A very quick Haraway blog:

1. In the series Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Togusa talks with a forensic specialist called Haraway. I'm not sure Donna would subscribe to what "Haraway" is saying, though I think she'd appreciate the philosophical tone and length of reasoning here (the character talks for almost two minutes straight about robots, gender, artificial life). And I'm pretty sure Donna would be surprised to find that "she" smokes!

Here is the link from Ghost in the Shell:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S25YpTaowsU&feature=related

As an aside, my mix played Return to Innocence as I typed about the Ghost in the Shell program. I love the serendipity of databases.

2. There are several "mashups" of Donna's manifesto on YouTube and elsewhere. According to Wikipedia, "Digital mashups represent a new phase in the re-use of existing works not so much conceptually as in ease of use. The creation of digital media formats such as ASCII text, Redbook audio, JPEG images and MPEG video has made it far easier for potential mashup creators to create derivative works than was the case in the past, when significant technical equipment and knowledge was required to manipulate analog content."

While there are all sorts of issues with mashups, including Jarod Lanier using them as examples of why the net is counter-creative, I am imagining them as a cyborg writing. So much of what we write owes much of its life to what has been read or written before, and not by us; in addition, the cyborg manifesto is not simply collaged, but integrated into popular culture products, making the pop product deeper and the potentially complex ideas in the Manifesto more accessible. My favorite mashup is one that overlays the manifesto with clips from Ghost in the Shell. Here are links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHePdqzIpN8

Other interesting reworkings of Haraway can be found here:

http://vimeo.com/6131354

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDUFpPibuMs

and here is one in Spanish that is fascinating

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI6jAQJXmy0&feature=related

Donna Haraway 1

On January 28th at UCSC’s College 9/10, I attended “Messing with Haraway,” a surprise goodbye to Donna Haraway, who is retiring at the end of the spring quarter after a long and successful career. The event was very much in the spirit of Donna’s work: eclectic, funny, serious, international. Scholar friends of Donna’s from all over the world Skyped in to a huge screen; there were musical numbers, testimonials, short presentations and mashups, and even a pagan style ritual with animal sounds, a cast circle, and cool masks.

My friend and colleague Chris Gray and I did a short bit for Donna using Wordle, to ask questions about what it might mean to talk about “machine reading.” Chris talked about the DARPA attempt to use machines to “read” the huge amount of intelligence information and make decisions about what is important; I showed large Wordle graphs of Donna’s key works (including her Manifesto for Cyborgs, The Promise of Monsters, and Situated Knowledge) and attempted a Donna-like reading of a Ford advertisement featuring King Kong and son.

Originally Chris had a joke to tell: that I was “one of the few people to leave Histcon voluntarily.” Both of us are Donna’s students; Chris’s witticism is that Donna helped Crystal transition from street activist to academic, and helped Rabbit transition from academic to street activist (though I was more or less on that road already; it is partly what prevented me from spending enough time on my HistCon work, to be honest).

Our performance/talk was called “Humans and Machines Read the Cyborg Manifesto. Here is how we described out project:

Perhaps there are no misreadings of a text, but there are strange readings, and strange appropriations. A text is a technology and its reception can be quite complex. We will consider various machinic interpretations, that is readings of the Cyborg Manifesto that are generated by digital technologies. Of course, these readings are framed by the humans that program the bots/engines/algorithms involved, so they actually are a manifestation of “cyborg reception”-- a new and special case of audience reception studies. We want to go beyond pure human analysis and beyond the classic version of the discussion (who agrees and why; who disagrees and why) and ask how do human-machine systems experience something like the Cyborg Manifesto now? When you search for it what do you find? What do its different organs look like distributed across the Internet, and does this much larger map of the manifesto and its iterations tell us anything interesting or useful?

To explore these questions we will use “Donna Haraway's "Manifesto for Cyborgs" to generate a number of hits and images for analysis.. We hope to make manifest one kind of cyborg reception: how an author and her work are cut up and distributed through cyberspace, and that the algorithms for “reading” her are mostly machinic, although also partly human.

The performance was only 5 minutes, so we cut a good deal of the original proposal. That meant focusing on Wordle and not on two other machine reading sites: our friend Andruid Kerne’s dynamic collage software, CombinFormation, (http://ecologylab.net/combinFormation/), and the site Gap Minder [http://www.gapminder.org], with its visual representation of data, in particular, the spatial and colorful representation of world health and wealth since 1810, and also a representation of CO2 emissions since 1820.

The idea was to begin asking questions about human readings, machine readings (or “readings” if you will), and of course, combinations of the two.

In preparing the presentation (and an article we hope to develop), I showed Chris a quotation by Jarod Lanier from his book You Are Not A Gadget:

It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons – automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote often secret locations around the world. They will be copies millions of times by algorithms…They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams. Ix

Lanier calls this “vast fanning out” of his words the “lifeless world of pure information.” And he contrasts this with the tiny number of “real human eyes” which will not only decode the words, but intersect with people who have identities: “You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.”

I think it is interesting that he looks at the ways machines “read” instrumentally (for example, the Google “reading’ of my email that triggers the algorithms that link my words with a possible advertisement), AND he looks at ways humans don’t “read” like a human, but rather like mobs who thrive on anonymous insults; meanwhile these people themselves are being “read” as their interaction with Lanier’s words allow data aggregating technologies to “find correlations between those who read my words and their purchases, their romantic adventures, their debts, and soon, their genes.” Again, the verb “to read” is undergoing some radical morphing, and understanding this will be a key part of our coming analysis.

So we then wanted to ask: does a Wordle representation of the most important words in a text (here, two of Donna’s important essays) count as reading in any sense of the word? Does this help us read the essay differently? BTW, Wordle is “ a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.”

Here are a couple of the Wordle images, the first Donna’s essay Situated Knowledges, and the second her Cyborg Manifesto:

During the presentation, we asked the assembly to guess which of Donna’s essays we were representing. It was interesting to see how wrong the first few guesses were, and how quickly people caught on (of course you’d have to have actually read the essays in order to make educated guesses!). You can see also that the cyborg essay was crucially about women, more so even than cyborgs; and you can see that her other essay is much less about women per se, though it is crucially about feminist practice. Also the layouts both prevent a more “rigorous” comparison of terms (for example we could simply order them from large to small and provide numbers for the occurrence of each word) and allow for a spatialization of terms that offer different kinds of conjunction and proximity.

One thing I found fascinating was that after the event, I spoke with Donna about her 1997 interview with Wired. In I think 2009, well after the article was published, the author Hari Kunzru posted the entire interview online [http://www.harikunzru.com/archive/donna-haraway-interview-transcript-1996]. When I told Donna this, she predicted that the Wired interview and the entire interview would be significantly different. In particular, she imagined the latter interview would include much of the feminism that the Wired interview seemed to erase. But when I went back and ran the two articles, neither emphasized woman, women, etc. I haven’t told Donna this yet, but the upshot seems to be that the image of Wired as editing out the feminist bits seems wrong, at least on a first (machinic) reading! I think in the interests of space, I’ll post these two Wordle bits on a separate blog page!

There’s much more to say here, both on machinic reading and on Donna herself. In my next post, I hope to give an overview of Donna’s work, and why it is important to me, drawing on the extended interview in the book How Like a Leaf.

Reading Gibson on Cyborgs Part 1

As some of you know I've been writing about the Mundane Cyborg (well duh that is the name of the blog!). As such I'm always searching for writers and thinkers who understand our current state of affairs as cyborgian, even if few of us have neural jacks or knives that emerge from our fingers (as cyborgs in Neuromancer do). So it was with great delight that I discovered Gibson's 2002 talk on cyborgs at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The show was titled The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture, and my good friend Chris Gray was there. He hear Gibson's talk and enjoyed it mightily, despite the fact that he is an erstwhile academic and Gibson characterized the show's theme as ""the cyborg" as academics understand "the cyborg", and not just a cyborg, or cyborgs, as you or I might understand cyborg(s) [so] I took it upon myself to lower the tone of the proceedings with the following.

The talk is in fact a very witty argument for the mundane cyborg. Well, sort of. It is more an argument for what Chris and I want to call the meta cyborg. I will elaborate this argument in a next blog.

The article is called IN THE VISEGRIPS OF DR. SATAN (WITH VANNEVAR BUSH) and can be found at:

http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_01_28_archive.asp

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The Windup Girl

So I finished Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl. I'm off to ski this minute, but I wanted to post a summary and a quick response. At the same time I am rereading Altered Carbon, which is also a cyborg novel. Both novels assume a future (a la Bruce Sterling) in which the current nastinesses of human states and corporations still applies, and in spades. States will use force multiplied by technology and a monopoly on violence; corporations will continue to wreak havoc on the world as they pursue narrowly defined goals of profit and power. But Windup Girl takes place on the ravaged earth in (I believe) the late 21st century, so it hits home harder for me. And while both books have good dystopian politics, I think novels like Altered Carbon assume a level of technological sustainability that (at least right now) I don't assume.

The television show/cult series Firefly starts off with:

Here's how it is...

Earth-that-was got used up.

We moved out -- terraformed and colonized hundreds of new earths; some, rich and flush with the new technologies; some, not so much.

The problem is - earth that was looks pretty horrible when all the easy energy is gone and the agricultural science has turned out to be heavy on colonialism and profits and light on biological responsibility. And of course terraforming and space travel turn out to need, um, energy. Oh there will be cyborgs all right, but the technophilic bits of so many otherwise dark and critical cyberpunk novels look a lot different in Windup Girl. And it matters that the novel takes place in Thailand and not in high rises and rich corporate digs (as happens a lot in Gibson, by the way). The notion that we have a network powered by an always on electrical power system is, uh, not exactly happening in a world where energy is scarce. Will this world be the one that emerges? I honestly don't know, but I do know that the people responsible for this coming world are sitting with and among us right now, preparing us for seed monopolies and genetic accidents (Monsanto, Astra-Zeneca), a hard landing after peak oil (thanks to all of us and to the corporate and state masters who set up our burn it all up system the way they did), and a world where war, to put it mildly, wasn't fixed (see all the Star Trek views of a happy pretty future Earth).

There is one powerful moment in Windup Girl; Anderson the calorie man is looking at a photo from long ago, when Thais and Americans had all the fruit in the world, genetically developed over eons of evolutionary time. In the background is an internal-combustion gas guzzling automobile. And he imagines dragging those faces to his time, where the results of their blindness and greed for energy are horrific. Right before he pushes them off his 5 floors up balcony. I tried to imagine the faces of the future looking back through a window at me, and couldn't do it. And yet the image stays and stays, like a memento mori.

Here is a brief take on the plot:

In The Windup Girl, we are plunged into a fraught and difficult world: energy collapse and environmental disasters have changed the shape of the planet, swamping its coastal cities and destroying our capacity to travel or move freight at high speeds. Add to this a series of genetic-engineering screwups that lay waste to the world's crops and trigger wave after wave of punishing plagues, and the rise of midwestern American genetic engineering cartels that control the world's supply of plague-resistant GM crops.

Anderson Lake is one such Calorie Man, working undercover in Thailand, a rogue state where generippers reverse-engineer the food cartels' sterile crops and combine them with carefully hoarded genetic material from the Thai seedbank. Anderson lives in Bangkok, undercover, running a factory nominally involved in the manufacture of experimental windup springs that can compactly and efficiently store the energy pushed into them by GM elephants. He is the hub around which many stories spin: that of Hock Seng, a former wealthy Malay Chinese who has fled an ethnic purge and now runs Anderson's factory; that of Jaidee, the Tiger of Bangkok, a hard-fighting, uncorruptable shock-trooper in the Thai environment ministry; and Emiko, a "new person" manufactured in a Japanese vat to be a perfect servile helper, abandoned by her owner to the brothels of Thailand, where she is cruelly mistreated.

The Windup Girl is a story about colonialism, independence, mysticism and ethics, sex and loyalty, and the opposing forces of greed and empathy.

http://boingboing.net/2010/02/17/the-windup-girl-2010.html

Distractions: the preview

Stories about distraction

1. So I was beginning to write about distraction and remembered the night, several weeks ago, when I was sitting on a friend's porch smoking cigars after a bottle of wine (something wants me to write "each" here) and I started to tell a story about distraction. And my neighbor Dirk interrupted me, and when I went back to the conversational topic, I, ummm, couldn't remember it.

Kevin looked at me, big old Cuban in his fist, and didn't say anything for a few beats.

2. Then there's the film Up!, which has worked its way into our local lore:

Beta: Chocolate, I smell chocolate!
Gamma: I'm getting prunes and denture cream! Who are they?
Beta: Oh, man, Master will not be pleased. We better tell him someone took the bird. Right, Alpha?
Alpha: [in a squeaky voice] No. Soon enough the bird will be ours yet again. Find the scent, my compadres, and you too shall have much rewardings from Master for the toil factor you wage.
Beta: Hey Alpha, I think there's something wrong with your collar. You must have bumped it.
Gamma: Yeah, your voice sounds funny!
[they both laugh]
Alpha: Beta! Gamma!
[they both stop laughing]
Alpha: Mayhaps you desire to - SQUIRREL!
[all of them turn their attention to a nearby tree; slight pause, Gamma whimpers]

We now use this for moments when one of us gets distracted, as in:

me: telling a long involved story

them: a brief comment on my story

them and/or me: noticing anything else in our immediate environment

them and/or me: forgetting the point of previously mentioned yet apparently important story

me or them: "SQUIRREL"

3. I began thinking about writing about distraction. The first thing that came to mind was Bruce Sterling's novel Distraction, which conveniently includes both the word distraction and a main character who is a cyborg. So I began trying to remember what the book was about, and then I got a phone call about skiing this weekend. I was at a cafe and hadn't ordered yet, so I took the phone up to the barista, and ordered a traditional cap with the Verve coffee, went outside, discussed sleeping conditions at the ski place and who would make which dinners. Then I went back in, signed off the phone as I picked up the cappuccino, talked with the barista for a few minutes on what a deal the costa rican shade grown fair trade beans were, went back to my table and began thinking about distraction again, until I overheard the conversation next to me between two college guys regarding the speed up feeling of a quarter system when you've been on the semester system, and since I had been on the semester system when I hit Stanford's speedupy quarter system...

You get the picture. In some ways distraction is simply attending to the environment, and being willing to shift attention. For some of us, this is what we do all day. For others, this is not what is done. Instead there exists a space of not-distraction, when focused work gets done. In the cult film Office Space, Peter admits to the efficiency experts interviewing him that really, most of his day is simply distraction (he has three bosses with endless memos and micromanagement; his job is utterly boring and repetitive; to survive he comes in late, fools around a lot, takes long lunches...). The conversation goes like this:

Bob Slydell: You see, what we're actually trying to do here is, we're trying to get a feel for how people spend their day at work... so, if you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Bob Slydell: Great.
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

At the end of the film, Peter is working construction, which turns out to have a big plus side: you actually do something that seems to produce something. Working hard, as opposed to hardly working, turns out to trump distraction, that nagging feeling that you don't want to look too closely at what you are doing at the moment.

4. So back to the Sterling novel. This is how Corey Doctorow sees it:

"Distraction is the story of an America on the skids: economy in tatters, dollar collapsed, unemployment spiked, population on the move in great, restless herds bound together with networks and bootleg phones. The action revolves around Oscar Valparaiso, a one-of-a-kind political operator who has just put his man -- a billionaire sustainable architecture freak -- into the Senate and is looking for some downtime. But a funny thing happens on the way to the R&R: Oscar and his "krewe" (the feudal entourage who trail after him, looking after his clothes, research, security, systems and so on) end up embroiled in a complex piece of political theater, a media war between the rogue governor of the drowned state of Louisiana, the Air Force, the newly elected president, and a weird, pork-barrel science park in its own glassed-in dome."

I know this because I began googling distraction, first the novel (hey it comes up first when I search "distraction" on my local library database! and in Amazon!) and then the word itself (hey! Wikipedia has a sucky entry! I could rewrite it! But first I ought to revise that minimal entry I read last night on Jose Delgado, the mind control "scientist" I discuss in my dissertation). Then I started copying and pasting popular books on distraction (and, it turns out, its opposite: overcoming distraction, focusing, etc).

5. First, I found Damon Young’s book Distraction. He’s a youngish Australian philosopher, not a self help dude, so I was curious and clicked onto his site, which offered the following description in a font called Futura, which in itself is worth a visit to the site:

About Distraction

Most of us struggle with distraction every day: the familiar feeling that our attention is not quite where it should be.

But what is distraction?

In his lucid, timely book, Damon Young shows that distraction is more than too many stimuli, or too little attention. It is actually a matter of value – to be distracted is to be torn away from what is worthwhile in life. And for Young, what is most worthwhile is freedom: not simply rights or legal liberties, but the capacity to patiently, creatively craft one’s own life.

Exploring the lives of such luminaries as Henri Matisse, Karl Marx, Seneca and Henry James, Young exposes distraction in work, technology, art, politics and intimacy. With warmth and wit, he reveals what is most valuable, and what is best avoided, in the pursuit of a life of one’s own.

Click here to read about distraction on the BBC news. Click here to read an extract in Australia's Age newspaper.

So of course I clicked here to find out about distraction on BBC. And I clicked the other here to read an excerpt.

And all of this clicking and moving around and reading around before I'd even proceeded to the second book I'd decided to check out. I even read the comments at the end of the BBC Magazine article, which is another form of reading altogether. (Once I went to a TED site on prosthetics forwarded to me by my good friend Kevin, and proceeded to read for an hour or so the many many comments written first on the talk, and then on other comments, and then back to earlier comments or to the actual talk itself. Did I learn anything from this distracted reading? Hell yeah! In fact, it felt like the kind of search and deconstruct operation that I love the Net for.

6. I liked the gist of Young's argument, which is both oh so familiar (I am after all writing on the same topic and using many of the same rhetorical moves) and, well, deliciously distracting and entertaining. Here is a bit of his writing, reflecting on that moment when, on vacation in Greece, he interrupts his reverie and presence in beauty to take a cell phone call from his mum:

To recover from the distractions of the technological age, what's required is a more ambitious relationship to our tools - one that promotes our liberty instead of weakening it. If we can't escape technology, we can certainly enforce its limits, and our own. We can defer to the comforting noise of iPods, or we can seek moments of quiet attention and reflection. We can accept the stress of 24-hour availability, or we can reclaim our own rhythms. (I can answer the mobile phone, or savour Ithaca's salt and cyclamen.)

At the heart of these choices is a concern for what's humanly valuable: what encourages vitality, creativity, liberty, and perhaps even happiness. There are no simple tricks for achieving this; no quick fixes. We have to step back from urgency and familiar habit, and reconsider what we want from life, and why. We have to give up on the easy necessities of technology, and forge some of our own. We must be what the unthinking machines can never be: the custodians of ourselves.

There is a lot to like in his analysis, including the notion that there is a rhythm to our current machine-heavy lives, and there are other rhythms that are possible, and that we haven't quite gotten control over the music of our cyborg lives yet.

But this process of moving through a series of very fast searches, reads, clicks, and leaps is part of that rhythm, one I like and which maddens me. And this is the distracted cyborg in me, the one that loves that I can cover so much ground in so few minutes (as opposed to reading one sustained argument or book for an hour or two). I like hopping around things (you may have noticed my name is cybunny, and most friends call me Rabbit), and I like speed, and I also like the opposites of these things: the beauty of sustained observation or long periods of reading; the way things like sports creates a disciplined body that is focused and achieves moments of excellence; the slowing down of the organism, at a slow cooked and slowly enjoyed meal, or walking down a trail and noticing the pace of walking as opposed to driving or biking.

This is what he means by being the custodians of ourselves. Unintentionally, he might also be referring to the custodians who clean up after messes are made, which can also happen with loss of focus, trying to do too many things at once, and so screwing up on all of them.

7. And so I went back to the earlier list, and found these two compelling titles:

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winired Gallagher

Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson

And I stopped myself from going and finding out what others may have said about these books and arguments. Instead, I prepared to go upstairs and find my 15 year old and see if he is indeed reading after a night of distracted (and ADDish) listening to parts of at least 30 songs, watching Family Guy, and sitting with me at our (slow cooked and delicious home made chicken soup) dinner for at least eight minutes.

But I'd be lying if I didn't say that part of me was wandering back to what sounded like a familiar topic: the downsides of technology, the way technology itself now gets in the way of thinking technology use through, and the always already nostalgic dream of focus, attention, rapture that comes from living in sustained and reflective moments, strung together like pearls.

As they say in Firefly (another wonderful distraction): shiny.

I gotta go.

Firefly: Mind Control #2: River at The Academy

These are stills from the Josh Whedon film Serenity. They go with the previous post on Firefly and Mind Control.

Firefly, Mind Control, Eugenics

One of the obvious moves in cyborg literature is from prosthetics (arms, legs, exoskeletons, eyes) to technologies that interface directly with the mind. I am thinking of the Gibson Neuromancer trilogy, with its jacked-in hackers, but there are tons of examples. And in keeping with the theme of augmentation and amputation, there is something lost or in the shadows regarding mind/machine links.

Firefly caught my eye partly because one of the characters, River Tam, is a disturbed character (erratic, schizophrenic, exhibiting signs of mental illness and/or instability) who has been the subject of horrifying brain experiments at a supposed school for the high achieving called The Academy. As the FireflyWiki explains,

The Academy was actually a scientific installation (likely funded by the Blue Suncorporation)... Blue Sun still considers River their property, and they will stop at nothing to get River back. Unfortunately, exactly what River is now remains uncertain. River's brain was operated on countless times while The Academy had her in its clutches, and she was treated for all intents and purposes like a laboratory animal. Simon was able to perform diagnostic tests and now knows for certain that, among other things, they cut into her brain multiple times. They even stripped her amygdala, which is a part of the brain used to control emotional responses and 'filter' incoming information. As he describes it: "She feels everything; she can't not.

In my dissertation, I discuss the 1950s technologies of lobotomy and shock treatment, as shadow narratives of cybernetics. A frightening amount of brain "research" (in particular, the funded work of Jose Delgado and others of his ilk) crossed over into searches for mind control and even torture. Wikipedia accurately describes Delgado's work thus:

Much of Delgado's work was with an invention he called a stimoceiver, a radio which joined a stimulator of brain waves with a receiver which monitored E.E.G. waves and sent them back on separate radio channels. This allowed the subject of the experiment full freedom of movement while allowing the experimenter to control the experiment. The stimoceiver could be used to stimulate emotions and control behavior. According to Delgado, "Radio Stimulation of different points in the amygdala and hippocampus in the four patients produced a variety of effects, including pleasant sensations, elation, deep, thoughtful concentration, odd feelings, super relaxation, colored visions, and other responses." Delgado stated that "brain transmitters can remain in a person's head for life. The energy to activate the brain transmitter is transmitted by way of radio frequencies." (Source: Cannon; Delgado, J.M.R., "Intracerebral Radio Stimulation and recording in Completely Free Patients," in Schwitzgebel and Schwitzgebel (eds.))

Firefly does a remarkable job of showing the terrible effects of what was done to River, and also of parsing out in bits and pieces the story of how and why these things were done. One sequence shows her in a dream sequence at The Academy, filmed through a gauzy soft filter; the lovely teacher walks up to her and puts her finger on River's forehead, and suddenly the scene shifts to a researcher pushing a needle into the forehead of a screaming River as we see her trussed up like a monkey in some hideous experiment.

In Firefly there is a connection between the organic brilliant mind (in the show River's brother is a brilliant doctor, top 3% of his class; but River is shown to be the genius, early on the smarter) and a "science" that is interested in a variety of ways to control and manipulate actual minds, especially ones already "super" human. She is driven mad by their efforts (much as some subjects in the 50s and 60s were made much worse by lobotomies, shock treatment, and even Nazi-like experiments), turned into a machine/killer (a la The Manchurian Candidate), and apparently also deprived of her ability to filter things (and so both a "reader" of others' minds, and someone unable to block out the thoughts/emotions of others, including the dead). I think Whedon is trying to say that all powerful governments, like the Alliance in the show, want to control minds, and will be prone to finding ways to do so (modern torture techniques derive in part from work on brains and minds done in the 60s by doctors working for the CIA). And he is saying that it is not impossible that the brain can't be augmented (River "knows" things she shouldn't know, like martial arts and how to read thoughts; her journey is a lot like Jason Bourne's journey in The Bourne Identity, with similar questions: how do I know this?) but that societies that practice Alliance type control (including control over how the history of the rebellion is taught to children) will enact sciences of the mind that bear out their priorities. The show has a definite critique of eugenics Nazi-style, and implies that this kind of control can shift from the individual (performed on River) to entire societies (the horror revealed in the move follow up Serenity about the planet Miranda and the social experiments there gone genocidally wrong).

Of this kind of dilemma, Whedon has said, "nothing will change in the future: technology will advance, but we will still have the same political, moral, and ethical problems as today."

Mundane Cyborg: more on phantom ring, or “who put the Oh! in Neuroplasticity?

Mundane Cyborg: more on phantom ring, or “who put the Oh! in Neuroplasticity?

Today I was listening to NPR’s radio show Fresh Air, when V.S. Ramachandran's Tales Of The 'Tell-Tale Brain” came on. I’d heard Dr. Ramachandran interviewed before; he is a neurologist at the University of California, San Diego. He was talking about his new book, The Tell-Tale Brain, which cites case studies that
“illustrate how people see, speak, conceive beauty and perceive themselves and their bodies in 3-D space.” The interviewer wanted specifically to know about something I’ve grown quite interested in: the issue of “"phantom limb" and what it reveals about both the mind, and (potentially) about how our minds may react to prosthetics that are not originally limbs but which may begin to act that way.

The interview (which can be found at http://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133026897/v-s-ramachandrans-tales-of-the-tell-tale-brain) focused on a few core ideas. First, many people who’ve lost limbs and/or had them amputated suffer from chronic phantom pain. Originally scientists thought the pain was caused by peripheral nerves (and nerve damage) near the lost limb. But Ramachandran proposed that phantom limb pain might be caused by changes in the brain. He says in the interview,

[It] was based on an idea that there's a complete map of the body's surface on the surface of the brain. So every point on the body's surface has a corresponding point in the brain. Now the curious thing about this map is, even though it's continuous, the face area of the map is right next to the hand area instead of being near the neck where it should be.

Several things interested me about what he found:

1. Ramachandran found that the brain can literally remap pain can “refer” to another place, so that touching a blindfolded amputee’s face revealed that the amputee felt the touch as touching their phantom limb.

2. This means that (as is assumed now, but was controversial until very recently) that the brain is constantly remapping itself, and is not so fully determined at birth. Our brains aren’t as genetically fixed as we thought; instead, he asserts, “Even the basic sensory map in the brain gets completely reorganized in a matter of weeks. This challenges the dogma that all medical students are raised with that no new connections or pathways can emerge in the adult brain. That was news 10 or 15 years ago. Now it's widely accepted." I’m not sure what he means here; in other words, is it trauma that reorganizes the brain this quickly, or does this happen as a matter of course? I assume the latter. But regardless, the extreme example of phantom limb may reveal something fundamental about not only our brains, but their relation to our limbs and perhaps by extension (no pun intended) our prostheses.

3. What I am interested in, here, is the possibility – or perhaps the likelihood – that our almost constant interaction with technologies like “smart” cell phones and laptops may also remap the brain in nontrivial ways.

I found a lot of anecdotal data on phantom vibrations, phantom ring, vibranxiety. Right around 2006 and 2007 several articles in the popular press began to notice a trend in cell phone users. When Web developer Steven Garrity wrote about it in his blog, he got over 30 responders also citing the phantom sensations. (See the USA Today article at http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-06-12-cellphones_N.htm. A Guardian article at approximately the same time comments on the similar nature of the phantom “hearing” of your cell phone’s ringtone. Obviously we are surrounded by cell phones with similar tones, but it turns out some of the sound issue has to do with our ears: “Certain sound registers - about 1,000 and 6,000 Hertz - are more easily caught by the human ear, and therefore more likely to stimulate a response.” And the term phantom ring is defined at UrbanDictionary.com, more or less as a common annoyance.

One theory behind both the phantom ring and phantom vibration is that its origins are physical: nerve damage, for example, or muscle memory. Another set of theories focus on psychological factors; the cell phone represents/creates a psychological need in us, a need to be connected. (Hence the preponderance of articles that describe the feeling as anxiety, though I don’t experience it that way, and I don’t imagine others all do, either). A third theory has to do with how we “learn” to perceive important new signals in our environment. Jeffrey Janata, director of the behavioral medicine program at University Hospitals in Cleveland, calls it "hypothesis-guided search." We are learning to pick out sensations of our phone vibrating, and this “leads you to over-incorporate non-vibratory sensations and attribute them to the idea that you're receiving a phone call." Alejandro Lleras argues that we set what he calls perceptual filters, and this setting is imperfect. His calling such phenomenon “false alarms” made me think of times lately when I thought I heard m name being called in a noisy environment (a café, a public square). I also remember my cousin Kevin listening to his new Beatles album on headphones back in 1975; when John sings the lines “she’s so……heavaaay,” he heard “she’s so…..KEVIN!” This happens three times in the song, and the third time he grew alarmed, jumped up (it was late at night), opened his attic bedroom door, and proceeded to fall down a very steep set of stairs. And then his mother and grandmother really DID call his name!

The connection I am wondering about, the one that Ramachandran is exploring with his work in the neuroscience of phantom limb pain, is neuroplasticity. This is what Doctors Janata and Ramachandran argue: the brain is able to form new connections in response to changes in the environment. Not surprisingly, the metaphor Janata uses is “wired,” as in the brain becomes wired to the regular sensation of the cell phone vibrating. He goes on to say that "Neurological connections that have been used or formed by the sensation of vibrating are easily activated. They're over-solidified, and similar sensations are incorporated into that template. They become a habit of the brain."

So if the brain can remap itself, create templates/filters (another metaphor) that then become habitual, the phantom vibration might lead to other discoveries about the ways we interact with, and adjust to, continual use of a whole panoply of gadgets and mundane prostheses. The cybernetic organism here would be one in which Kate Hayle’s notion of embodied knowledge is accurate; we incorporate our phones and laptops, and this incorporation is literally embodied in the brain’s neuroplastic response. Not only is the cell phone not simply a tool we use; it may be an example of a wide range of shifts in the human brain generated by the increasingly intimate connection of humans and postwar machines.