Marisa Malone

Neuro Reverie Conclusion.

Week. 9

Word Count: 107

“Emotions course through the veins, engage the heart and the lungs, the bowels and the genitals, the muscles, the skin and face. As for cognition, do we not think, literally here, with hands and eyes?” (Rose, Abi-Rached, 230)

My body is a translator of the tangled neurons and synapsis that line layers of skin.

My brain functions through my entire body–or, my body functions through my entire brain (?)

Through western culture, through education, through privilege, through ability, my hands and eyes have evolved to become the translators of the world, the word, the thought, the image, the feeling, filtered through my body-brain. If I literally think with my body and my body is emotion and my body is female and my body is object and my body is seen and I frame my body in cultural values…do I trust my hands and eyes?

Marisa Malone

Neuro Reverie ch. 7

Wk.8

Word count: 150

“Goldsmith’s “transcriptions” is thus hardly passive recycling.” (Perloff, 161)

“The self is not a thing but a process…we are ‘selfing’ organisms…” (Metzinger, 213)

We are creatures that find our “selves” in what surrounds us. Perhaps that makes Goethe’s approach to science even more compelling—by incorporating, projecting and relating ones self to an object or environment, we distort the separateness between our self and the other. We become what we create and we create what we become. We are transcribing ourselves constantly as our minds make sense of the moments flashing before us, remembering, fastening, and firing within the structure of our hardwire. Through this process of “selfing” we are continually forming the pathways of synapsis that remind us of who we are, where we just were and where we might go. This brings a sense of consistency but allows for fluctuation. When we consciously decide to include “our selves” in that which surrounds us we are no longer passive receivers of outside data, but we become both architects and structures of that data.

Marisa Malone

Neuro Reverie #2

Wk. 7

Word Count: 85

“The mechanism is the growth and pruning of synapses in response to experience—synapses that become “hard-wired” by repeated use.” (Abi-Rached, Rose, 194)

Humans are conditioned/conditional creatures, we live through patterns, repetition, ritual, routine and consistency. The repetition creates a thought path in our neurons that brings us comfort and familiarity and habituate our actions and reactions accordingly. These synapses get fired and welded together from rewards and consequences regarding behavior, appearance, class, and gender based on the expectations that fill such labels from the powers that be. The “mechanism” in place imposes the foundation of what will or wont make us “feel good” hard-wiring a consumer mentality.

Marisa Malone

Reverie on Neuro ch. 5

Spring qt. wk.6

Word Count: 131

“Imaging technologies, with their focus on the localization of function and the experimental manipulations they require and utilize, impose their own constraints and logics as to what can be thought.” (Rose & Abi-Rached, 158)

Do we chose what we want to see? Are these images of brains showing the viewer a portrait of themselves? And if so, where is the point at which these two brains (the one in the skull and the one on screen) connect?

Brain imaging technologies only show but those with the power to view are the ones who tell. By viewing the brain, watching where it illuminates and cast shadows, the viewer is faced with their own constraint of thought to try and explain that of an others. The meaning given to these images and translators supplies the truth in their story. The truth becomes power and power defines the “normal.” These translations are fictive, they are subjective, they are the constraint of ones thoughts viewing a brain under constraint.