kurt

Morning Mirroring

While watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind on Saturday, a movie I had been anticipating, a scene describing the method by which the doctor (Tom Wilkinson) would map the memories of a person in the brain of the patient (Jim Carrey), by scanning the brain while he concentrated on objects associated with the person to be erased, connected so tightly to the ideas I have about my thesis, that I had a moment of panic. Had I unconsciously and telepresently plagiarized, or at least been remotely influenced by, an unreleased movie I hadn't yet seen?

I know I had seen the trailer, but on reflection I realized that it had none of the overlapping elements that had caused my anxiety. Certainly the knowledge of the film's general plot, a man tries to erase the painful memories of a woman and his relationship with her, had influence, undetectable/untraceable perhaps, on my mode of thought. And when I try to track back the links that led to my current interest in brain mapping, I arrive inevitably at my friendship with Maital Neta and our conversations regarding her work in neuroscience at UCLA. Then there is the connection to space/place/location that I believe comes directly from work in the mobile media project with Scott Fisher (and from additional input by Mark Bolas and Peggy Weil). Also, the issue of object memory and history evolved for me during conversations with Scott for a directed research class last Spring.

So I'm trying to map my own mind right now...

I've often had the experience where, after acquiring an object/thought, I "suddenly" notice multiple instantiations of that object/thought all around me. Like getting a new car: when I first started driving a Camry (a highly generic token of car), my awareness of other cars like it on the road with me was heightened. It's an artificial perception of course, the sampling rate is heavily distorted, all other cars are lumped into one group and compared to the particular one that I'm identifying.

This morning, 2 days after the movie triggered an association with my thesis, I noticed a /. post about a video game in which the player must balance the character by concentrating on blocks on either the left or the right side. Controlling events on the screen with thought is not too near my research to cause much more than calm introspection about the field with which my work may share some technology. Really, upon reading the article, I was unimpressed with the scope of the project. The research is centered on visual focus, something that has very little interest to me. Of course the work is core to building a platform that allows for more complex thought patterns to be used as input... but really, mapping visual focus only informs us about the physical rather than the mental, something that we can do much more easily by observing the subject optically. My interest lies in the mapping of the mind activity that we cannot externally observe, a sort of refutation of logical positivism.

Mind, place, object, memory and the nonlinear mappings between them.

btw... I highly recommend Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.