Two things I made note of when reading “The Last Hippie” by Oliver Sacks were issues of memory and how people’s lives are constructed. Noting memory, Deadhead Greg seems to have lost his ability to concretely remember anything past the…
The Case of the Colorblind Painter- An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks
“Indeed when we first met, and he described how objects and surfaces “fluctuated” in different light, he was, so to speak, describing the world in wavelengths, not in colors. The experience was so unlike anything he had ever experienced, so…
The Matrix, Neurocomic, and Orpheus
Colin made the point that Neurocomic‘s mirror imagery–and the connection is makes to consciousness–is reminiscent of The Matrix. That definitely seems true. I’d say they are also both reminiscent of Jean Cocteau‘s 1950 film Orpheus. Take a look.
Your Brain on Jane Austen
A research team at Stanford is doing fMRI studies on “your brain on Jane Austen.” Are we neurodivergent when we read Austen?: “Phillips said the global increase in blood flow during close reading suggests that “paying attention to literary texts requires the…
What is it like to be a bat? – Thomas Nagel
The title what is it like to be a bat? From Thomas Nagel’s essay seemed to pique my interest at first. When I think of bats I think of blindness and the saying “blind as a bat.” As I dove…
What is it like to be a Bat
“But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically that there is something it is like to be that organism… there is something that it is to be that…
The Ability to Imagine
In our discussion about “Neurocomic” yesterday, someone mentioned page 126, where the main character touches the mirror and is pulled into it. This image was so familiar to me, and after mulling over it for a while, I realized this…
As Blind as a Bat
When reading What’s it’s like to be a bat by Thomas Nagel, I was confused more times than I can count. I was able to make sense of a few of his point but most of it didn’t make sense…
Reading Nagel and LeDoux for Thursday
Hi everybody. As I mentioned in class, we are reading about theories of consciousness for Thursday–Thomas Nagel’s classic (and short) essay, “What It Is Like to Be a Bat?” and Joseph LeDoux’s up-to-date (and fairly long) overview of current theories…
An Interesting way to learn
I consider myself a person who learns more effectively by visuals. Neurocomic did just that, the cover to the very last page was so intriguing i almost did not want to stop reading. The chapter that i was drawn to…
