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In a new RSAnimation, psychiatrist Iain McGilchristc revises the great divided brain debate, something I discuss in my book, Mediacology. To recap, in the ’70s the idea that the left and right brain hemispheres serve different cognitive functions entered into popular culture (represented by books such as Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain). In The Global Village, Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers run with this concept, arguing how different kinds of media favor or bias the cognitive processing of our brains. Reading and writing are distinctly left brained, whereas nonlinear media like TV and music are favored by the right hemisphere.

Leonard Shlain presents his main thesis

Many authors posit that writing has turned us into an overly rational and patriarchal culture. In the Alphabet Versus the Goddess, neurosurgeon Leonard Shlain argues that writing mimics the same mental processes of hunting: the pen replaces the spear.

McGilchrist doesn’t contradict these arguments. Rather he points out that it’s not an either or situation. Sight and sound are processed by both sides of the brain, but what happens is that the left hemisphere handles detailed and focused thinking, whereas the right hemisphere deals with field-like vision or hearing. Consider how we differentiate between seeing and watching, and listening and hearing.

What I find intriguing about the animation (a mix of both right and left brain media), is the possibility that sustainable behavior comes from cultivating right brain thinking. This is what I argued for in my book, but this video does a much better job of articulating how that’s possible. My main point was that traditional media literacy was mainly left-brained, because it focuses on reductionist deconstruction techniques, whereas new media involve right brain skills, and therefor should be incorporated into the concept of media literacy.

He points out that the right brain’s job is to inhibit immediate responses to situations so that we can use our wit and empathy to work out solutions. It also helps map and simplify the world so that we can make better sense of it. Metaphor, implicit meaning, body language, embodied experience, and a disposition for living rather than mechanical reality characterize the right brain approach to the world.

The machine model is self consistent because it made itself so. It’s what he calls the “Berlusconi of the brain” because it controls all the “media”– the right hemisphere doesn’t have a voice. The left brain model of the world is like a hall of mirrors, a reality bubble. And this is exactly the kind of problem I see in media theory which rarely challenges the mechanical model of cognition and communication. This is also why I believe media theory has not significantly tackled ecology (not in the “systems” sense, but in the sustainability sense).

Finally, McGilchrist argues knowledge within the left hemisphere is a closed system that demands perfection. By contrast, the right hemisphere’s understanding of the world is an open system.

In the end, it’s not reason versus imagination, he says, but both working together. You can’t have one without the other. The problem with our current world system is that it’s based on a closed, machine-like model of the world built by an unbalanced, and ultimately, insane mind. To restore sanity, we need to re-balance how we perceive the world and ourselves.

Though focus groups and test marketing of films is old news, a hybrid version with brainwave scans is truly bizarre. I think something that distinguishes a film as a kind of art versus a mere cultural commodity is the sensibility and aesthetics of the filmmaker. Granted, block busters require dollars and investments to recouped, but if we begin to monitor brainwave responses to films to test whether or not they are emotionally viable, what’s next?

This adds a new twist to Benjamin’s proclamation that aesthetics can lead to fascism.

Neurocinema Aims to Change the Way Movies are Made | GeekDad | Wired.com:

GeekDad: How do you see the fMRI technology changing how films are made?

Peter Katz: Movies could easily become more effective at fulfilling the expectations of their particular genre. Theatrical directors can go far beyond the current limitations of market research to gain access into their audience’s subconscious mind. The filmmakers will be able to track precisely which sequences/scenes excite, emotionally engage or lose the viewer’s interest based on what regions of the brain are activated. From that info a director can edit, re-shoot an actor’s bad performance, adjust a score, pump up visual effects and apply any other changes to improve or replace the least compelling scenes. Studios will create trailers that will [be] more effective at winning over their intended demographic. Marketing executives will know in a TV spot whether or not to push the romance- or action-genre angle because, for example, a scene featuring the leads kissing at a coffee shop could subconsciously engage the focus group more than a scene featuring a helicopter exploding.

GeekDad: Explain how the subconscious mind can better determine how we actually feel about what our conscious mind is interacting with and how that applies to film.

David Hubbard: If an audience already knows what they feel, fMRI is an expensive way to confirm the obvious. The magic of fMRI is that it shows what the brain is doing even if the viewer isn’t aware of it or can’t articulate it. We are comparing R-rated trailers to PG-13 trailers and discover that gore and sex and cursing sometimes activate the fear-anger-disgust area and sometimes it doesn’t. Let’s see what these scenes do to the brains of the MPAA when they’re deciding what’s socially acceptable; if they’re not excited, why should we [be]? FMRI makes it easy to see what’s boring.

Angel Tech

Antero Alli, a fellow traveler in the realm of the DIY spiritual underground, has an interesting commentary about the impact of immersive media, something I had not thought about. He says, below, that the loss of dream memeory is an amputation of the imagination caused by allowing devices to imagine for us. This is similar to McLuhan’s claim that whenever we transport our senses into mediation we end up cutting off our own bodily senses.

Reality Sandwich | Information Bombs and the Canary in the Coal Mine: A Talk with Antero Alli:

In this hypermedia saturated culture, especially with people born in the early ‘80s on, I think there is a certain imagination lobotomy that has occurred where the external media technologies and sources have gradually usurped the poetic genius or our innate ability to image their own realities. So we succumb to images more gorgeous, interesting, fascinating, or compelling than we can create out of our own imaginations. So the imagination dies, it withers — imagination death or soul loss is involved. I think part of also what gets lost is dream recall.

Personally I don’t really think that it’s that people don’t dream, but that they’ve lost dream recall. There’s an association in my mind between the loss of dream recall and power loss in people’s lives. People losing power, losing the ability to influence the world in ways that are meaningful to them. So power loss, loss of dream recall, loss of imagination are all tied into a larger cultural epidemic resulting from this acceleration of media technology and its interface with human consciousness. Especially any kind of immersion software like video gaming, VR technology, and sometimes even films and television and other kinds of media too, where it just overwhelms and sabotages or takes over the individual imagination.

… Imagination is the new canary in the cultural coal mine; imagination death precedes loss of the soul.

We all knew reading Kafka made us cool, but smarter? The study quoted below says yes! If you read the whole article what it points out is that if one is exposed to nonsensical information, the brain seeks to find patterns in the environment to bring order to the confusion. This might explain the power behind juxtaposition in montage, in particular the kind that Eisenstein wrote about. Through the collision of images, new meaning comes into existence, but the added twist is the importance of the context in which this mind explosion occurs.

Reading Kafka Improves Learning, Suggests Psychology Study:

According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka’s “The Country Doctor” or Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions. The researchers’ findings appear in an article published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science.

* * *

“What is critical here is that our participants were not expecting to encounter this bizarre story,” he continued. “If you expect that you’ll encounter something strange or out of the ordinary, you won’t experience the same sense of alienation. You may be disturbed by it, but you won’t show the same learning ability. The key to our study is that our participants were surprised by the series of unexpected events, and they had no way to make sense of them. Hence, they strived to make sense of something else.”

What follows is scientific verification of McLuhan’s concept of media as extensions of the body. I highly recommend reading the whole article.

Brain Represents Tools As Temporary Body Parts, Study Confirms:

Researchers have what they say is the first direct proof of a very old idea: that when we use a tool—even for just a few minutes—it changes the way our brain represents the size of our body. In other words, the tool becomes a part of what is known in psychology as our body schema, according to a report published in the June 23rd issue of Current Biology.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Nicholas Carr is doing us a great service by raising the alarm of how the Internet is ruining our minds. I don’t agree with him 100%, though, and the quote below from a recent interview explains why. The lament is that we cannot contain civilization in our heads anymore. This is a complaint of a book culture that privileges information over relationships. In a book world, ideas are self-contained objects, and we are isolated individuals, which correlates directly with our disconnection with nature.

Instead, we are networks and processes coming into being. Even one of the latest management books from Harvard Business School acknowledges that our minds are open loops. That is, we synchronize via emotional intelligence with other people in the same way that groups of women who live together start having their periods simultaneously. I don’t want to have the whole of civilization contained within me– if that’s the case I would probably nuke myself. The problem with me is that I have civilization as my reality filter, and it often makes me a sad, lonely person. To paraphrase Gandhi, when he was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, “It would be a good idea!”

The Sun Magazine | Computing The Cost:

Cooper: You’ve quoted Richard Foreman, author of the play The Gods Are Pounding My Head, who says we are turning into “pancake people.”

Carr: We used to have an intellectual ideal that we could contain within ourselves the whole of civilization. It was very much an ideal — none of us actually fulfilled it — but there was this sense that, through wide reading and study, you could have a depth of knowledge and could make unique intellectual connections among the pieces of information stored within your memory. Foreman suggests that we might be replacing that model — for both intelligence and culture — with a much more superficial relationship to information in which the connections are made outside of our own minds through search engines and hyperlinks. We’ll become “pancake people,” with wide access to information but no intellectual depth, because there’s little need to contain information within our heads when it’s so easy to find with a mouse click or two.

Can You Guess a Person’s Politics by Their Personality? Psychologist Team Says Yes | Election 2008 | AlterNet

An interesting book, Brain Rules, covers 12 facets of brain health. Just don’t eat them!

One of the most intense things I learned from a brain expert is that TVs dream your brain. In reality, it’s more like an induced meditation. That’s because it puts you into a alpha state, which is the same brain wave as when you are half-awake, half-asleep. No wonder we find TV so relaxing. I’ve tempered my fears somewhat through the realization that nature dreams our brain, too. Which one is stronger?

Image link from HowStuffWorks

A recent study shows that many people over 55 who grew up with black and white TVs dream in monochrome. Will the next generation dream in short bursts of text (as in SMS), or HD? I’ve had the fun experience of becoming a dream editor after endless hours of nonlinear video editing on my computer. I cut and paste reality tunnels like snippets of quicktime video. Dreams are closer to hypertext, so maybe it’s computers that are becoming more like human dreams. The jury is out.

Thanks Scud for the link!

Deep inner peace circuitry. Yeah. Hey, if there is one thing you can do to improve your life this year, please take 18 minutes to watch this incredible lecture by neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor talk about her stroke and how it taught her the brain’s access point to inner peace.

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