purple motes

Shen Wei Dance Arts painted and played Connect Transfer at the Kennedy Center this weekend. In the open space of the Concert Hall, the performance connected senses and worked across specific to abstract in an intriguing externalization of the human brain.

In caricature, ballet is about the air, and modern dance is about the floor. Shen Wei's company connected to the floor with lines and strokes. Even when the dancers were moving with their torsos against the floor, energy flowed out of their arms and legs, pulling them across the floor. The movement had the earthliness of modern dance, but rather than with the weight of limbs and steps, it imaged neurons firing.

Cross-sensory effects shape the performance. In an interview for Dance Umbrella in October, 2007, Shen Wei explained:

Sometimes you hear a sound and you may see an image. Sometimes you see a movement and you feel its speed. You see the movement and hear the sound as well. ... When I see a physical movement, it's important at the same time to keep my others senses open --- my ears, my feelings, my touch. That way I might understand how I can deepen all of the elements of my experience.

The human neural system integrates sensory modalities across all stages of sensory processing. Connect Transfer abstractly enacts those processes.

The work also images calligraphy being written and written characters unraveling and reforming. About a third of the way through, a single dancer wearing a single, slightly extended, gloved sponge soaked in black paint brushes through the space with circular movements within traveling floorwork. The image of the movement is brush strokes of calligraphy. At one point, the music stops and floor microphones bring out the sound of the dancer's brushing. Nonetheless, much of the movement that evokes brushwork occurs up from brushing paint on the floor. The play of senses and abstraction in brush-movement is an intriguing aspect of the work.

The floor painting was not just a product of brushing. Moving on the floor, the dancer's tights acquired paint and transfered paint. So did their feet. One dancer had one bare hand painted red. Her painted hand created some hand stencils on the floor like those of cave art dating back about 30,000 years. In their diversity of forms and scales, and in the sense of purposive actions and chance occurrences, the resulting paintings are much more evocative of a biological system than abstract expressionist paintings.

The part of Connect Transfer that I liked least was the personal seal that Shen Wei danced. This was done in a spotlight in front-center stage, twice, to very different music. It included the only movement directed through a dancer's eyes. Some of the movement seemed to be body-builder camp. Connect Transfer as a whole contained little parody or irony. But for me, Shen Wei's seal evoked, intentionally or not, a parody of the egotistical artist.

More ambitious staging might better mark the trajectory of the performance and enlarge the sense of the artistic process. Why not pull the canvas out from under the dancers after they have worked on it for awhile? With the canvas as a back drop, the percussive section of the performance might use movement patterned on finger painting and dabbing of thick, oil-based paint. Then maybe move the canvas above them. And, with a sufficiently translucent canvas, why not finish with a section that has the artists dancing behind their work? Such staging might shift some of the work from the brain to more accessible, personal artistic experience.

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There is no Chief Executive Officer neuron in a brain. In brains, the most general decision-making processes (top of the executive hierarchy) and the broadest and most abstract representations (top of the perceptual hierarchy) are physically instantiated in the broadest networks of neurons. That's rather different from the structure of a company in which the Chief Executive Officer is considered to be the highest decision-maker and the best representative of the company.

Joaquín Fuster, a leading neuroscientist, described this contrast:

The cortical structure and dynamics of the executive hierarchy, like those of the perceptual hierarchy, differ radically from the structure of social hierarchies. In social hierarchies, such as those of industrial and military organizations, representation -- like power -- is concentrated at the top; in cortical hierarchies, it is distributed at the top. Because both perceptual and executive hierarchies are formed largely by divergent connections, representations at the top are much more broadly based, in neural terms, than those at the bottom....[1]

The Neurocritic provides conceptual and anatomical diagrams from one of Fuster's earlier papers.

Note that this difference involves neither an absence of hierarchy nor a contrast between bottom-up and top-down control. The brain's executive and perceptual hierarchies are built upon anatomical gradients of memory formation:

Because the three gradients of memory formation -- phylogeny, ontogeny, and connectivity -- largely coincide temporally and spatially, we can trace them by focusing on any one of them, such as the ontogenetic gradient, as portrayed by the myelogenetic map of the cortex. The numeration of the map refers to the order of myelination of the various cortical areas in perinatal periods.[2]

Moreover, both top-down and bottom-up control are important aspects of brain functioning, each with somewhat different communications technologies.

The Internet is like a global brain. That global brain, like the one in your head, includes hierarchies and forms of top-down control. At the same time, the most general decisions about the goals of the Internet are a product of the relations of many active participants. Relations among persons, not one corporate person, represents what the Internet is.

Notes:

[1] Joaquín Fuster (2006), "The cognit: A network model of cortical representation," International Journal of Psychophysiology 60, p. 130.

[2] Id. p. 127, reference to figure omitted.

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Brain effects are communicative goods. A recent study found common effects among reading and seeing actions:

Participants observed actions and read phrases relating to foot, hand, or mouth actions. In the premotor cortex of the left hemisphere, a clear congruence was found between effector-specific activations of visually presented actions and of actions described by literal phrases.

For example, reading the phrase "biting the peach" and seeing a video of a person bite a peach activate a common set of premotor neurons called "mirror neurons." These neurons also trigger muscular actions such as actually biting a peach.

Consider the economics of activating these neurons. Making sense of text is relatively expensive. Actually executing actions involve the caloric cost of moving bodily mass. Observing actions is probably the cheapest means to activate the common neurons associated with these different sensory circumstances. Perhaps this helps to explains why so many persons spend so much time on couches, watching sports on television.

Past physical experience affects the extent of neural activation. A scholar who has studied this relation noted:

"When we watch a sport, our brain performs an internal simulation of the actions, as if it were sending the same movement instructions to our own body. But for those sports commentators who are ex-athletes, the mirror system is likely to be even more active because their brains may re-enact the moves they once made. This might explain why they get so excited while watching the game!" [supporting scholarly paper (pdf)]

Sense of presence involves attunement to another like oneself. Common experience of physical action heightens sense of presence. Current demand for televised sports probably depends strongly on explicit marketing investment. An interesting challenge might be to try to calculate the implicit marketing value of sports participation.

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The idea that you are your brain has fascinated intellectuals at least since Descartes. Francis Crick, a co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA and a Nobel Laureate, described the "astonishing hypothesis":

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that "You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased: "You're nothing but a pack of neurons."

That's obviously true. The whole of you by weight is mainly water, but you also include some hot air. You might leak out some tainted water, and subsequently be slightly lighter and happier. But lose your brain, and you're dead.

Neurons evocatively named "mirron neurons" have generated considerable excitement recently in neuroscience. Mirror neurons have the same pattern of discharge when an animal sees an action performed, and when the animal performs the action. V.S. Ramachandran, a leading neuroscientist and an important contributor to the controversial field of neuroesthetics, has declared that "mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology."

The film The Matrix popularized the idea of a person as a "brain in a vat". William Gibson's novel Neuromancer popularized the idea of "jacking in" -- connecting one's brain directly to an alternative reality. I've argued that these ideas obscures much of how a living body makes sense in interacting with things of the world, especially other persons. In a recent essay, Ramachandran seems to take a "brain in a vat" and "jacking in" quite seriously.

Well, at least for awhile. Towards the end of his essay, Ramachandran emphasizes relations between persons:

We are all merely many reflections in a hall of mirrors of a single cosmic reality (Brahman or "paramatman"). If you find all this too much to swallow just consider the that as you grow older and memories start to fade you may have less in common with, and be less "informationally coupled", to your own youthful self, the chap you once were, than with someone who is now your close personal friend.

So much for simulating a person with a brain in a vat. We're all in this vat together. Either simulate us all, or forget about it.

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Sense of presence has not been the central focus of much scientific study. The neuroscience of a single body cannot adequately understand sense of presence. Social psychology that does not recognize the biological constraints of separate human bodies cannot either.

Scientific interest in the connection between biological hardware and relations between organisms appears to be growing. Oxford University Press has just announced a new journal entitled Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. This area of research points to better understanding of sense of presence.

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