Concepts (part 1)
I need to catalogue a couple of things I've read/seen recently, before they disappear in the absent-minded fog I'm currently living in. Both of these items hold concepts I try to reference or want to reference in nearly every project.
The first bit comes from a New Yorker article from the June 30, 2008 issue. The article (true story), titled "The Itch" is about a woman who has an itch on her scalp that she cannot get rid of. No matter how much scratching - no matter what the doctors tell her - it persists and (understandably) drives her crazy. One morning she woke up and found she had scratched through her skull - just the thought makes me shudder. Nearly every doctor she visits believes it's a psychological issue - that she has obsessive compulsive disorder. One of her doctors believed differently - that it could be one of two things - constantly active nerve fibres or the triggers in her brain had gone haywire and were constantly sending itch signals.
Okay - all that's kind of interesting, but just backstory. Turns out no one believed that it had to do with the brain - they tested various theories regarding the nerve fibres with no lasting results. The woman still has the itch. So now, the article posits that it's actually a brain problem - that there's so much about the brain we don't know, or are just beginning to find out. The thing that triggered my interest - apart from the horrible grossness of scratching through your skull into your brain - was this idea:
" The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor - a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you'd expect that most of the fibres going to the brain's primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty percent do; eighty percent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety percent memory and less than ten percent sensory nerve signals."
Visual perception is more than 90% memory. What we see has mostly to do with memories of what we've seen. If I feel as if I'm "finding" photographs - it's because I am. I'm in the process of recovering memories.
(The next bit has to with a similar topic but this post is rather long... so I'll break it up.)
The first bit comes from a New Yorker article from the June 30, 2008 issue. The article (true story), titled "The Itch" is about a woman who has an itch on her scalp that she cannot get rid of. No matter how much scratching - no matter what the doctors tell her - it persists and (understandably) drives her crazy. One morning she woke up and found she had scratched through her skull - just the thought makes me shudder. Nearly every doctor she visits believes it's a psychological issue - that she has obsessive compulsive disorder. One of her doctors believed differently - that it could be one of two things - constantly active nerve fibres or the triggers in her brain had gone haywire and were constantly sending itch signals.
Okay - all that's kind of interesting, but just backstory. Turns out no one believed that it had to do with the brain - they tested various theories regarding the nerve fibres with no lasting results. The woman still has the itch. So now, the article posits that it's actually a brain problem - that there's so much about the brain we don't know, or are just beginning to find out. The thing that triggered my interest - apart from the horrible grossness of scratching through your skull into your brain - was this idea:
" The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor - a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you'd expect that most of the fibres going to the brain's primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty percent do; eighty percent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety percent memory and less than ten percent sensory nerve signals."
Visual perception is more than 90% memory. What we see has mostly to do with memories of what we've seen. If I feel as if I'm "finding" photographs - it's because I am. I'm in the process of recovering memories.
(The next bit has to with a similar topic but this post is rather long... so I'll break it up.)
posted by bridget at
5:46 PM
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