mixingmemory | July 21, 2006Those of you interested in this whole frame analysis thing, or in George Lakoff's new cult of personality, might find his blog interview at Emboldened. I'm planning on writing a post about Lakoff when my computer access is more consistent, because I've been thinking about his (and Mark Johnson's) theory of concepts, and by extension, his version of frame analysis, from a different perspective lately. I'll give you a taste of that perspective with a quote from Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (p. 103 in the Second Edition; all emphasis mine):
The ritual-authoritarian language spreads over…
mixingmemory | July 20, 2006That's it for the republishing of the old posts, for now at least. If you read the posts on art and/or metaphor, I hope you enjoyed them, and maybe even learned something. For administrative purposes, I'm including links to all 8 posts here:
Cognitive Science of Art
Goals and Motivations of Neuroaesthetics
Ramachandran's 10 Principles of Art, Principles 1-3
Ramachandran's 10 Principles of Art, Principles 4-10
Beauty and the Brain
Metaphor
A Brief History of Metaphors in Cognitive Science
"Metaphor Is Like Analogy"
Metaphor Is Categorization
The Reckoning
UPDATE: Thanks to The Neurocritic, I'…
mixingmemory | July 20, 2006[First posted on 11/03/04 at the old blog.]
In the final installment of Mixing Memory's metaphor series (for now -- at some later date I'll get to novel vs. dead metaphors), I try to use the empirical data to distinguish between the categorization and structure mapping theories of metaphor. Before I start, I should make it clear that there is certainly not a consensus among researchers about which model is the correct one, though my feeling is that most are in the comparison camp, rather than the categorization camp, even if they don't fully buy the structure mapping account. Part of the…
mixingmemory | July 19, 2006[First published on 2/4/05 at the old blog.]
If you've read my two previous posts on Ramachandran's principles of art (here and here), you've probably got a good idea of what Ramachandran's concept of beauty is. While his 10 principles of art are concerned more with the production of art and the visual principles that apply to the viewing of art, and he therefore does not discuss beauty at length, there does seem to be a fairly clear conception of beauty contained within his explanation of the principles and why they work in art. Specifically, beauty is seen as the product of perceiving…
mixingmemory | July 18, 2006[First posted on 11/1/04 at the old blog.]
I have heard that there is an election today, and I've heard that it's going to be close and contentious, but I don't care. Here at Mixing Memory, we're only worried about metaphor for now (and soon, classical vs. connectionist architectures, and perhaps after that, idioms, and after that... the sky's the limit). In the first two metaphor posts, I talked about the history of cognitive theories of metaphor, and the structure mapping theory of metaphor. Now it's on to the other prominent view of metaphor, one that differs almost entirely in its…
mixingmemory | July 17, 2006[First published on 1/22/05 at the old blog.]
Recall V.S. Ramachandran's 10 principles of art.
Peak shift
Perceptual Grouping and Binding
Contrast
Isolation
Perceptual problem solving
Symmetry
Abhorrence of coincidence/generic viewpoint
Repetition, rhythm and orderliness
Balance
Metaphor
In the last post, I talked about the first three. In this post, I'll discuss 4, 5, 6, 7, and 10.
Isolation
Ramachandran's first three principles, peak shift, grouping, and contrast, may, after a little thought, seem fairly obvious. Art is generally not meant to be strictly representational, but instead to…
mixingmemory | July 16, 2006[First posted on 11/1/04 at the old blog.]
Onward we go to the first contemporary view of metaphor, structure mapping theory. Before I start, though, I want to clear something up. Perhaps no one has actually been confused, but I'm afraid that I haven't made something clear that should be made clear. For the most part, cognitive theories of metaphor -- cognitive linguistic accounts, which purport to be theories of all cognition and, if the cognitive linguists had their way, would also combine to serve as the Unified Field Theory, aside -- are intended to account for common, everyday uses of…
mixingmemory | July 15, 2006[First published on 1/20/05 at the old blog.]
As a starting point for the attempt to discover universals in art based on our knowledge of neuroscience, and visual neuroscience in particular, V.S. Ramachandran has proposed ten principles of art (eight of which come from the paper he wrote with William Hirstein, titled "The Science of Art") . The principles, in the order that Ramachandran discusses them, are:
Peak shift
Perceptual Grouping and Binding
Contrast
Isolation
Perceptual problem solving
Symmetry
Abhorrence of coincidence/generic viewpoint
Repetition, rhythm and orderliness
Balance…
mixingmemory | July 14, 2006[First posted on 10/31/04 at the old blog]
From Aristotle through speech act theories, metaphor had been viewed as a secondary type of language, built on literal speech which is, in turn, the true nature of language. However, since the 1970s, cognitive scientists have become increasingly convinced that metaphor is not only central to thought, something that Aristotle would admit, but that it is also a central aspect of language, and no less priveleged than literal language. Metaphors are processed as quickly as literal language, and as automatically. In addition, metaphors, while generally…
mixingmemory | July 13, 2006[First posted on 1/20/05 at the old blog]
With all the controversy surrounding the issues in my last few posts, I thought it would be refreshing to talk about something completely uncontroversial: the existence of universals in art based on neurological mechanisms. (That was a joke, people). I've been doing some research on the cognitive science of art and aesthetics for my own work, and have wanted to post on it for a while, but there's a lot to talk about, and I haven't really been able to develop a plan for how to discuss it in this forum. So, I've decided to do what I usually do with blog…
mixingmemory | July 13, 2006I'm going to have only sporadic computer access for the next several days, so I won't have time to do much new posting. So I'm going to just copy and paste some of the more popular posts from the old blog. They are four posts on neuroaesthetics, particularly Ramachandran's 10 principles of art. Also, because we were talking about metaphor recently, I thought people might be interested in the posts I wrote way back when on theories of metaphor that are both more mainstream and better tested than anything cognitive linguistics has to offer. So I'll repost all of those as well. The first…
mixingmemory | July 12, 2006A couple weeks ago, a couple Science Bloggers, sparked by Jessica of Feministing, discussed the potential dangers of discovering the biological causes of homosexuality. Jessica expressed a common attitude in her post, writing:
And naturally the larger question with all these why-are-you-gay studies is why do we have to know? I'm terrified that once someone targets a "reason" they're just going to try and find a way to do away with it.
To which fellow Science Blogger Janet added:
Pinning homosexuality on something (abnormal) from genetics or development comes dangerously close to making it a…
mixingmemory | July 11, 2006Theory of mind, or how we think about what's going on in other people's heads, continues to be one of the hottest topics in cognitive science today. A debate continues to rage over whether we reason about other people's thoughts by means of theory-like propositional knowledge, or through simulation (i.e., putting yourself in their shoes... in your head). Since psychologists are unlikely to solve this debate by themselves, they've called in the artillery - cognitive neuroscientists. And those buggers have come up with some interesting ways to figure out where mentalizing (another name for…
mixingmemory | July 10, 2006It's been obvious to everyone who's written about politics since Aristotle that emotion plays an important role in political rhetoric and political judgment. With an increased focus on emotion in cognitive scientists, there has been a flourish of empirical work attempting to elucidate this role. I thought it might be interesting to say a little about this given the recent resurfacing of the Westen et al. study on motivated reasoning in politics. While the recent posts on the study have (unfortunately) described it in terms of confirmation bias, it would be more accurate to describe the study…
mixingmemory | July 9, 2006The second edition of The Synapse is up over at A Block Around the Clock. I especially liked "Are You Conscious of Your Precuneous" and Ethics at the Dawn of the Neurotechnological Age."
Elsewhere, John Hawks tackles Aymara, "the future is behind us" thing, with some links to some nice discussion at Language Log as well.
Three Quarks Daily links to a Scientific American article about how we cognitive scientis, and other scientists, are stealing humanity.
Chris Chatham has a nice post at Developing Intelligence compiling the various points and counterpoints in the discussion of brain imaging…
mixingmemory | July 9, 2006Wow, what a really bad cup this year. I mean, I was rooting for Italy after the U.S. was eliminated, but ending on penalty kicks? That just sucks. Combine that with all the other games that either ended on penalty kicks after extra time, or in which the only goal scored was on a penalty kick, and then the poor officiating through much of group play, and this was the worst cup that I remember.
mixingmemory | July 8, 2006This week's visual illusion is related to Mach bands, and similar in some ways to the watercolor effect. It's called the Craik-O'Brien-Cornsweet effect (or just the Cornsweet effect)1. This is the best example I've ever seen (from here):
What you should see is a dark square over a light square (almost white). Now take your finger and place it over the boundary between the two squares. What do you see? Two squares of the same color!
What's going on here? Well, at the boundary between the two squares, the top one really is dark, and the bottom one really is white. The visual system seems to be…
mixingmemory | July 7, 2006The Westen et al. study on the motivated reasoning of political partisons has made its way back into the blogosphere, first with Will Wilkerson, and now fellow Science Blogger Ed Brayton. I posted on the study, and hot cognition/motivated reasoning in general back in March, when the study was first noticed by the press and bloggers. I'm not exactly pleased to see the study popping up again, because it was so massively misinterpreted last time, with people making claims to the effect that the study demonstrated the impossibility of political persuasion. One reporter, writing about the paper…
mixingmemory | July 6, 2006If you're looking for a good way to waste some time, try this (via Bitch Ph.D.). Here is a piece created by my 8-year old Pollock (aka Darth Vader):
mixingmemory | July 5, 2006If you found yesterday's post on perceptual symbol systems and related theories interesting, you might like this paper by Edouard Machery that is in press at Cognition. The paper is titled "Concept Empiricism: A Methodological Critique." The critique is aimed at "neo-empiricism" in concept research, and uses Barsalou's perceptual symbol systems theory as its primary example. Here's the abstract:
Thanks to Barsalou's, Damasio's, Glenberg's, Prinz' and others' work, neo-empiricism is gaining a deserved recognition in the psychology and philosophy of concepts. I argue, however, that neo-…