing from a brainy girl here, that loves intellectual discussion that are funny and intellectually stimulating.

bobbyheenan020_large idea girl consulting word press wwe tna wrestling

I have several reviews to post today but felt an explanation for my unexpected absence might be in order…

For reasons unknown to your humble feline foodie (that would be me) The Lady and The Man decided to move to a different  manse…one a little smaller but newer than the old manse and still in the Pacific Northwest, aka “the-recently-too-damned-cold Pacific Northwest”.

I would also like to add that I was not once consulted regarding this move and I have not been a happy feline foodie the past few weeks… I left The Lady a gift one morning on the rug by my box and all she said was “Bad Spaulding Gray”… you’d think she could take a hint…

I don’t care for the sound of the tape dispenser building boxes to hold “stuff” wrapped in that amazingly annoying bubble wrap crap. The only good thing is that most of the boxes came from the Cheese Kiosk and all smell like cheese…now that I like…

We have been in the new manse about two weeks and yesterday I stepped out on the front door stoop and took in my first whiff of the new neighborhood… I caught a few faint scents of my new Brigade… a couple of them may have left me messages in the front yard…

Perhaps The Brain was The Brain behind this move and because I had completed my Observations in the quiet Knoll Heights neighborhood of Salmon Creek… he decided it was time for me to take on Orchards… I must be The Man… I mean, The Feline…

why does listening to music like this make me want to do battle with an ax?  or use good ol’ OE words like helm?

is it all conditioning, or is it rooted in the structure of my brain?  maybe Oliver Sacks knows…

(Copyright © 2009)

Consciousness often seems to operate by an either/or law that excludes the possibility of taking any middle position. We are either happy or sad, pro or con, well or sick, calm or stressed, bold or meek. Ironically, debate teams can flip a coin to see which side of an argument they are to present. We act out our lives more like Lear judging his daughters than Hamlet muddling through to a bad end. One after another, heads of state insist on making “one thing perfectly clear.” We avoid ambiguity, uncertainty, mixed messages, and confusion as if they were sexually transmitted diseases. Regarding judgments and opinions, we act as if there were no room for maybe—no middle ground.

Which pretty much reflects the stop/go nature of how our brains operate. Either neurons fire or they don’t, there are no halfway measures. Even at the last instant, a neuron told to fire by every one of its input signals can be stopped in its tracks by a single inhibitory signal. Cancel! Hold everything! Just say No!

Which is not necessarily a bad thing because it assures clarity of both vision and action under stressful conditions. The job of consciousness is to suggest appropriate courses of action in novel situations. Personally appropriate, that is, to the actor’s most basic biological and cultural values. We grow impatient with Hamlet because he simply can’t act on the basis of what he knows to be true, failing to revenge his father’s murder, or if he does act, skewering poor Polonius trembling behind the curtain in his mother’s chamber. In the end, all major players lie strewn about the stage, the intimate world of the hesitant one fallen in ruins.

But if hesitation proves costly on occasion, rash action in the name of clarity can come at an even steeper price. Take the U.S. invasion of Iraq as an example. The shock and awe was intended for Saddam and his troops, but stunned the whole world. Were there truly no alternatives? Indeed, there were many, all stifled by the overriding thrust of consciousness that ruled the Bush administration. When the looting began, we saw that shock and awe was no substitute for planning ahead.

Defending the selective nature of attention as the gateway to consciousness, Gerald M. Edelman addresses the evolutionary pressure to select one action as being the most appropriate among a field of alternatives:

An animal that is hungry or being threatened has to select an object or an action from many possible ones. It is obvious that the ability to choose quickly one action pattern to be carried out to the exclusion of others confers considerable selective advantage. Possessing such an ability makes it possible to achieve a goal that would otherwise be interfered with by the attempt to undertake two incompatible actions simultaneously (Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, pages 141-142).

I picture Bush as an exceedingly threatened animal in seizing upon the Rumsfeldian strategy of preemptive attack in waging war on Iraq. Within a limited circle of minds, it seemed a good idea at the time. Except it extinguished all the uncertainties that a prudent commander would need to consider before making such a move, with the result that a shallow notion poorly thought through was put into effect, with egregious results.

Obama’s sending a surge of troops to Afghanistan appears to be another example that speaks to much the same point. Again, the military mind is out of its depth because there are too many imponderables in the social mix (it certainly is no nation) we call Afghanistan. Echoes of Vietnam are evident in Obama’s thinking, clouding his consciousness, spurring him to rash action as if he could picture the full consequences of such a move. This time, he tells himself, we will not retreat; we will win. But consciousness offers no guarantee of success; based entirely on past experience, it has no way of predicting with surety how things will play out. If I were the Taliban, I would lie low for a year or two, then, when American forces withdraw as advertised in 2011, step into the void supposedly defended by Afghan troops lacking the American commitment to, and fervor for, battle.

Consciousness is far more fragile than we care to admit, often tricking us into making a good show for form’s sake when, in fact, we don’t fully grasp the problem or threat we are faced with. As a result, we decide on an irreversible course of action with no option other than defeat when victory doesn’t rush from the wings on cue.

On the world stage, the loss of a man here or there (because his past experience does not prepare him to deal with prevailing events) is no tragedy. But when one individual’s consciousness is made responsible for the actions of an entire nation, leading to commitment of all its resources to a particular end, even the rigor of six million years of hominid evolution doesn’t equip us for the task of even imagining what an appropriate course of action might look like, much less recognizing it if we ever came across it. Consciousness is always experimental on the scale of one person leading a particular life. If we survive our personal errors of judgment, we have opportunity to learn where we went wrong. But on a national scale, no one mind can be made fully responsible for decisions affecting the whole. Which is why we have cabinets and advisors and staff to supplement the life experience of the so-called Commander In Chief. Who—like Lear misjudging his daughters, and Hamlet wanting absolute certainty—can aspire no higher than to a mortal level of consciousness.

Where the buck stops, that is where one individual’s consciousness makes a real difference on the national scene. That is precisely where Obama is located in the issue of America’s relation to Afghanistan and Pakistan. And India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Russia, China, and North Korea. His is a daunting assignment, even with the most artful spies and prescient advisors on Earth. Whatever choice he makes, he is damned one way or another precisely because he cannot admit to his human limitations or the frailty of his personal consciousness.

Our form of government calls for leaders with the stature of gods—when there are no gods available to take the position. Fallible as we are, there’s nobody here but us chickens. Men and women with the gift of consciousness and speech—who are bound to make mistakes in novel situations they are ill prepared to deal with. Particularly in situations they have no chance to rehearse as stage actors have because they take place in real time, every performance playing to an opening night crowd.

In the case of sending more troops to Afghanistan, we the senders are united by the commonalities of American experience in this decade; the receivers by their shared experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is bound to be a meeting of bodies carrying weapons, but not of minds. I cannot fathom any mind but my own, as no American can an Afghan or Taliban or al Qaeda mind, and vice versa. In global affairs, it is the minds inhabiting individual bodies leading particular lives in specific places that set the courses of action which determine world events. There is no possible way we can know what will happen as the result of this surge in military commitment. We can know what we want to happen, but that has almost no bearing on what will actually take place.

What is lacking in this campaign is a sense of humility, along with a realization that concepts in the mind are not events on the ground. The best thing we could possibly do under the circumstances is for all concerned to put down their arms and engage one another as fellow humans, children of the one Earth. Yes, we should engage, but as equals, not as one dedicated to dominating (or killing) the other. Consciousness being as fallible as it is in every known instance, it is foolish to put a gun in any hand that might take the life of a total stranger for reasons that are not fully known or considered. Imagine killing someone and then wondering who he was? Was, but no longer is.

Is there no middle ground between victory and defeat? There certainly is. Between me killing you and you killing me, there is the usual middle way of muddling through by playing backgammon together and trading stories about our mishaps and adventures. Of being human together—you being fully you, me being fully me. Acknowledging our similarities, sharing our differences, balancing the two, not letting ideology come between us to distort our relationship.

No, we have not tried that approach. We are better at building walls between people than bridges. At shooting from the hip before we’re sure of the target. America is now a street gang writ large on the world scene, defending its turf at all cost—unto bankrupting the nation both financially and morally. Because that is the way we are taught to conduct ourselves in the world—by flexing our might instead of listening to the other side of the story. Maybe later, when we do hear the story, we’ll apologize for acting so rashly, lay a few wreathes and call it square.

After all, they invaded our territory on 9-11, which everyone knows is a violation of sacred ground. No matter we violated theirs first. So we send out our muscle to teach them a lesson. As long as they run their turf by our rules, everything will be OK by us.

That’s the stuff tragedies are made of because we know it’ll never happen. That’s not how people are made. Lear was Lear, Hamlet was Hamlet. Liberty means living your own life your own way, being who you are till the curtain drops. We’re scripting our own drama as we act in the world, driven by the dictates of consciousness, which are invariably self-serving as best we can picture our current situation. It’s not only a tragedy for those who fall during their mission in Afghanistan, it’s a tragedy for all of us because we’re making it happen. It’s our money that’s paying for this expedition—a million dollars a year per head. That’s the going price for pretending we can teach total strangers the lesson we want them to learn.

Shakespeare has already written a play about a black man deceived by the advice of his lieutenant, Iago. Othello fell for it, not realizing Iago had his own agenda driven by his own motives. “O fool! fool! fool!” he said of himself when disabused, realizing he had been tricked into smothering Desdemona, whom he had “lov’d not wisely but too well.” Another animal driven by fear, he acted boldly as he thought he must, but acted wrongly nonetheless.

it’s been interesting. the end of the semester draws near and i’ve yet to motivate myself into studying properly and religiously doing my homework. instead, i find ways to preoccupy myself with cheap thrills, such as wasting the entirety of today on the preparation of christmas presents, the baking of banana bread, the practising of various other culinary skills (à la jamie oliver) and the liberal intake of televised programming that is methodically turning my brain into mush. it’s a vicious circle really. the sum of these things contributes greatly to the loss of an attention span making it increasingly difficult for me to learn all these things that i will soon purge from my stress-plagued mind for the new information that comes in the shiny, promising wrapper of next term. i wish i was more motivated. ma spanish oral exam was today as well, which despite all my anxieties, went fantastically well. señora primorac informed the brain and myself that our grammar had drastically improved since the midterm, which paired nicely with our escape from the french conjugation state of mind. whoops of joy ensued.

dabagaha was acting strangely today, claiming that she was “having a bad week”. it was odd, i’ve never seen her act like that. i hope it’s something minor and that it can be easily dealt with. i hate to see her so depressed.

on a brighter note, i got to see the parental units today, over a steaming loaf of banana bread created with the help of my various measuring devices purchased at ikea that very morning. they reported the usual, stress of the haus not being complete and the typical moans and groans of my recently dissected mother. it was good to see them, however it was exactly the sort of visit that forcibly reminds me of my outside position in the family. they clearly felt like visitors in my apartment, all the while seated ironically on their own couches, eating the banana bread born from my mother’s recipe. my mother was eager to interrogate me about the christmas presents i’d procured earlier in the day, a series of pictures and a few wooden frames. now all that’s left is the artistic portions, so i’m becoming turbo excited to see the reactions of the recipients.

anyways, i think i’ll return to the curious case of benjamin button now, perhaps it has enough substance to prevent my mind from dissolving into the liquid its slowly but surely becoming.

-mouchefska

Jag bjuder på en överraskning imorgon till den stackare som läser mig blogg. Vad det är tänker jag såklart inte säga, då blir det ingen hemlighet lixx. Det handlar om the brain iallafall.

The more I think about it, the more it becomes clear to me that the answer is mind distraction.

It is known that the biggest mind distraction is sex. I often make rude comments to fellow forumists (obviously on a forum), by the likes of: Yes, you could ponder over that bla bla you’re on about, or and this is a BIG OR, you could just have mind blowing sex. Problem solved. Next !

Now, after reading some more stuff, I realize that sex is not only a huge releaser of particular substances in the body (as endorphins and such, and stop fooling yourself that exercise or chocolate will ever make up for it), but you also do not think during it. That’s what some people like to call “stopping the voice in your head”. 

Life is made out of endless decisions. We constantly have so many thoughts that they become overwhelming. So many questions, so many ideas, so many ways to do things… Times we’re scared, times we’re happy and don’t want to lose it. Times we ponder upon the meaning of life like we’d know anything. LOL Times when we can solve problems (and drown in fame) and times when there’s nothing we can do about problems and we sob.

But if you cleared your mind… If you didn’t have one thought… What bliss that is. What perfect bliss.

They say ignorance is bliss. I think they do have a point.

So should you live your life having mind blowing experiences, over and over and over again, in the “chaotic” style I was speaking of? Everybody yearns for mind distraction, from the janitor to Bill Gates, from the woman with a moustache to Angelina Jolie, from the kid playing with his toys to the grown up releasing through video games (and much more).

So if everything we yearn for is mind distraction… Is that not the ultimate goal? To be as distracted as you can for the rest of your life?

There are numerous ideas pointing to this… Par example… If you get angry with someone and don’t let it out at them immediately, you may learn later that the anger has gone or at least softened.

However if we all were to lose ourselves in mind distraction, who would’ve invented cures for diseases? Who would’ve invented viruses? Who would’ve invented marvellous or terrible things?

Nobody, but…

Apart from having to work for a living (assuming you want to live, although technically nobody’s making you live), what else stops you from drowning in mind distraction and forgetting all about the complexity of this world and most of the “second hand information”?

“I didn’t lose my mind, it was mine to give away…”

Going back to basics… That’s what it is. Well the basics of living and the basics of the same “second hand information”, but basics nevertheless.

What’s so wrong with that, instead of tormenting yourself with questions you’ll never answer and truths you’ll never find (mostly because they’re already there)?

Now my mind’s sayin’: “But, but… What would I be if not for my knowledge, for my questions, for my truths?”

Yeah… What would you be? You? LOL You’d still be you. But a more torment free you.

“But, but… What about excellence, achieving and such?”

Yes, what… Do you come with a label that says “become excellent, achieve and such…”? LOL

“But, what about staying safe and such?”

Well nobody makes ya live… I have stated that before. And ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE, yet again. It’s pretty much the law. As for control and security – Still fiction, as Hellen Keller would put it.

Maybe what the samurai achieve isn’t so different. What chaotic people do through pleasure injection, samurai do through mind detachment. How’s that for an answer? Same goal, different ways.

“So what do you mean? The whole purpose of life is ignoring ourselves?”

I’m afraid I don’t have an answer to that. I’m tired with searching for answers. Answers to what?

Men understood that they have to seek for pleasure, ditch pain and avoid death (aka the unknown).

It’s common inflicted law (by one way or the other).

Par example, I don’t want anyone to throw mud at me and call me a shame to society. I don’t want my career thrown to dust. I don’t want anything thrown to dust. I like those things = pleasure. I lose those things = pain. Makes sense?

So that’s pretty much what we do, whether it is our goal or not. Avoid pain, seek pleasure, avoid death (which again is supposed to be painful as it’s a step into the unknown).

Could it also be a vicious circle? Getting pleasure, avoiding pain, losing pleasure, getting pain?

So basically what I am saying is get as much pleasure as possible, face pain and screw death – you can‘t avoid them anyway.

Is that a truth, a goal? I have no idea. Lately I’m failing to see the meaning of life, really. I keep on thinking and thinking about it and simply CANNOT see it. Not unless you “think”, which is obviously a waste of time (at a particular extent). Thinking practically resumes at choosing to live or die. Easier said than done.

And there’s surely some bugger who won’t read this till the end because it’s boring. And they’re correct. It’s all boring thinking.

One last idea: I know I’ve talked about seeking pleasure, facing pain and death, but let’s get back to what we started. MIND DISTRACTION. THAT IS KEY. Call it detachment if you will.

Oh and one last, last thing… Why struggle when you can just let go?

And one last, last, last thing… Maybe in the end, mind distraction is just a way of fooling the body that it’s all ok. I don’t know. Who cares? You do not think of such things when distracted, you do not care, you do not talk about the fight club.

To quote on Jack… “What if this is as good as it gets?” No answer, no goal, no truth. Nothing, as someone else would say.

End of story.

Part of this text has been erased. I thought about some things I said and just wasn’t comfortable with them, so I erased them. Apologies.

Yes, this is my idea of fun. (jk) These are all interesting tidbits from Introduction to Brain and Behavior 2nd Edition by Bryan Kolb and Ian Q. Whishaw, Worth Publishers,  2^nd edition, 2005.

• “But our version of the world, whether we see it directly or view it reproduced, is always a creation of the brain. What we see is not an objective reproduction of what is “out there” but rather a subjective construction of reality that the brain manufactures.”

• “We perceive red because certain cells in our eyes are activated by certain wavelengths of light that we call red or green…If we did not have these cells, we could not experience red. In fact, about 5 percent of all human males lack the cells.“
• “Winderickx found two forms of the receptor cell that detects red; about 60 percent of men have one form, 40 percent have the other. The difference between these two forms is small but significant and results from a small difference in the gene that encodes the red-detecting receptor. The Winderickx study provided the first evidence that normal variation in our mental world is traceable to normal variation in our genes.”
• “Vision is our primary sensory experience. Far more of the human brain is dedicated to vision than to any of our other senses.”
• “Within the rather narrow range of electromagnetic energy visible to humans, the wavelength varies from about 400 nanometers (violet) to 700 nanometers (red). (A nanometer, abbreviated nm, is
  one-billionth of a meter.)”
• “The eyes are usually moving. We make tiny, involuntary eye movements, called nystagmus, almost constantly.” (There is a name for them!!)
• “…In fact, these darkened regions have become known as blobs, and the less-dark regions separating them have become known as interblobs. Blobs and interblobs serve different functions. Neurons in the blobs take part in color perception, whereas neurons in the interblobs participate in form and motion perception.” Yes, blob is a legit neurogical term.
• “Light is electromagnetic energy that we see; sound is mechanical energy that we hear.”
• “…sound waves travel at a fixed speed of 1100 feet per second, sound energy varies in wavelength (frequency)”

- Cérebro, o que você quer fazer esta noite?
- A mesma coisa que fazemos todas as noites, Pinky… Tentar conquistar o mundo!

A verdade é que os dois ratos brancos que utilizam os Laboratórios Acme como base para seus planos mirabolantes já estão dominando o mundo. E o plano é perfeito. Veja bem:

A primeira etapa:

Parodiar a si mesmos. Inventar que são idiotas e que seus planos nunca dão certo. Minar a própria credibilidade a ponto da infantilidade humana. Por isso viraram desenho animado.

Segunda etapa:

Descobrir como invadir as mentes humanas de maneira que ninguém percebesse ou fosse capaz de controlar suas ordens. Pesquisaram por anos a fio e descobriram, então, a Mensagem Subliminar, um tipo de mensagem que não pode ser captada diretamente pelos sentidos humanos, está abaixo do limiar, a menor sensação detectável conscientemente.

Terceira etapa:

Descobrir a melhor maneira de enviar as mensagens sem que os seres humanos percebam. Pesquisadores ligados ao grupo do Inspetor Buginganga detectaram a seguinte conversa via rádio telepatia;

- Cérebro, como vamos enviar mensagens subliminares com nossas ordens aos humanos?
- Bem, Pinky, acho que podemos usar algo ligado às origens humanas, como a comunicação e…
- Lá lá lá… – Pinky viajando na maionese – Tururu…
- Isso! Você é um gênio!
- Ãh?
- Vamos usar a música… – sorriso maldoso nos lábios (é, ratos tem lábios) – Vamos inventar a música eletrônica!
- O que é isso?

E assim começaram seu maldoso plano contra a humanidade. Estudaram anos a fio. A fundo. Entenderam as religiões, os rituais, as crenças.

Viajaram o mundo perambulando tribos indígenas, seitas, grupos fanáticos, oligarquias, estrófes, eras mesozóicas, pcterodáctilas, motocôndricas, ribossômicas, enzimáticas e outras galáxias.

Descobriram o estado de transe! Descobriram que o “Lá lá lá… Tururu…” funcionava muito bem e tornava os seres humanos receptivos a qualquer baboseira.

E então! (ênfase dramática, muito dramática mesmo), lançaram as raves e as trances e o diabo a quatro, por assim dizer.

Fizeram que isso virasse moda, lógico, uma vez que entendem a imbecilidade do homo sapiens em relação ao que o outro pensa (diferente e mais imponente que o ‘eu interior’). E, como moda, aproveitaram para lançar grifes e ganhar dinheiro. Dinheiro que vem bancando seus estudos.

Pesquisaram mais e descobriram o efeito das luzes monocromáticas. E descobriram como eliminar os riscos de claustrofobias (estas neurazinhas que o homem inventou pra si mesmo). Inventaram que estes eventos, na sua maioria, ocorreriam em locais abertos, perto da natureza (agradando aos religiosos), durante a noite e o dia (agradando aos mochileiros), frequentados por nichos diferentes (agradando aos nichos diversos, aos jornalistas, aos produtores, aos jovens, aos velhos, aos gordos, aos esquizofrênicos, etc) e inventaram o PATROCÍNIO! Ohhhhhh…

Por fim, num ato de extrema magnitude, inventaram AS DROGAS! Drogas específicas para consumo durante tais eventos. Drogas inibidoras de tal coisa e exibidoras de outra coisa, mas o fato é: drogas que potencializam o efeito imbecil do estado de transe absorvendo a mensagem subliminar.

Pacote completo!

Desviam a nossa atenção, claro. Usam todas as mídias para nos embromar. Lula, Bush, guerras, fome zero, tsunamis, novelas, metrôs, gangues, aquecimento global…

E, enquanto isso, saímos das raves e vamos comprar NIKE´s, vamos beber Smirnoff Ice, maltratar velhinhos e dar esmola aos moleques de rua. Tudo isso como efeito de teste, lógico.

Porque, preparem-se, quando o plano começar, de fato, o mundo será realmente dominado pelo rato branco alto, magricela, com escleróticas azuis e dois dentes tortos saltando fora da boca e pelo outro, o rato branco, baixote e atarracado, com escleróticas rosadas e uma cabeça enorme evidenciando um cérebro também enorme.

Isso, claro, se não matarmos uns aos aoutros antes, só pra ver quem morre primeiro, o que é bem do nosso feitio. Achamos que dominamos tudo e sabemos tudo e que os ratinhos, no máximo, podem mexer no nosso queijo.

Somos enganados,como sempre, pela nossa própria ignorância.

Publicado orinalmente em De Costas Pro Espelho em Abril 19, 2007

I was lucky enough to catch two shows at The Suspense Festival this year.  Suspense is an adult puppet festival organised by The Little Angel Theatre, a hidden gem in the middle of Islington.  Both pieces I saw were incredibly impressive, with a real sense of artisanship and integrity present which is annoyingly not always the way with actor based theatre.  These people really are highly skilled performers, not only with the objects that they manipulate so evocatively or their own charming performances but also in the formation of the sophisticated and beautiful soundscapes that go along side their creations.  It just goes to show what one can do without words and its all done with a large dollop of twinkly humour and a ruthless perfectionism which stops anything becoming cutesy.  Sadly it’s over for this year, but I hope that it has brought to the forefront of people’s minds, as it has with mine, that puppetry is an incredibly poignant and plush part of the theatrical world that isn’t being utilised enough currently.  I encourage more people to go and see adult puppetry, and hope that more venues will programme it.  Bring on the new Pinocchios, and I can’t wait for next year’s Suspense.

Inkfish – The Brain

TAM TAM Objektentheater – To Have Or Not To Have

We tend to believe that what is familiar is good. From Kluge, page 48:

Another study, replicated in at least 12 different languages, showed that people have a surprising attachment to the letters found in their own names, preferring words that contain those letters to words that don’t.

The Familiarity Effect is one reason it can be so difficult to change social policies – we believe that what we already have is good, regardless of whether another policy might be better, and regardless of whether the current policy is even working. I’m sure you can come up with your own examples of policies that are not working, but which are almost impossible to change. As Marcus says, people tend to assume the rule “If it’s in place, it must be working.“

Here’s an example of favoring current social policies, from pages 49-50:

Subjects were asked to evaluate policies such as the feeding of alley cats – should it be okay, or should it be illegal? The experimenter told half the subjects that alley-cat feeding was currently legal and the other half that it wasn’t, and then asked people whether the policy should be changed. Most people favored whatever the current policy was and tended to generate more reasons to favor it over the competing policy.

Because our brains are a mixture of new brain build on top of old brain, both old brain and new brain are involved in beliefs. However, when we become stressed or threatened, we tend to go to the old brain and to cling to the familiar. From page 50:

Other things being equal, people under threat tend to become more attached than usual to their own groups, causes, and values. Laboratory studies, for example, have shown that if you make people contemplate their own death, they tend to be nicer than normal to members of their own religious and ethnic groups, but more negative toward outsiders. Fears of death also tend to polarize people’s political and religious beliefs: patriotic Americans who are made aware of their own mortality are more appalled (than patriots in a control group) by the idea of using the American flag as a sieve…. Another study has shown that all people tend to become more negative towards minority groups in times of crisis; oddly enough, this holds true not just for members of the majority but even for members of the minority groups themselves.

The impact of the Familiarity Effect on our beliefs has profound implications for politics in this country because the current Great Recession is causing a lot of people to feel a lot of stress and to feel a lot more threatened.

It Is All In Your Head