CPSblog: 8 September 2005
Mirror Neurons and Thrift Stores
- Nice work on the visual perception stuff. Be sure to keep contributing to the visual perception glossary until it includes all of the important words. Someone put up a Thrift Stores page today for listing, directions, and comments about local spots for good, cheap project matter.
- There is a video available online that beautifully connects our work today in the studio with our next reading and into the whole of our work together. Please watch the following video before next studio: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3204/01.html It is 14 minutes long. If it does not work from your home setup, it should work in the labs or cps studio.
The video shows the new research in "mirror neurons". These same neurons fire in your brain whether you are doing some task or watching others do the task. So we have built in to our "wiring" an empathetic response. Much of this operates in the subconscious - so it might seem familiar, but its full activity is below normal cognition. This research shows how integrally connected the brain and body are.
This explains the mechanism by which we learn most things through imitation and mimicry. This also relates to much of the visual perception reading we just discussed by showing us the mechanism by which the external (cultural and environmental things) actually become internalized.
When we consider meaning and how it it conveyed in images/objects, this new research gives support to a major theory; that we relate to things mostly in terms of metaphor.
This also give support to how feeling and seeing, and movement are connected. When we watch something our minds fire as if it was us doing the action, and that action is connected to feeling.
Culture: According to V. S. Ramachandran at a key moment in our evolution our mirror neurons got way better. Once we got better at mirror neurons we could copy quickly any feature that we might witness in animals or nature rather than having to wait for the slow progression of evolution to select for that feature ......... these complicated methods are codified not in genes but in culture which is passed from generation to generation through cultural objects, methods, and practices.
In conclusion, we see the power of the visual: To present to the viewer a visual image or object is to have them mentally perform or do what is in the image or to be done with the object. In the language of both of our readings, this is how the world is mediated; in images, objects, other people, games, sports, dance, pets . . . . . . .
Link to this Page
