Neuronal Modelling (One Step on from Neuronal Mirroring?)

With a big dose of hmmm . . .

Kirsten Winkler, ”Learning with Video Is as Effective as the Classroom — And That’s a Problem,” Disrupt Education, Big Think, 2 Oct. 2011 [link] (slightly edited):

Scientists of the RUB [Ruhr-University Bochum] Department for Neurophysiology have proven that we don’t need to actively explore new environments in order to learn but that passively watching new information on a computer screen leads to the same sustained changes in the strengths of nerve cell connections in the brain.

Simulations of situations are as good for learning as the real thing?

In the experiment [1], one group of rats was actively exploring new spatial environments and another group was watching the new environment on a screen. Both formed new lasting connections in the hippocampus which is important for long term memory.

Prof. Dr. Denise Manahan-Vaughan points out that these findings are essential to understand how digital learning competes with learning in a physical environment, e.g. the classroom, in the brain of the students.

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On the one hand, the research can be the basis for new strategies in the classroom to fight against “the apathy in children towards the traditional teaching methods.” [. . .]

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[. . .] On the other hand, it also explains the observations of teachers that each new generation of school children seems to have increasingly shorter attention spans.

According to Manahan-Vaughan, children are using an increasing amount of digital media throughout the day. If the findings in the experiment are correct, the information that children learn by playing games or watching videos is simply competing with the information they received and learned during class.

While this is, of course, a problem when the information consumed by children after school are games and TV shows, the research is really good news for Khan Academy and the model of the flipped classroom. [. . .]

See Jeff Dunn, “How a Flipped Classroom Actually Works,” Edudemic, 20 Dec. 2011 [link]; check the infographic and the Youtube vid (other resources). In the flipped classroom, students learn online outside the classroom and do “homework” in class.

[. . .] In this model, children watch Khan’s or other educational videos at home to learn the essentials and then do experiments and homework in the classroom with the teacher and their peers. If the findings of Manahan-Vaughan are correct, the effect of watching a lecture at home would be of the same quality as learning the topic in class.

This, of course, implies a transmission (instruction), rather than a transaction or transformation, model of teaching and learning. It’s classic information literacy download, i.e. data-dump (interpassive), model — unless it’s done very well (interactively).

However, we need to take Dr. Derek Muller’s findings on the effectiveness of science videos into consideration which I discussed last week [2]. Though the effect on the nerve cells might be the same we don’t know what students are learning. As Muller points out in his research, it might be that students just get confident in what they think they already know, which is in most cases not correct [= confirmation bias]. Students need to bring up mental effort in order to learn, just passively watching the right information does not seem to work.

I’d agree.

Hence, a combination of both research results might be a big step forward when discussing how to address today’s learners best.

Aha, the old additive solution: doing more must be better, no?

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What is interesting is what this neuronal modeling model of learning adds to recent thinking about neuronal mirroring as the basis of empathy (see Virno [3]). More later . . .

1. “Two-Dimensional Learning: Viewing Computer Images Causes Long-Term Changes in Nerve Cell Connections,” Medical Express, 26 Sep. 2011 [link], reporting on Anna Kemp and Denise Manahan-Vaughan, “Passive Spatial Perception Facilitates the Expression of Persistent Hippocampal Long-Term Depression, Cerebral Cortex, 13 Sep. 2011 [link].

2. Kirsten Winkler, ”Only Getting the Right Answers is Wrong,” Big Think, 25 Sep. 2011 [link].

3. Paolo Virno, “Mirror Neurons, Linguistic Negation, Reciprocal Recognition,” Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext[e], 2008) 175–90 [link]. After Vittorio Gallese and Alvin Goldman, ”Mirror Neurons and the Simulation Theory of Mind-Reading,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2.12 (1 Dec. 1998): 493-501 [link].

Learning Drawn and Quartered

(With Stephen Turner.) From We Are the University, vol. 2 (Auckland: WATU, 2011) 6.

The corporate university makes knowledge a matter of product and patent, performance and measure, technocracy and templates: knowledge marketing and management. The league tables that follow make every university’s vision every other university’s vision, making critical thinking and creativity generic and fast-following. Accordingly, the University of Auckland positions itself at the hub of Auckland City’s Learning Quarter (LQ) as “open for business,” “actively commercialising research,” comprising an “innovation ecosystem” that unites “innovators,” entrepreneurs and investors in a capital consensus — or consonance [Learning Quarter Plan].

The real university is not so easily marketable or manageable: it is noisy and problematic. Critical thinking and creativity (buzzwords of technocapitalism and immaterial labour) cannot be autotuned (so we all sing to the same tune). Critical thinking problematises the world “as it is”; creativity constructs new worlds. Critical thinking and creativity are divergent and dissident, and the dissonance they cultivate is the very basis of public life: it is democratising. Thus, “Dissensus,” as Jacques Rancière argues, “is not a confrontation between interests and opinions. It is the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself,” the demonstration of a possible world (Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics [38; read]). Democracy lives in the gaps.

The reduction of the university’s “mission” to entrepreneurial investment in innovation will “create,” if anything, a social deficit. For-profit, for-credit knowledge suppresses the university’s critical-creative capacity to generate a social surplus in the service of a public or political good, in other words, to educate (from the Latin educare: literally, “to lead forth”). What we see in the corporate university is an abdication of the responsibility to educate all for a shared future, to provide a place of learning for all. We in the real university do not teach and learn for profit or for credit; we are not about skills and competencies or about producing portfolio people for a global market. We are about creativity and critical thinking, which for us is being social, being public.

The LQ needs to be occupied and the University’s mission reshaped by those who care about teaching and learning. Recovering its critical-creative capacity is a matter of engagement in two senses: engaging other people in the noise and problematics of being public — not simply acting privately in public; and engaging the powers that be as guarantors of the order of things — what Rancière calls the “police” (Dissensus). Dissensus — real politics — resists consensus as “the reduction of politics to the police” (ibid. [42]). This is not politics or protest as usual, but calls upon the logic, says Paulo Virno, of jokes, which for him represent the “capacity [for] innovative actions, that is, actions which are capable of modifying established habits and norms” (“Anthropology and Theory of Institutions“; see “From the Third Person Intruder to the Public Sphere“). What he calls jokes we call critical-creativity, which embraces problematisation and construction, but also irony, mockery, contradiction, etc. It is this that makes us “dangerous” (ibid., after Carl Schmidt, The Concept of the Political 58); it is this that makes us look like criminals to the police order of the LQ. But we would argue that the dissenters, the occupiers, are the University.

It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)

And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. / For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. (Ecclesiastes 1:17-18)

Indulging myself for Xmas . . .

Dylan’s Ecclesiastical masterpiece, “It’s Alright, Ma,” was written in summer 1964, first performed on 10 October 1964, and appeared on Bringing It All Back Home (1965). (It’s also on The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall [slow], Before the Flood [fast, rapped], Bob Dylan at Budokan [full band, half-time], among other iterations — but the menacingly measured original is the best.)

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying

Temptation’s page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you’d just be one more
Person crying

So don’t fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don’t hate nothing at all
Except hatred

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

An’ though the rules of the road have been lodged
It’s only people’s games that you got to dodge
And it’s alright, Ma, I can make it

Advertising signs they con
You into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit
To satisfy, insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something they invest in

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer’s pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes must get lonely

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed
Graveyards, false gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough, what else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

See the Wiki for details of its composition.

Check the mean rhyme scheme: AAAAAB CCCCCB DDDDDB (verses); EEB (chorus) — with not too many dud doggerel lines (much better than a lot of the catalogue songs that followed on the more lauded Highway 61 Revisited).

Darkness at the break of noon [A]
Shadows even the silver spoon [A]
[...] There is no sense in trying [B]

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn [C]
Suicide remarks are torn [C]
[...] That he not busy being born is busy dying [B]

Temptation’s page flies out the door [D]
You follow, find yourself at war [D]
[...] Person crying [B]

So don’t fear if you hear [E]
A foreign sound to your ear [E]
It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing [B]

This is one of Dylan’s most innovative compositions harmonically (perhaps only “Tears of Rage” — loosely in mixolydian mode — is more complex [tab here]). It has a dorian mode verse (G/B D/A Csus2 G/B Gm/Bb → Dm) and a major chorus (D A D G/B D.A.G/B A → Dm). (Lennon borrows the verse chord progression for the verses of “Dear Prudence.”)

G/B
Darkness at the break of noon
D
Shadows even the silver spoon
Csus2
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
G/B
Eclipses both the sun and moon
Gm/Bb
To understand you know to soon there is no sense in
Dm
trying

D A
So don’t fear if you hear
D G/B
A foreign sound to your ear
D A G/B       A                      Dm
It’s al-right, ma, I’m only sighing

The tab is here (note that you only need to drop the low E string: Dylan usually didn’t drop the high E string live — ignore the ornate fingerings of the F/D and G/D suspensions). Dylan first used this picking pattern in “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” (tab here; listen here), but the drone vocal is new (Lennon nicks it for songs like “I Am the Walrus,” etc.). (There’s a couple of cool covers of “Hollis Brown” out there: The Stooges did a Suicide-style version with drum machine in 1973 — listen here.)

Roger McGuinn and Gene Parsons (from The Byrds) cover “It’s Alright, Ma” on the Easy Rider soundtrack. Listen:

Watch the Easy Rider segment (it can’t be embedded).

Sloterdijk in English Updated

I’ve updated a post from last year on all the Sloterdijkstoff available in English: go there.

There’s a couple of new essays out:

1. “Architecture as an Art of Immersion” (2006), trans. Tina Engels, Interstices 12 (2011): 106-09, 12 Nov. 2011, <http://interstices.ac.nz/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/INT12_Sloterdijk.pdf>
2. “Society of Centaurs: Philosophical Remarks on Automobility,” trans. Katie Ritson, Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 1.1 (Spring 2011): 14-24. [Preview here — the journal is hard to come by.]
3. “The Time of the Crime of the Monstrous: On the Philosophical Justification of the Artificial,” trans. Wieland Hoban, Sloterdijk Now, ed. Stuart Elden (Cambridge: Polity P, 2012) 165-81.

Of course, Bubbles is also out (a.k.a. Spheres, vol. 1: Microspherology). Better late than never!

The Movement of Memory at Work: Bergson

Henri Bergson, Cone of Memory, from “On the Survival of Images,” Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (1896; 1908; New York, NY: Zone Books, 1988) 162, ch. 3 (fig. 5).

Action and memory (for Bergson, habitual and spontaneous respectively) meet in the “general idea” (161-62):

The essence of the general idea . . . is to be unceasingly going backwards and forwards between the plane of action [P] and that of pure memory [AB]. Let us refer once more to the diagram . . . traced above. At S is the present perception which I have of my body, that is to say, of a certain sensori-motor equilibrium. Over the surface of the base AB are spread, we may say, my recollections in their totality. Within the cone so determined the general idea oscillates continually between the summit S [the now] and the base AB [the then]. In S, it would take the clearly defined form of a bodily attitude or of an uttered word; at AB, it would wear the aspect, no less defined, of the thousand individual images into which its fragile unity would break up.

This is to say, the present moment (the now) is a point; the past (the then) is a plane, a mosaic — and a muse.

(Interestingly, the etymology of “mosaic,” from the medieval Latin musaicum “work of the Muses,” circles back through the Greek Mousa, “music,” to the proto-IndoEuropean root mon-/men-/mn- “to think, remember” — from which stem our words memory, mind, anamnesis, mania, etc.).

[T]hat is why a psychology which abides by the already done, which considers only that which is made and ignores that which is in the making, will never perceive in this movement anything more than the two extremities between which it oscillates [S: the present action or word; and AB: the past ]; it makes the general idea coincide sometimes with the action which manifests it or the word which expresses it, and at other times with the multitudinous images, unlimited in number, which are its equivalent in memory. But the truth is that the general idea escapes us as soon as we try to fix it at either of the two extremities. It consists in the double current which goes from the one to the other,always ready either to crystallize into uttered words or to evaporate into memories.

This amounts to saying that between the sensori-motor mechanisms figured by the point S and the totality of the memories disposed in AB there is room, as we indicated in the preceding chapter, for a thousand repetitions of our psychical life, figured by as many sections A’B', A”B”, etc., of the same cone. We tend to scatter ourselves over AB in the measure that we detach ourselves from our sensory and motor state to live in the life of dreams; we tend to concentrate ourselves in S in the measure that we attach ourselves more firmly to the present reality, responding by motor reactions to sensory stimulation. In point of fact, the normal self never stays in either of these extreme positions ; it moves between them, adopts in turn the positions corresponding to the intermediate sections, or, in other words, gives to its representations just enough image and just enough idea for them to be able to lend useful aid to the present action.

Phew. In short, memory for Bergson is vertiginous, as Levi R. Bryant puts it (Larval Subjects, 13 Mar. 2010 [link]):

The plane P in Bergson’s diagram stands for the “present”; “S” stands for the specious-present of the experience of the object. Each of the cords A-B refer to different planes of past experience going further and further back. [. . .] [E]ach specious present of the object contracts a plane of the past that trails behind it. For example, I hear R.E.M.’s End of the World as We Know It and I’m suddenly thrown back into the seventh grade, sitting in my bedroom, where I first heard the song on the radio [I'm not — it reminds me of a horrid Billy Joel song, "We Didn't Start the Fire," which reminds me of "Subterranean Homesick Blues," which reminds me of "My Favourite Things" . . . aaah. I always thought that song was the end of R.E.M. — albeit a couple of great ballads on side 2 of Green]. The specious present pulls, as it were, that plane of the past back into the present.

I do like his description of the mentalities that embody each of the extremes of the man (or woman) of memory and the man of matter (155):

A human being who should dream his life instead of living it would no doubt thus keep before his eyes at each moment the infinite multitude of the details of his past history. And, on the other hand, the man who should repudiate this memory with all that it begets would be continually acting his life instead of truly representing it to himself: a conscious automaton, he would follow the lead of useful habits which prolong into an appropriate reaction the stimulation received.

Paradoxically, then, for Bergson the man of matter is habitual — and an automaton, a kind of unconscious “universalist”; the man of memory, spontaneous and a dreamer, an unconscious “particularist.”

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See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (link). Matter and Memory is available as a pdf at Scribd and a plaintext pdf at reasoned.org (paginated as 1911 edition). The Zone edition is available for reading on Amazon.com.

Note that there’s a discussion of this passage in Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton (London and New York, NY: Continuum, 1994) 92-94 and notes 158-59 (see also 103-05, 264). (There’s an essay — not great — by Constantin V. Boundas, “Deleuze-Bergson: An Ontology of the Virtual,” on the connections between their work in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton [Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996] 81-106.)

Whitehead and Heidegger — Beyond Objectivity

The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact. It is the flying dart, of which Lucretius speaks, hurled beyond the bounds of the world.

Here we’re talking A. N. Whitehead’s “Objects and Subjects” (1931, in Adventures of Ideas [New York, NY: MacMillan, 1933] 177-92, ch. 11), an excellent introduction to his somewhat non-intuitive theory of the role of “intuition” in experience. [See my edit Whitehead - Objects and Subjects (Annotated).]

(Cf. Bergson on intellect as “cinematographical” [Creative Evolution 322-23] — static, i.e., taking “snapshots” of states of “reality” — and intuition as “creative” — dynamic, in “sympathy” with “life” “making itself” [CI 362-63].)

Whitehead’s insistence on the fundamentally “affective tone” of experience — and the parasitic nature of subjectivity — mirrors Heidegger.

[Western philosophy's "appeal to clarity and distinction"] presupposes that the subject-object relation is the fundamental structural pattern of experience. I agree with this presupposition, but not in the sense in which subject-object is identified with knower-known. I contend that the notion of mere knowledge is a high abstraction, and that conscious discrimination itself is [177]
 a variable factor only present in the more elaborate examples of occasions of experience. The basis of experience is emotional. Stated more generally, the basic fact is the rise of an affective tone originating from things whose relevance is given.

For Heidegger on affect, see “Being there [Da-sein] as State-of-Mind [Befindlichkeit],” Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1962) 172-79 (sec. 29; 1.5: “The Existential Constitution of the ‘There’”):

A mood makes manifest “how one is, and how ones is faring” ["wie einem ist und wird"]. In this “how one is,” having a mood brings Being to its ‘there.’ (173)

For Heidegger on subjectivity, see BT 86-90 (sec. 13; 1.2: “A founded mode in which Being-in is exemplified. Knowing the world”). He makes much more of the subject-object relation in his later more developed critique of metaphysics. See, amongst other places,

1. “Overcoming Metaphysics” [1936/46] (orig. “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” Vortrage und Aufsätze [Pfüllingen: Neske, 1954]), trans. Joan Stambaugh, The End of Philosophy (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1973) 84-110 [pdf]. Also in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1993) 67-90.
2. “Introduction to ‘What is Metaphysics?’” [1949], trans. Walter Kaufmann, Pathmarks, ed. T. E. Klein and W. E. Pohl (Cambridge, UK: CUP, 1998) 277-90.

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N.B. On Gilles Deleuze’s debt to Whitehead, see Steven Shaviro, “Deleuze’s Encounter with Whitehead,” shaviro.com, 19 May 2007, http://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/DeleuzeWhitehead.pdf.

“Built Pedagogy”: The University of Auckland Business School as Crystal Palace

An essay Stephen Turner and I wrote, “‘Built Pedagogy’: the University of Auckland Business School as Crystal Palace,” appears in Interstices 12 (2012): 23-34; read/download here.

Six essays from Ceasefire on Barthes by Andrew Robinson

Six essays from Ceasefire on Roland Barthes by Andrew Robinson:

1. Roland Barthes and Semiotics (23 Sep. 2011)
2. Roland Barthes’s Mythologies: A Critical Theory of Myths (30 Sep. 2011),
3. Roland Barthes’s Mythologies: Naturalisation, Politics and Everyday Life (7 Oct. 2011),
4. Roland Barthes: Death of the Author (14 Oct. 2011),
5. Roland Barthes: The War against Myth (21 Oct. 2011),
6. Barthes on Activism (28 Oct. 2011)

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Teaching as Letting Learn: What Heidegger Can Tell Us about One-to-Ones

Here’s a paper on Heidegger and one-to-one teaching: Teaching as Letting-Learn: What Heidegger Can Tell Us about One-to-Ones (from the ATLAANZ Proceedings).

Students learn on the basis of what they know but don’t know that they know: the “unknown knowns” of their learning situation, as it were . . . [to quote Donald Rumsfeld — see Žižek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences 95]

The Mammon of Melbourne

Another essay.